SLA
December 24, 2010
It doesn’t take a teacher to realize that training students to translate doesn’t produce proficiency. If you want to look into the SLA research behind why translation slows language processing so much (and if you are a teacher, you owe it to yourself to get this and let it revolutionize your methodology), start with this […]
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July 29, 2010
The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages in May passed a new policy statement on the use of the target language in the classroom – 90% or above at all levels. It’s about time that we as language teachers realize that 1) language education in the US doesn’t work because we don’t speak […]
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February 9, 2009
Cause and effect
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A few thoughts on what we shouldn’t do, in my opinion: If you don’t want your students to translate in their heads when they speak… DON’T include translation in your assessment. EVER. Real translation/interpretation is a very advanced skill and will come with time anyway. If you don’t want your students to run through a […]
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February 6, 2009
Relating everything to English
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Cross-linguistic transfer, the problem of a learner’s native language interfering with the one being learned, is a big enough issue without us as teachers compounding it by constantly relating things to English. For example, giving students ways to remember words by relating them to English is not always a smart idea, in my opinion. I […]
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November 21, 2008
Grammar learning vs. acquisition
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My 38 Spanish 1 darlings just turned in a stack of projects–they had to describe and illustrate five family members, at least one of them a plural set, at least one outside their immediate family. They had to tell me 1) what their name was, 2) ¿cómo es?, and 3) ¿cómo está? We worked on […]
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November 18, 2008
I’ve been grading these Spanish 1 tests lately. This is the test (for some reason the clip art didn’t publish well on Google docs). They did extraordinarily well on it. The average was somewhere around 32-33 out of 38 points possible. And keep in mind, all my tests are given with no warning at all. […]
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October 31, 2008
Overgeneralizing, again
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A few posts back I commented on how my Spanish 3 students are overgeneralizing and I’m getting “Yo es” all over the place. Since I made lots of comments about it I’ve seen less. But I noticed something today–my Spanish 1 cherubs are doing it. I haven’t taught Spanish 1 in three years and never […]
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September 30, 2008
Think you can’t know if students understand without them giving you translations (or you providing them)? See if this presentation can change your mind. Tips on why and how we should be assessing comprehension without English in the world language classroom. This presentation was given at the Kentucky World Language Association’s fall 2008 conference in […]
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September 23, 2008
Modeling the billingual lexicon
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Kroll’s Revised Hierarchical Model and the Inhibitory Control model are other models I was introduced to in grad school, and they are an incredible help in explaining how students develop proficiency in their second language, why we shouldn’t use English translation in a world language class, and why back-translation (L2 to L1) is easier than […]
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September 4, 2008
What on earth is going on here?
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I’ve written about how I went to grad school and learned about second language acquisition (SLA) theory that revolutionized how I approached teaching. Then I attended an AP workshop where the facilitator used two Latin pop songs to illustrate how authentic Spanish media could be used in AP. I decided it was catchy and could […]
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September 1, 2008
Starting to share my journey
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I put myself through grad school working with a group of graduate electrical engineers. Their supervisor spent thousands of dollars paying 100% of my tuition and a stipend for me to live off of, and in exchange, I helped them communicate their research. After spending 4 years in undergraduate engineering classes, they’d entered their master’s […]
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