reading
August 10, 2012
I say this often: textbooks are unmotivating, often based on bad pedagogy, and out-of-date as soon as they’re printed. If you want to see your students motivated to work with language that interests them, you have to create your own material – or “steal” the great stuff that fantastic teachers like @SraSpanglish and @ZJonesSpanish and […]
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August 23, 2011
I keep the Mexico trending topics as a column on my Tweetdeck, because you never know what will come up there. One great thing about Twitter is that you can only get so complicated in 140 characters, and when a topic like #4palabrasqueduelen gets trending by thousands and thousands of people, the text gets even […]
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June 23, 2011
Flipbook illustration
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This post is part of my project to get rid of old (but useful) papers that have been sitting on my bookshelf. This is another literacy idea I got from a grad school class on teaching literacy to ELLs. Materials: 3 sheets of 8 1/2 by 11 blank paper stapler drawing tools Directions: Place the three […]
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June 13, 2011
Symbol Illustration
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This post is part of my project to get rid of papers I haven’t looked at in forever (but still contain good ideas) by making them ‘digital’ here. The symbol illustration idea is from a course I took in graduate school on teaching literacy to (mostly elementary) English-language learners. It seemed to me an idea easily […]
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February 4, 2011
I wrote here about what I’ve done with the book Ciudad de las bestias by Isabel Allende in my AP class. I recently put all of the chapter guides with their “palabras claves” in one streamlined document, public on the web. They’re not perfect -my students and I often find mistakes (like incorrect page numbers)- […]
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October 1, 2010
Want to guide your advanced students through a culturally-relevant novel by a Hispanic author, written specifically to adolescents? Good! Intensive reading for pleasure is the best way to acquire vocabulary in any language. I’ve put an incredible amount of work into writing reading guides and vocabulary lists for all 20 chapters of Ciudad de las […]
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September 23, 2010
Books recommended as ‘easy’
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I found a helpful post on Amazon.com where someone recommends easy novels to read while learning Spanish. I hope to order them and see whether they might be good for Spanish 2, since I’m all about feeding kids authentic rather than learner Spanish from the beginning. One is La Tierra del Fuego, and the other […]
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November 11, 2009
A case for pleasure reading
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Stephen Krashen has done a ton of research on what he calls Free Voluntary Reading. Catch up on his research by checking it out on his website. Basically, the premise is that kids learn more (and language learners acquire more vocabulary) when reading at an appropriate leve and something that is pleasurable to them. I […]
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September 20, 2009
For you French teachers
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This weekend I was at the fall conference of the Kentucky World Language Association (phenomenal!) and after I gave my presentation on YouTube and pop music, it occurred to me I should have offered the French teachers present the url of my favorite French-teaching cyberamiga Diane (@parisprimrose), Foreign Language Fun.
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October 3, 2008
Reading in Spanish 3
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I firmly believe that the best way to acquire new vocabulary is to hear it or read it, in context, in multiple contexts, many times. So, personally, I read in Spanish whenever I have the time. I rarely read fiction in English. This year I’ve been really in to Isabel Allende’s Zorro and Inés del […]
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