Virtual TPR and Beginning the Year

I’m still not sure exactly what this year is going to look like, but I don’t think anyone else knows either.

I do know that, as always, I want to focus on making opportunities for students to receive comprehensible input. One way I try to ensure comprehension throughout the year is to establish gestures for high frequency words when possible.

The HIGH frequency verbs that I’m working with this year, based on Super 7, Sweet 16, and Frequency dictionaries, and what words *I* most use in class, are: looks at, leaves/goes out, sees, likes, gives, puts, thinks, says, there is/are, knows, stays, wants, can, does/makes, arrives, has, goes, should. I don’t have ‘is’ in there because it’s really hard to gesture, and it is the highest frequency verb so it will naturally be used a lot, and students sometimes hear ‘es’ as ‘is’ which… sometimes helps… they guess the meaning pretty quickly in context.

Theoretically this should be pretty easy to do via video: Establish meaning, show a gesture, model the gestures, mix them up to start processing the meaning, repeat. Do in sets of three, randomize, repeat.

If you’re like me, you’ve had a hard time thinking on your feet to randomize commands, so I introduce to you…. The TPR randomizer! Feel free to make a copy 🙂 Put your list of words/phrases in the first column and everything else will automatically populate.

Admittedly, TPR is great for learning vocabulary, but it doesn’t often give a lot of context. I do highly suggest looking at TPR Materials from CPLI to learn more about the research of TPR as a language learning approach. I LOVE “TPR is More than Commands” by Seely and Romijn, and Berty Segal’s book “Enseñando y aprendiendo el español por medio de la acción”

What I HAVE seen in my classrooms in the past is that when I don’t start off with a solid base of TPR I notice instructional gaps “Why don’t students already know this word/gesture” right, because I didn’t teach it. I think TPR can be a great way to set a foundation of high frequency words that you’re going to use all through student’s learning. And the thing I love MOST about TPR is that when I teach verbs with it, I teach 3rd person singular, but as long as we have had the gesture established, I can use any form of the verb and still remain comprehensible.

So, what’s my plan with TPR as a virtual learning tool?

I have created some loom lessons to introduce the gestures and meanings, which also include screen grabs of me spelling the words to ‘teach’ the alphabet. Click the image below to look at the videos, and in the 3rd video… don’t mind my sunburn.

So after EACH spelling video (they watch the gesture introduction, and the spelling video) I am going to use my schools LMS, Canvas, and our G Suite for Education to create activities that put words into context.

Some ideas are: read a sentence and match the meaning of the TPR word. The sentence might be “Bob tiene chocolate” and students would need to choose ‘has’ from a list to show comprehension of ‘tiene’

I might use Charlala to give drawing prompts “Bob tiene chocolate” and students draw a person with chocolate.

I might give sentences and students try to translate, sentences will probably be recorded on video so I can do the gestures.

I might do a little story (Like video 6) but much shorter, essentially, storylistening with very simple sentences to start, adding in words naturally to make it more compelling.

So there are some of my ideas right now. I’m going to play around with our LMS and see what other kinds of activities I can do and I’ll post them on twitter @welangley and try to remember to update this entry.

Those PESKY Standards

First off, let me say that I LOVE Indiana’s World Language standards. They are SO easy to navigate not only for teachers but for students. If you are not a world language teacher, the National Standards from ACTFL and most state standards are comprised of the 5 C’s.

Communication
Culture
Connections
Comparisons
Communities.

I’d take a leap and say most language teachers, even those who do Standards based grading probably only focus on Communication, and perhaps Culture (Especially since we have intercultural can-do statements from ACTFL-NCSSFL). But assessing and grading the culture standard can still be messy.

The other three, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities are REALLY hard to assess, at least formally. The question still exists though, how do we assess all the standards, and should we ‘grade them’? I don’t think they need to be graded.

In my opinion, these standards do help us push students to grow as learners and global citizens, but most of them are behaviors and grading behavior is well… meh.

So in comes SELF REFLECTION.

I use Canvas, so I set up some outcomes based on each of the hard to assess C’s (excluding Communication). And like I said, I LOVE the Indiana Standards they’re very easy to use!

Then I copy and pasted the outcomes into a google doc with a few simple reflection questions.

So students can go in to the Google Cloud assignment and write about where they feel they are with each of the standards.

Then in SpeedGrader, I mark the level the student thinks they are reaching.

Important to note that these assignments are set at 0. No points are awarded, but perhaps we can have a celebration of achievement around these.

In outcomes, I set it up so Advanced is 3, Intermediate is 2, and Novice is 1 so when I look at student mastery gradebook I can get a pretty, color coded overview of where we think we are with the standards.

These are just test students so I went in and played around with the scoring just to see how this would all look.

I’m excited to pay a little closer attention to the standards this year. However I’ll have to see where we can fit it in, because we want to keep the majority of class, even if it is online, providing input to lead students to language acquisition.

Comparing class texts to make reading assessments

One of the things I LOVE about teaching with comprehensible input (TCI) is that I can start each class with the same prompt (a question, a story script, etc.) and no two classes are the same. We focus on similar language but the additional language we add is unique to each class depending on their interests.

For me, a problem that arises is that then not all classes have the same vocabulary, so creating a reading assessment based on what we’ve done in class can be cumbersome. Do I create something unique for each class, or do I try to create something that all classes can use?

I’m a big believer in work smarter not harder. I can do an assessment for each class based on what the class has come up with during write and discuss. In the past, I have even used first period’s class reading as an assessment for second period, and so on. But I’m not sure if that was completely fair, even with glossing words that were unique to each class.

So last night I was thinking about this and came up with a solution, I think.

I usually type (and this year will DEFINITELY type) write and discusses. Which makes it easier for me to do what I’m about to explain.

The first step is do copy your class text and put it into a word list maker: https://design215.com/toolbox/wordlist.php

Do this with each text you create so you have a list of items that appear in your texts.

Then, take two of your lists and shoot them through a list comparison.

http://www.molbiotools.com/listcompare.html

When you put your lists in the list comparison tool it creates a new list of common words from the lists.

Then we’re going to use the NEW list generated by the comparison tool and one of the remaining lists from the other texts, and repeat until you get a list of common words from all of your texts.

We compare:

List A/List B=List AB

List C/List AB= List ABC

List ABC/List D= List ABCD

and so on.

So now you have a list of words that were common in all of your classes write and discuss writings. From that we can now create a new reading that uses the common words that EVERYONE has seen, and we should be able to create a fair assessment for all students.

MORE Remote lesson plans on Canvas

I created another set of lessons that you can use if you’re on Canvas! Simply add an audio/video story and a text.

Story Based Remote Learning Module

If you don’t have CANVAS here are the activities that students do in this module:

Behind the scenes: Find a story. Record video/audio, prepare a parallel story for assessment.

Step 1: Introduce key vocabulary with your favorite online tool.

Step 2: Students listen to the story and draw a picture to demonstrate understanding.

Step 3: Students listen to the story again and answer true/false questions

Step 4: Students listen to the story and put sentences in order, I wouldn’t use the ENTIRE story so that they have to listen to the ENTIRE story.

Step 5: Students read the text, and annotate the text by highlighting/underlining the text for a given guideline (verbs, adjectives, etc.) This is to get students to read the text CLOSELY.

Step 6: Jeopardy, students write questions about key words/phrases from the story.

Step 7: Students summarize the text by copying sentences directly from the text.

Step 8: ADDjectives/ADDverbs students use their summary and add adjectives or adverbs to make the story more interesting.

Step 9: Students change the perspective a lá horizontal conjugation.

Step 10: Back At’Cha: students type a sentence they remember from the text into a discussion, but they cannot post something someone else has already posted. They should be reading everyone’s responses so that they know what has already been posted. Tricky re-reading 🙂

Step 11: Listening/Reading quiz. Students read/listen to an alternate version of the story and give a summary in English.

Lesson Plans on Remote Instruction

We are starting remote instruction next week. We have been off for a month(1 week was spring break). But I have been going stir-crazy so I began working on remotifying lessons last week.

Before break we were getting ready to start talking about how we have used technology in the past week. Usually this unit is very discussion based, with some short grammar practice thrown in.

My goal with this unit is to get students to start seeing the structure “I have (done).

I have devised 6 days of 20-30 minute online lessons for my students, put into a module on canvas, and set so students must work through the unit activity by activity.

My hope with making everything required to move through the module is that students will see that even though things are not all graded, ALL the things we do build up to output.

Pre-Unit

1. View video instructions, a screencast explaining what students ‘submit’ for EVERY activity, and explaining how modules work.
2. Sign up for remind, it’s the easiest way to get ahold of me, and it guarentees a quicker response from me.
3. Say hello on Flipgrid- I’m sure students want to see everyone else’s face, and I know that I do, but I know not everyone likes recording their face.

Day 1

You’ll notice that I put the objective for each day in a text header in the module.

1. Present Perfect Introduction. This is quick grammar lesson.
2. Optional “Conjuguemos” practice
3. Discussion, post a picture of how you have used tech to not be bored. I respond to EVERY post here with a sentence or two. This is the real meat and potatoes of the lesson because they are getting reading input. I make sure to ask students questions (you form) and I state whether or not I have done the thing as well (I form, so they can answer the questions).

Day 2

1. Vocab introduction with textivate
2. Listen and Write, I will record video/audio for students to listen to and they have to do a dictation of three sentences. Now they get to HEAR ‘he usado’ and be reminded that the /h/ is silent in Spanish.

Day 3

1/2. Grammar practice, low stakes, not for a grade.

3. Students read about someone’s plans for the day and they start outputting a little bit. I give feedback.

Day 4

1. Students Read, copy and paste, and translate sentences from a list of activities that they may or may not have done.
2. Students output a little, make 3 statements of what they have NOT done during quarantine, and reply to 3 people saying what they HAVE done that the other person said they haven’t done.

Day 5

1. Grammar practice, not actually for a grade, but it’s a self scoring quiz. It’s actually a reading with fill in the blank.
2. Listening quiz, I will make a new video based on the discussions from Day 1 and students write a detailed summary of what they hear.

Day 6

1. A quick writing, I’ll probably remove ALL points from this because, translators. But my hope was to give feedback on writing.

 

That’s it. That’s what I’m doing for the first week of Remote Instruction. The rest of the time in RI will be pretty similar in structure.

CANVAS COMMONS LINK: https://lor.instructure.com/resources/f01f060c1790404081e556620d0f8dfe?shared

Training Students to Ask for Clarification (while reading)

Students, in my case teenagers, do NOT like saying they don’t understand something.

This is frustrating for me. It’s one of my expectations to ask for clarification, or rather I put it on myself. Tell me when *I* am unclear. Tell me when *I* go too fast.

I get frustrated because when students don’t tell me I am being incomprehensible, I can’t clarify, and I can’t help them acquire new language. Then because they aren’t acquiring new language, they have the misfortune of being left behind at some point. They get frustrated because they don’t understand, I get frustrated because they haven’t been doing what they need to do to succeed. I do do my darndest to preemptively clarify things. If I know it’s a new word I’ll write it on the board. But if I use it again and don’t clarify I need students to tell me that I didn’t do my job of making language comprehensible to them.

In comes lap reading. I read about lap reading from Jon Cowart. I really like that I can give students more reasons to re-read a text, and do a comprehensible input style “close reading” activity.

I’ve made my first lap (and I think it will permanently be this) to highlight what you UNDERSTAND. Obvi, the first reason I do this is to show students they are understanding more than they think they are.

Second reason is the review period for the lap. I bring the class back together and start reading the text aloud with the instruction: When we come to something that you have NOT highlighted, tell me.

This allows for on the spot clarification, they are rereading the text, and I can maybe have some collaboration going on by having other students help clarify.

The review period is SO IMPORTANT of this. Because we can’t just go back and tell students what a word means after the fact. It does nothing for real-time processing of language. You MUST re-read the text with students. Cold call students after reading a sentence, ask if they DIDN’T highlight something, then go back and re read the sentence, check for understanding after and then go on.

I’ll let you know if this gives students any long term confidence of letting me know when something is incomprehensible to them.

What did you learn today?

“Nothing”.

I’m sure my parents were so tired of hearing that response to their daily question. For me, it was undiscovered introvert-ness. I had peopled all day and just wanted to go to my room for a bit.

Of course I learned. But I didn’t have anything to talk about. Seven hours of class after class, you need time to digest that.

Something similar happens EVERY DAY in the Comprehension based communicative language classroom. Or the TCI classroom. Or the TPRS classroom. Whatever you want to call it.

When we teach to the subconscious mind, that is, for acquisition, students DON’T feel like they’re learning. They can do more on assessments, they can write more on timed writes. BUT they don’t see it like that. Students want to know they can do something with language. They want to ‘FEEL’ like they’re learning.

This semester I have remedied the “I don’t learn anything in his class, all we do is tell stories in Spanish” problem.

And it is with a few simple questions.

“What new words did you learn today?” This is a cheap trick, because they probably didn’t acquire the words yet. BUT it gives students a chance to think about the fact that we ARE slowly but surely building their vocabulary and their ability to uphold discourse.

“What words/phrases are you ready to use?” This one surprises me when I hear answers. Today someone in Spanish 2 said they felt more comfortable using the word ‘blanco’ (white). In my mind I’m like, we did colors ALL THE TIME last year, and you just now feel comfortable using the word for white? But on the other hand, each student is special, individual, and the speed of their acquisition is different than others. Today was the magic number for that student to be able to use the word ‘white’. But you know what? I drew their attention to the fact that they are learning something.

Daily Lesson Structure and CI with a Textbook

I’ve written about using CI with a textbook before, but I think I’ve made some leaps in how it’s going. So here we go, here’s what a typical class looks like. If you are a fan of Tina Hargaden I’m sure you’re going to see some similarities.

Bell Ringer: 

The daily bell ringer is what students are doing as they enter the class. I need to get better at the bell ringer process, but that’s on me. Bell ringers MUST be something students can do on their own, without my help. My bell ringers are one of two things. Silent reading, or grammar practice. I want to make sure students feel they are prepared for other classes that might focus more on grammar than I do. I have found though, the 5 minutes of grammar has been AS effective as full class periods of grammar.

Input:

After the bell ringer we go into input time. This can be anything. Story asking, movie talk, picture talk, PQA, special person, ANY activity that provides input. I try to go for about 15-20 minutes of input with high comprehension and frequent checks for understanding.

Write and Discuss

Students have now heard a lot of input, now is an opportunity for them to get more repetition of the language by reading it as I write out what we talked about.  Sometimes this is difficult depending on what we talked about. What I’m still struggling with is honoring all students in the class. If we have a PQA day then I typically talk about only one student, because I want to have something substantial to write about. I’m still struggling with talking about multiple people and writing about multiple people during write and discuss. Recently I’ve added, thanks to Tina, a word by word translation followed by the question “What do you notice about how Spanish is different than English?”

Assessment

I’ve got a big ol’ stack of Anne Marie Chase’s ACTFL aligned Quick Quizzes. I can use these WHENEVER we do write and discuss to get a listening or reading grade. I’m going to be much more attentive next semester to give one every day that we write and discuss as a way to keep students accountable for input.

Getting Critical Thinking OUT of My Class

NOTE: This is not about language acquisition, there is input involved here, but the focus of this post is to draw attention to getting students to use what we are doing in class to think critically.

I’ve been thinking critically about critical thinking.

Producing ouptut AT ALL, in my opinion, is critical thinking and requires so many steps from processing input, making connections, thinking about how you want to answer (probably in the L1) and then coming up with the language in the L2.

If that’s not enough, then we also have WHY and HOW questions which can inspire critical thinking. If it’s a WHY question, you have to process the question, process the information you already have, think about prior knowledge, and then think about how to answer and then put that language out into the world. Same with HOW questions.

Then we’ve got comparisons of culture, which is what Interculture is all about which allows for critical thinking in English. In ACTFL’s Intercultural Reflection Tool they state that “Deep reflection normally occurs in one’s native language”. They even suggest maybe having students do the reflection outside of class.

The time we have in class is precious. We need to give students as much comprehensible input as possible to build mental representation and lead them towards acquisition. So any activity that does not provide input should not take up (too much) class time. So I think that having critical thinking activities as homework is a sweet spot. Students get input in class, and critically think about the information from the input outside of class.

Here’s my plan: I am going to use Martina Bex and Maris Hawkins’ collaboration project: El mundo en tus manos to get some critical thinking going. We will read the articles together in class and discuss them then students are going to have some homework. I am thinking it could be individual, or a group discussion on our Canvas page.

Here are questions that I might give to students  for any given issue of EMETM:

I am MOSTLY taking these from Readicide by Kelly Gallagher

1. Summarize the articles in SPANISH.
2. Choose 3-5 quotes from the issue and explain in ENGLISH why you think they are important. (Discussion option: Post your quotes, other students discuss WHY you chose those).
3. Choose the article that you think has the biggest impact on the world, explain. (This could also lead to good discussion)
4. Choose the article that you think is the least newsworthy, explain.
5. Create a TChart with important info on one side, and on the other information that you think could be missing from the article.
6. In Spanish OR English, re-write the title of the articles.
7.  Create an action plan on how you can get involved with one of the events discussed in the issue.

I would do these activities out of class as homework so that we don’t take away from the opportunity for input IN class. The time we have in class is limited so we need to make it input heavy, and while I don’t think this is a valuable use of class time, I think it is valuable for students.