proficiency
October 9, 2013
Oh, how I miss teaching novices! I teach next door to the Spanish 1, 2, and 3 teacher, with a divider separating our basement rooms, and every time I hear her with her Spanish 1 students I long to be in there – not because she’s really doing anything wrong, but because I love teaching […]
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September 20, 2013
Using audio-lingua
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I’m betting you’ve probably already discovered this resource, but if you haven’t, you are going to love this. I don’t know who started Audio Lingua or why, but it’s basically a repository of people, well, talking. About, well, stuff. All kinds of stuff. It seems people record themselves talking about something and upload it. But […]
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September 13, 2013
Stations: Exploring music
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In AP, one of the ways I love to build up to an oral comparison or persuasive essay, our two “test” assessments in each unit, is to explore the topic using stations. One of my spring units is called “El ritmo me mueve” and involves investigating artistic expression in many forms: art, design, music, and […]
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July 17, 2013
There’s one moment in a teaching class I took in college more than ten years ago that forever remains in my memory. Our professor, one of my favorites of all my education years, told a story of how he watched one of his students die of cancer. He ended the lecture that day with a […]
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May 19, 2013
By the time students get to advanced classes such as those intended to prepare them for national standardized exams, almost nothing should include only simple recall. We ask questions like why and how, ask for debates and opinions, ask for synthesis of authentic sources and troubleshooting common problems. How can we prepare students for this from novice levels? There’s one […]
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May 13, 2013
Novice high vs. intermediate low
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I got a question recently from a colleague who was having trouble pinpointing the difference between novice high and intermediate low with her students, especially in writing. When it comes to writing, here are some keys that I think mean a student is consistently performing at IL and not NH: Changing topics with relevance A few […]
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January 21, 2013
Paragraph form
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The rubric I use to score all performance assessments (which I almost completely stole from colleagues) has an entire section called “function/structure” that I use to identify how proficiently students communicate in “paragraph length.” Indeed, the AP rubric (from 2007, which will be changing for 2014) talks about “paragraphing,” and for speaking uses words like […]
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August 8, 2012
Maintaining personal proficiency
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This question has been suggested a couple of times on #langchat: How do you maintain your personal proficiency? Someone asked me this same question at a PD session I was at last year, adding that she only teaches novice learners and so she feels like she’s only speaking novice language for practice. Then I […]
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November 17, 2011
Twice for #langchat we’ve polled the following question: What activities prepare students for AP from the very beginning? I confess, I probably wrote this question, maybe with some help from something similar being suggested as a topic. Certainly I’ve voted for it twice. But for whatever reason–perhaps teachers of lower levels don’t think much about […]
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August 21, 2011
Got the rubric!
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**Update August 2015** After four years of scoring assessments using this rubric, I overhauled it to attempt to highlight the areas I loved most and fix the ones that really bothered me (and others). Please see the new post for the new rubric I am using, updating, and working to improve. I’d love your feedback […]
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August 18, 2011
At last I’ve turned to working on my own classes (after looking at Spanish 1 all summer for our new teacher) and I’m (once again) re-doing my Spanish 3 units. This year I’m trying to make them more realistic. I’ve been heavily influenced on this by a particular #langchat last year on making assessments authentic. […]
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June 28, 2011
Proficiency & tacos
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So, about informing our students on proficiency. One of the great ideas that came from that PD I went to was this ‘taco’ activity. It’s designed to be done in the first days of school, preferable on the first day unless your first day is taken up with ‘administrivia.’ Divide students into four groups, or […]
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