Srta. Jax's World Language Resource Blog

¡Hola! My name is Jax Deming, I´m a Spanish teacher in Tennessee and a language learner. I'm currently working on my third language, but I plan to learn as many as I can! I am striving to implement Comprehensible Input in my classroom every day, and could talk about language learning all day long. This blog started out as a class assignment for a technology in the classroom course, but I'm finally getting around to using it to talk about what I'm doing in my classroom and why I'm doing those things. Say hi! I don´t bite (but I will most likely preach the good news of CI to you. You have been warned.)

[srta-jax-blog]

NTPRS Day 4 & 5 (This one’s gonna be a long one!)

I’m putting these two days together because Day 5 was a half day and both days consisted of one-hour sessions addressing special topics. On these days, presenters like Mira Canion, Bryce Hedstrom, Jim Woolridge, and many others presented, and I consider myself very blessed to sit at the feet of more experienced professionals and learn from them. I went to sessions with Von Ray, Bryce Hedstrom (2x), Clarice Swaney, Scott Benedict (2x), Nathan Spencer, and Mira Canion. Thursday was also when Dr. Bill VanPatten gave the keynote speech, which was mind blowing. (I’ll address BVP’s address separately, because this is already a very long post!)

The first session was conducted by Von Ray. (I guess I didn’t get enough of him the first three days of the conference!) He presented on the value of developing good improvisation skills, which he pulled from “Truth In Comedy: The manual of improvisation” by Charna Halpern, Del Close, and Kim “Howard” Johnson. It was during this session that Von said that “Bad TPRS is better than good grammar” and that “Anything worth doing well is worth doing poorly in the beginning.” I think the best pieces of advice that I got from this was that I should try to be funny/make jokes, I should embrace the unexpected, listen and make connections, and make the students look good.

Blaine Ray sat in on this session, and he gave a ground rule that he uses in Storyasking: Once I state the fact, you cannot contradict that. This was in response to someone asking about students adamantly trying to change the details of the story to suit themselves. This is one of the concerns I’ve had, but having a succinct rule like this will be very helpful.

I went to two sessions with Bryce Hedstrom because he had two topics that I really wanted to know more about: passwords and student interviews. The passwords session was first, and it was really helpful. Bryce gave great tips on how to introduce and teach the passwords, and gave some tips for how to get through them in a time crunch. After the morning sessions, I did go buy his book on passwords, just so that I could peruse the material at my leisure again and again. The book also has lists of passwords that can be used at different levels, which is helpful for me to have handy. I can’t wait use these in my classroom (and I’ll probably even make my administrators say the password when they come to visit!) He also talked a little bit about how he handles late students. They don’t have to say the password, but they do have to say “Lo siento” (I’m sorry) and the class responds with “Está bien” (It’s okay.) His reason for this, which I thought was beautiful, was that the students need to learn to forgive and also that they can be forgiven, which is a concept that so many students are unfamiliar with these days. Bryce also gave some neat little tidbits about things he does in his classroom… but you had to be there. ;)

I tried doing student interviews last semester, but the students didn’t seem to get super into it. In the second session I went to with Bryce, he explained his Special Person Interviews (we discussed the unfortunate naming, and someone suggested Selfie Talk to match with other CI terms like Picture Talk and Movie Talk) and demonstrated how he handles them in class. He said that this all stems from his personal philosophy of helping students realize who they are, what they are about, and what they want to do so they can realize Ikigai. In other words, he is using the target language to help his students become better people. He has posters with his Special Person interview questions (and sentence frames for answers) up all year round. This is an easy way to differentiate for varying processing speeds.

In this session he also addressed quizzes based on the SPI, free-writing, do nows, and how he organizes it all in a composition notebook and grades the various things within. I really liked how he organized it. I was planning on having my students get binders, but I may have them get composition notebooks and use those as well to develop a portfolio of writings throughout the semester. (I’ll be having mine keep their composition books in the classroom.)

I think part of my problem last summer was that I did not do a good job of asking follow-up questions, and I limited the questions they were asked too much. In his demonstration, he showed how he was able to get a lot of follow-up questions based on the answer to the question ¿Qué te gusta hacer? (What do you like to do?) This year, I plan to stick closer to his script for the questions that are being asked.

Which leads to the first of the two sessions that Scott Benedict presented. Both of his sessions were very helpful (and I had originally only planned on going to one of his sessions), the first one addressing using the Super 7/Sweet 16 verbs as the basis for a world language curriculum and the second regarding grading and flexible seating.

Scott explained how the Super 7 (Dr. Terry Waltz) and Sweet 16 verbs (Mike Peto) give our students the ability to communicate pretty much every idea they need to if they can use them in the past, present, and future tenses. The students will not be able to say everythingthey want say in the exactway they want to, but they will be able to circumlocute (talk around) pretty much every concept they can be expected to talk about. In Scott’s school district, the main focus of Spanish I and II is to get the students to “own” these 16 verbs across all persons in the most common present, past, and future indicative uses, although they are introduced to other tenses.

The big takeaways from this session:

1) less is more-If I focus on teaching and repeating a small set of words-the Sweet 16 and personalized, releveant vocab, the students will retain that and then some.

2) Focus on the Super 7 first, but teach “disgust” before “gust” so that the reverse construction doesn’t confuse them too much.

3) We are language parents, not language teachers. That’s actually a Haiyun Lu quote, but the point is that we need to talk to our students like we would talk to a little kid. In general, a parent corrects their child by restating their statement with correct grammar, not making them parrot it or lecturing them on grammar.

4) Shortrunposters is the cheapest website to get posters made for your classroom. Scott has made posters of the Sweet 16 verbs in a number of languages using the most common past, present, and future forms of the verbs for free on his website, and he had them blown up, printed, and laminated for his own classroom. I have done the same for the 9 I’m sure I’ll need from day one as well as 2 pages of Bryce Hedstrom’s Special Person Interview document. (In a few weeks I’ll do another order to get the rest of the posters made, because even though each 17”x22” poster was only $5.50, I’m still not made of money.)

In the second Scott Benedict session I attended addressed classroom layout and gradebook layout. This was an accidental session for me, I intended to go to a different session, but couldn’t find it. I had already planned to go deskless and begin implementing alternative seating, but this session really helped me feel better about that decision and get a better idea of what that could look like.

The benefits of a deskless classroom:

1)   There’s more space. Chairs, yoga balls, and bean bags take up a lot less space in the room than the traditional chair-desk combination. This helps me stay close to everyone, which improves classroom management and lets me have a bigger staging area.

2)   I can rearrange and group students easily.

3)   Desks are a barrier to conversation and give students a place to hide illicit activity (phones, food, etc) or disengage by putting their head down.

4)   It’s easier to implement alternative seating. There is only so much space in a classroom, having to accommodate a yoga ball next to a chair-desk or a table takes up a lot more room or makes it almost impossible to reach everyone quickly.

Scott doesn’t implement alternative seating until a few weeks into the school year, and lays very clear guidelines for the use of alternative seating.

Scott addressed how he uses various posters to develop his classroom culture, including classroom rules, a word wall, his Sweet 16 posters, question words (I like that his don’t have the English on them, but rather are illustrated with pictures), and behavior warning posters. He uses a clothesline to hang his collection of funny hats to be used by student actors (or student behavior problems) and some shelves to store realistic animal plushes that he gets at zoos all over the country. (They look amazing, and I want to start similar collections!)

Finally he talked about how he sets up his gradebook. He divides his into Speaking, Writing, Listening, Reading, and Culture categories that contribute to the students academic grade, but he can/does track things like participation, homework, effort, etc in a 0% category for documentation purposes. The percentages he uses align with blooms taxonomy and range from 10%-30%. For his level 1s, there are no speaking and writing grades in quarter 1, but he has them for the full school year, and he gives three grades per category per marking period. Two are formative, one is summative, and he assesses all the categories in one exam at the end of the quarter. This means he’s giving 15 grades/quarter, and is taking at least 1/week. He recommended staggering when grades were taken among classes, especially for the formative assignments to reduce the amount of grading done at any one time.

I don’t think I will implement this exact system next year, at least in terms of percentages, but we shall see.

Mira Canion spoke about assessing reading comprehension. She pointed out that we need to be doing this consistently because it tells us what our next move is. We discussed the ACTFL and WIDA standards for comprehension on the different levels, and how they are only somewhat helpful in guiding what assessment should look like. One of her more brilliant points was that by using the target language to teach content using Comprehensible Input Methods, we can bypass arguments about explicit grammar teaching because we aren’t teaching that.

Mira then talked us through reading strategies we could teach and then use to assess our student’s reading comprehension.

Strategy 1: Read the text, comment on it/make a prediction/ask a question/clarify something, and reread it if you are completely unable to do one of those things. We can have students write these down, and then sort them to assess.

           -Deep questions/comments get an A.

           -Simple questions/comments get a C.

           -If it is between the two, it’s a B.

           -We need to model asking deep questions in L2 (the target language) in order to help our students do the same, then supplement the ones who do with more complicated texts, and we can do that starting in Level 1.

Strategy 2: Have the students make a web of information around a topic based on a reading.

           -It’s important to have the students drawing this web, not just filling information out.

           -Have them sort whether statements pulled from the text are linked to the main idea or detail, and explain why the details support the main idea.

           -We need to really teach students how to find the main idea, not just have them read a text and then ask “so what’s the main idea?” Sure they should have learned that in their English/Language Arts classes before they get to us, but odds are good that they haven’t.

Strategy 3: Students find the story structure.

           -If a students can find and talk about the various elements of a story structure, then they understand the story.

           -You can give them a chart with columns to support them creating sentences. Ex: Somebody/wants/but/so.

R Clarice Swaney’s session dealt with doing Picture Talks. I’ve done Movie Talks with varying degrees of success, so I understand the concept of a Picture Talk, but it was still good to go to a session that specifically addressed doing them and reinforce what I already knew. The big takeaways for me was to make sure that my picture was interesting, I used creative cropping to create interest and build suspense, set clear expectations from the get-go, and have a loose plan of questions to ask that blend talking about the picture and talking about the students.

I really like the way Clarice phrased her expectations:

1)   Nothing on your lap, nothing in your hands. (She’s deskless too!)

2)   One person speaks, all others listen.

3)   Professional posture

4)   Use the Target Language, make interesting suggestions.

5)   Demonstrate understanding or ask for clarification

If a student breaks those rules, Clarice doesn’t make a big fuss, but acts like she didn’t go over the rules and refreshes them.

I really liked the suggestion of using Picture Talks to introduce or examine things of cultural reference. Working more culture study into my classroom is a personal goal for this year, which means I will have to be more diligent about researching culture in various countries, but not all of my Picture Talks this year will be about culture. I learned so much in on these two days, and I wish I could have gone to more individual sessions! I have a ton of new methods and strategies in my teacher toolbox that I can’t wait to use this year!

[srta-jax-blog]

NTPRS Day 3

Okay, so… I got very wrapped up in the goings on of the last three days of NTPRS and when I got back to my Airbnb (or in the case of Friday, the family home in Ohio) I was super exhausted and basically went straight to sleep.

BUT I didn’t forget about the importance of reflecting and my goal of using this blog more consistently, so now I present to you a summary of NTPRS 2019 day three and my takeaways!

Okay, so we started the day by discussing in pairs and trios a series of questions posted around the room, addressing the purposes, ways, and challenges of using TPRS in the classroom. After, we discussed some specific issues as a whole group. The big ideas that came up were:

           -It will take years to become a master at these methods.

           -We need to keep kids responsible and accountable.

           -Involving the kids in the running of the class will help them stay engaged.

           -Assessment comes in various stripes, and we have to utilize an array to really get a good idea of where our students are.

That first big idea is basically a mantra for life right? It will take years to become a master. I believe Von was also the one who said “Anything worth doing well is worth doing poorly at first.” I believe he was quoting someone else when he said it, but it’s a great corollary. This past spring when I put my toes into CI and TPRS especially (okay, so it was more like stomping around in the garden and getting covered in muck) I knew that I was probably not delivering the material in the best way possible. I was definitely not doing it particularly well, BUT I was trying, and I was working at it, and I knew I would get better. I’m not going to hold myself to the Linda Li standard or the Von Ray standard, or the whomever-you-choose standard for TPRS. If I did that, I would quickly become discouraged and would probably give up. What I can do is look to the masters as guideposts and start moving in that direction.

I am still holding myself to a higher standard going into this next school year because I have more understanding, more training, and more support. The standard I’m holding myself to is basically “Do better today than you did before. Keep moving forward and improving your craft.” I know people who have been doing this for two, three, five, ten, fifteen+ years, and I can go to them and say “I don’t know what I’m doing. Can you help?” (And I am reasonably certain they will.)

The next two big ideas basically come down to good ol’ classroom management. I’ll be honest, CM was my weak spot last year. CM is pretty much every new teacher’s weak spot, so I’m not too discouraged by it. That being said, we really spent some time discussing and demonstrating ways to keep the students engaged and behaving.

Von showed how he sets up a class on Day One. He uses L1 (the most common language of the group) to begin this norming process.

1)   He asks “Who wants a good story?” (Obviously everyone, right?)

2)   He demonstrates how he wants the students to react to various things he does. (Going “ohhhhhh” when he makes a statement and/or makes a rising hands gesture, answering questions with yes/no and thumbs up/down chorally, etc.)

3)   He explains that he wants them to be active participants in creating the story. They can help co-create by giving English proper nouns or target language answers, and they should try to give interesting details. (If their detail is interesting enough, it will probably take precedence over what he previously decided.)*

4)   He starts a story. He uses circling and begins taking actors and actresses for dramatization.

*Von did mention that if all the students are saying one thing… sometimes he’ll do the opposite just to keep the drama and interest up.

Classroom jobs help the students develop accountability and makes them manage each other. Having a timekeeper who resets a timer every time L1 is used instead of the TL is a great way to get the students to stay on each other about staying in the TL so I don’t have to. Periodic rewards for “points” earned in this way keeps the incentive up.

We talked about dramatization in more detail as well. This is something I was afraid of doing last semester, but I will be trying it in this coming school year. Students like to see their peers doing things, and it is a good way to assess how confident students are getting with speaking. The key to having the students speak is coaching and supporting their ability to speak. In our Chinese demo with Linda Li, she had about six student actors up by the end (Harry Potter, two suitors, a flower, and a speech bubble), and even in that story, the whole class was involved as a character early on.

We talked a little bit about reading texts, but I would have liked to spend more time discussing and exploring that as well. Basically, there were variations on reading and translating the story being read first as a whole group, then back and forth with the teacher, and then with a partner.

Some other useful info came when we discussed absences and late adds. This I found fairly useful, since it was a problem I dealt with consistently in my own classroom this past year. The main point that was made was to make the products of what we did accessible to the absent student, but not to necessarily stress about having them do things with it because of the repetition of the language. A useful support for late adds would be to allow them to point to words to form an answer, and then as the teacher putting them together to say out loud for the class. For homework we can have students do readings at home, retell the story in the TL for their parents with story strips, watch clips, and other things like that.

With regard to assessments, some ideas presented involved having a native speaker say something and the students identify the meaning or matching translations, doing readings with questions in L1,  putting pictures in the order that go with the story, translating into English/L1, etc. When it came to assessing original writing, they recommended grading based on volume or on a rubric. The goal, according to Von and Linda was to write, on average, 100 words in 5 minutes. Later in one of the special topic sessions, Scott Benedict mentioned that the AP Exam is looking for 200 words in 20 minutes. (Therefore, if we set a goal of 100 words in 5, they could theoretically be writing 400 words in 20, which blows the AP expectations out of the water!)

A fairly hefty amount of time was spent pitching and demonstrating elements of the “Look I Can Talk” curriculum that TPRS Books offers. I would have loved for more time to be spent on how to identify appropriately leveled readings and how to make authentic texts more accessible to students, and reading strategies we can teach our students to help them read texts independently, beyond reading and translating.

I was pleased to find that the basic strategies I was using in my reading and writing assessments were good, and that I need to keep going with that. One of the things I would like to do as I go into this next year is have more visuals that go along with my stories and use those in assessments as well. I need to work on listening and speaking assessments. My big challenge there was finding the time and resources to do that. I think that will be much easier now that I have confirmation that my reading and writing assessments are in a good place.

Major takeaways:

1) Use the students as actors. Use them to manage each other. 

2) Assessment should involve speaking, reading, writing, and listening.

[srta-jax-blog]

Summer Camp I mean NTPRS Day 2

I didn’t take that many notes today, because overall, I think today was a lot more hands on. Now… do I remember what we did at the very beginning of the day super well as a result… no, but I’m going to do the best I can to cover the important stuff.

Story asking and assessment in Mandarin

In the beginner track during our Mandarin lessons, we experienced some real story asking and ended up with a fairly complex story in the first hour. (Okay… complex to someone who has barely had two hours of Mandarin.) After lunch, we had another hour of Mandarin, but in that session, Linda Li demonstrated various ways we could assess our student’s acquisition. First, we did three different activities that reviewed the story and reactivated it in our minds. Each time we reviewed, Linda incorporated more details from in the morning. Then we did eight or nine things to assess our comprehension. Most of this assessment was informal. One of them (the timed retell) I think could be used for a grade in a level 1/novice class if necessary. Several of these “assessments” were great for students to prove to themselves that they actually understood what they were hearing. And the last two things involved us speaking in groups of three. I don’t know about all the other groups, but in my group, we didn’t want to stop talking, and it was so cool to see and hear Mandarin falling out of the mouths of my partners and my own mouth too!

Image description: A picture of a whiteboard with two sheets of paper attached. On the left sheet are six boxes. Each box has a drawing that goes along with one sentence from the story. Box 1: A stick figure named mark looks at a stick figure named Lindsay. Box 2: Mark gives Lindsay pizza. Box 3 shows only Lindsay and that she doesn’t like pizza. Box 4: A stick figure named Rob looks at Lindsay. Box 5: Rob gives Lindsay a heart, which represents love. Box 6 shows Lindsay with Rob and a bunch of hearts between them, showing that Lindsay likes Robs gift and likes him too. The sheet on the right side of the board has the same story written in Chinese using roman letters. Some pieces of information are emphasized with smiley faces. End Image description.

Props

With just a few props, specifically, a pizza slice mask, a hamburger hat, and a giant cardboard heart, the two stories we did today in Mandarin came to life and were way funnier. We did a warmup story with the whole class, and one woman wore the piece of pizza, because she was a piece of pizza, and another wore the hamburger hat. It was very funny, very lighthearted, and foreshadowed the real story for the day. In the real story, two guys liked a very pretty girl. One gave her pizza romantically. The other gave her love (secretly). She did not like pizza, but she did like the love. Having the pizza and the heart props really supported the action and helped increase the humor for the audience. As of right now, I don’t have many props. I plan to fix that. I also plan to actually use student actors in my classroom next year, because they did make it way more entertaining.

Image Description: Student actors are being coached by the teacher in their dramatization. The student closest to us is a man playing Mark’s character. He is on one knee facing away from us so he can romantically give pizza to the very pretty girl named Lindsay. Lindsay is standing between Rob and Mark, the teacher is in front of Lindsay. She has her hands on the piece of pizza that Mark is trying to give her, but she is looking at the teacher for direction. Behind the teacher Rob is standing and holding a large piece of cardboard shaped like a stereotypical heart to represent “love” in front of his chest. End Image description.

Practice, Practice, Practice

One of the other things we did in our sessions was practicing using circling and triangling with a mock class. We were broken down into groups of 8-10 and each group member took a sentence from a basic story about a boy named George who was in California but had a problem. (The problem was that he wanted a Coke but didn’t have one). This story was being told in the past tense (but in the real world… you could choose to tell it in the present tense too. Preferene and needs will dictate that.) Our groups were able to work with a coach to develop a script for us to use that first had us circling a statement, then triangling it with an actor, then adding a statement about a “parallel” (read: additional) character, triangling that with another actor, then adding ourselves as a parallel character, circling the statement about ourself, and then triangling that statement using the two actors once again, and triangling the actors with statements about each other.

That sounds really really complicated, and I’ll be honest, I only got to practice the first part (up to where I introduce myself as a character) but it was really neat to get to go through that coaching process as the teacher, as a student, and as an observer. In my group, we had several Spanish teachers, a French teacher, a Mandarin teacher, an English teacher (ESL) and a German teacher. I only speak two of those languages fluently, but the three that I don’t speak fluently I still understood and was able to participate in the conversation about their given sentence. I look forward to practicing adding myself into the story and the advanced triangling at the end, but that may have to wait until open coaching tomorrow.

Image description: Several pieces of paper are hanging on a wall. The piece in the middle is the largest and is meant to be written on like a whiteboard. The rest are 8.5 inches by 11 inches. To the right of the large center piece are three sheets arranged vertically that explain the roles of the coach, the student, and the observers. Below the center piece is a single sheet that states the purpose of coaching. To the left of the center piece are three sheets arranged vertically. The top sheet has question words in English for the “teacher” to point at when they are speaking. The middle sheet options for the type of circling question that can be asked based on the answer they elicit (a No question, an Either/or question, a yes question, or a question using a question word like Who, How, Where, etc.) The bottom sheet reminds the teacher of the options they have as they go through their lesson. Above the center piece is a piece of paper that talks about pre-teaching considerations for the “teacher” to consider before they teach to their mock class. End Image description.

Speaking of open coaching…

I went to that today, and it was awesome. I taught a very simple sentence to students who were Chinese speakers and it was really successful. One of my main takeaways here was the types of gestures I used to get feedback from my students. In the demonstrations, Linda used a fist strike on an open palm to indicate that we didn’t understand something she said, and one to slow down. I struggled to get my students to do that consistently back in the Spring semester, but I realized that the gestures I tried weren’t good enough because if my back was to that student, then I didn’t know they didn’t understand. I also saw the power of “teaching to the eyes” which is a phrase I learned from Tina Hargaden. The feedback I got from the coaching was all positive by design, but it was so affirming and such a confidence boost. I have a much better idea of what it means to go slow and celebrating accomplishments.

Getting out of my shell

One of the other things I loved about today was getting to know some other attendees. I don’t remember the names of everyone I talked to and chatted with today, but it was so awesome to get to know colleagues from around the world and hear their stories as educators and pick their brains about different things they do and strategies they use and how they got into CI. The encouragement and affirmation that I got from those five or six conversations throughout the day will last me for a while and will help me on those hard days. (I also finally got a grasp on what International Baccalaureate and Seal of Biliteracy are, much to my joy and relief.)

Major takeaways:

1)   Rapid fire review and mini assessments don’t have to be hard, but should give me an idea of where my students are at and give the students the opportunity to see where they are and own their learning. They should also build in complexity and rigor over the course of the assessment.

2)   When the students feel safe and confident in what they know and see that confirmation repeatedly, they take more risks.

3)   A few simple props and gestures go a long way to helping students comprehend what they are hearing and reading.

4)   Teaching to the eyes helps me go slower and catch when my students aren’t understanding, which means I’m less frustrated.

5)   I need to have an “I don’t understand” sign that makes noise, AND ENFORCE ITS USE.

6)   Talking to colleagues who teach a world language is some of the best professional development I’m ever going to get. Thanks to some of the conversations I had today with colleagues, I feel more confident that I am on the right track, I can do this and I have a pretty good plan for how I’m going to get my bosses to give me the money to support the methodology changes I’m trying to enact. (Mua ha ha haaaaaaa)

Oh... and here’s my retelling of the story. I had 7 minutes to complete it, and I was allowed to extend the story or add details if I had time, which I did.

Image description: a picture of a legal pad. The author wrote the class story in Mandarin using roman characters. The text is written on every other line, but takes up almost the entire page. The last two lines make note of the activities that followed the timed writing for later reference. End image description.

[srta-jax-blog]

NTPRS Day 1

So what had happened was...

We laid some groundwork. Von Ray gave an overview of what Comprehensible Input is and why we should be doing this in broad strokes with some great examples. Then, Linda Li demonstrated some basic TPRS skills she uses in her Mandarin class for an hour. Then we debriefed what exactly happened during that lesson and broke for lunch. When we came back, we dug into the process of circling and triangling and practiced those skills with a partner.

Circling and Triangling, the bread and butter

Okay, circling is a process of repeating a statement and asking questions about it. When I haphazardly implemented TPRS, I did steps 1-4 of circling reasonably well. 1) Make a statement, 2) ask a question with a yes answer, 3) one with a no answer, and 4) one with a “either or” thrown in, and restate that statement after every single answer. Repeat for each chunk of the sentence (Subject, verb, object)

What I learned today was that there are more steps. We made the statement, asked the yes question, then the either or one. Then we stated the negative, then the correct answer, and then asked the no question. Once I’ve done the three questions above, I ask the question with a question word, and then ask an open-ended question to get new details, and repeat the process with the new details. The more I’ve circled, the more unpredictable the order I ask them should be.

Triangling is the process of exposing students to the first and second person forms of the verbs and giving them an opportunity to produce (and let you assess that production). A statement is made, the actor is asked a circling question about the statement, the teacher coaches this answer as needed then confirms the detail, then reports the statement to the class (again).

I tried to implement some of this in my classroom with mixed success. I have a much better idea of how to do it and how to elicit details from my students.

Mandarin?

Yes, I learned some Mandarin… and thoroughly enjoyed it! It’s actually one of the things I’m most excited about being at NTPRS. After 1 hour of TPRS, I can say “clap”, “yes”, “no”, “good”, “not good”, “gives chocolate”, “gives coffee”, “looks at”, “wow”, and “My name is” with reasonable confidence and can understand and react to a fair bit more (things like stand up, sit down, likes coffee/chocolate, and different subject pronouns). It was AWESOME. That hour ended and it hadn’t felt like that long at all and I wanted to keep going! (Then again… I really, really like learning languages.)

How did Linda Li do that?

Weellllllll… first of all, she used RICH input. It was Repetitive, Interesting, Comprehensible, and used High frequency vocabulary. There were about 30 words/phrases posted in the room at the start of the lesson. We used maybe 20 of those and added 8 more. So for an hour, she almost exclusively used about 30 words/phrases over and over and over.

Second, she asked A TON of questions, and repeated statements a lot. In one hour, she asked at least 80 questions. (Circling is the heart of TPRS). Statement. Question. Restate the statement. Another question. These questions allowed her to “circle” the statement, which she repeated after we chorally answered each question.

Third, she kept it interesting by bringing in new “characters.” In one part of the lesson, half the room was called Beijing and the other half was called Taiwan (And Singapore and Hong Kong and a few others on accident). She used singular subjects for quite a while to establish the meanings of the verbs “look” “give” and “like” then she started adding plural subjects. She compared two “characters”, one who liked chocolate (and looked at it romantically) and one who liked coffee. She had us stand up, sit down, clap, and do various hand gestures with her. She did quite a bit more than that as well, because she kept the pace up and when things started to get stale she spiced it up.

Fourth, she kept us feeling safe. How? 1) She taught us to use cues to show that we needed help. A fist smack on an open palm to say we didn’t understand, another to ask her to slow down. Other gestures were used to illicit a response or to show we understood what she said, even if we didn’t have the words to say it. 2) The only words we were required to say were yes, no, and people’s names. Most of us said “coffee” and “chocolate too since they were cognates.

Major takeaways from today:

1)   For not having any real training in TPRS and CI… I didn’t actually do too bad of a job at doing it during my first semester!

2)   Use gestures to cue students, and be diligent about training the students to use these cues! (Especially to show that they don’t understand or need me to slow down).

3)   Questions help make slow processors fast processors, and fast processors into speakers.

4)   Keep asking questions. I don’t have to remember the details because either the students will, or the details weren’t interesting enough and we will make more interesting details.

5)   The more characters I add, the more questions I can ask, the more repetitions I can get while still keeping things interesting.

6)   Shelter the vocabulary, because you don’t need a lot of vocab to communicate. Don’t shelter the grammar, use what you need when you need it to convey meaning.

[srta-jax-blog]

How I got here

Consider this an introduction post in which I briefly summarize my first year of teaching and explain why I’m at the National Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling Conference in Chicago, before I just start rambling about NTPRS itself.

Okay, so I had heard about Comprehensible Input (CI) and Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS) during my last semester in college. That summer, when I landed my first teaching job, I wanted to dive head first into these methods and be an amazing teacher.

I had no clue what I was doing. I panicked, went to the textbook, and waged a war of attrition trying to get my students to learn anything. I hated it. My students hated it. My students hated me. It was not fun.

Lucky for me, I got a new batch of kids in the Spring because we are on a true block schedule at my school. So in the last couple weeks of the Fall semester and during my Christmas break I spent a lot of time reading blog posts by Martina Bex and Bill Van Patten and Ben Slavic and a whole bunch of other people. And I decided to try doing some TPRS style storytelling and Personalized Questions and Answers (PQA) and maybe a little bit of Movie Talk and Write and Discuss and see what happened. I knew it was going to be rough, and that I was going to struggle, and it wasn’t going to be amazing because despite reading blog posts, I didn’t actually know what I was doing, but I knew I wouldn’t survive another semester of traditional teaching.

So I decided to go to a TPRS training. Buuuut I didn’t want to have to subject a substitute teacher to my students and didn’t want to miss school (because I am a nerd) but I didn’t see any dates in the summer at the time, and noticed that the NTPRS (National Teaching Proficiency through Reading and Storytelling) wasn’t much more expensive than a 2 day training AND was like 4.5 days… AND was in Chicago!

So I tried doing CI and TPRS and had way better results than I did teaching the traditional way. (I will talk more about that some other time!)

So now, it’s July, I’m at an Airbnb in Chicago, and I just had a whirlwind first day of my first professional conference and first TPRS training (beginner track, aka-the training for the newbies)

[srta-jax-blog]

quehoraes_apuntes.pdf

I designed this to be glued into student notebooks to guide notes on telling time in Spanish. This PDF creates two inserts. Intention for the half sheet:  Top (left): “Es la” vs “Son las” (Students draw a wedge from 1-2 and write “Es la...” and then “Son las...” in the rest.  Middle (right): When to use “y” and when to use “menos” Bottom (left): Cuarto and media with the hour. Of course, you can use this however you wish, but that’s what Im using it for on Monday with my seventh graders.

[srta-jax-blog]

This is a great video to show different ways of saying the same thing and how spanish varies from country to country.

[srta-jax-blog]

On Word Clouds

For one of our class assignments we created word clouds. Now wordclouds are fun to fiddle around with, and you will see two I have made, but let me tell you, I was not that passionate about them, and we didn’t really use them when and where I went to school.

They, like most things have their uses. Word clouds, in my mind, are mostly limited to classes with a literature element. So when you are in English lit classes, you can plug in poetry or selections from books or short stories, and boom, you can pull out some of your key words. Woo hoo. The bigger the word, the more important it is apparently. Fine. However, when I looked at it from a foreign language standpoint, I realized something.

This has a great application for the foreign language classroom, especially when you start having your children reading selections in Spanish. Reading more than a couple sentences was very intimidating for me at first, and it felt like I was starting all over and suddenly I knew nothing at all. (It took me at least 45 minutes to read a piece that was maybe a half a page long. MAYBE.) Now if you put a short section or all of a reading (depending on length, of course) into a word cloud generator, you can create a visual that shows your students the high frequency words, and it gives them a great starting place for vocabulary. They can look at something like this one:

(wordcloud of Poderoso Caballero es Don Dinero by Francisco de Quevedo created by @srtajax using wordclouds.com)

Now, this is not a complicated or hard to understand poem, despite being written in the early 1600s, but, when introducing it to the class, you can present this, and have them look at the large words. Chances are, they are probably going to know what words like “Dinero,” “caballero,” and “poderoso” mean, but what about “pues” or “oriente?” those are opportunities to have students digging in their dictionaries for what exactly “guerrero” means, before they read, but it will also help them see just how many words they do know before they start so they go into it saying “yeah, you know what, I CAN read poems in spanish.”

One of the things I did not know about word clouds going into it is that these days, the generators can make your wordcloud in all kinds of shapes. Here’s the one for the same poem I made on tagul:

In this instance, the tagul generated wordcloud has a larger variety of sizes and so more words stick out (at least to me) but I had to work harder to get it as an image I could share here.

There are dozens of word cloud generators out there, so I encourage you to find one that you like, but I quite like these two. I would also encourage using them in a foreign language classroom, whether its teaching a second language, or teaching ELL, to help build the confidence in your students that yes, they can read in their target language, and that they probably know more words than they think they know. The more I look at these, and the more I think about them, the more ways I’m thinking of using them. 

What are some of the ways you use word clouds in your classroom? What are some of the ways you want to use them in your classroom?

[but-the-library-of-alexandria]

the thing about writing fantasy stories is that language is so based on history that it can be hard to decide how far suspension of disbelief can carry you word-choice wise - what do you call a french braid in a world with no france? can a queen ann neckline be described if there was no queen ann? where do you draw the line? can you use the word platonic if plato never existed? can you name a character chris in a land without christianity? can you even say ‘bungalow’ in a world where there was no indian language for the word to originate from? is there a single word in any language that doesn’t have a story behind it? to be accurate a fantasy story would be written in a fantasy language but who has the time for that

[a-kite-dancing-in-a-hurricane]

Tolkien had the time apparently

[misbehavingmaiar]

LIsten. Linguistics Georg, who invented over 10,000 conlangs each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted. 

[srta-jax-blog]

Disclaimer: This particular video has no particular value in the classroom. The technology used to make this video COULD be of use in the classroom. For this assignment, we didn’t have to make it educational, and thus, I decided to combine two of my favorite things: Monty Python and the Quest for the Holy Grail, and two of my favorite fictional characters- Commander Erwin Smith and Levi Ackerman of Shingeki no Kyojin. Now, on to the process!

This video was surprisingly easy to make, if a bit time consuming. This video was rendered using blabberize, With this site, you upload an image, draw a mouth shape over the part of the picture you would like to move as the mouth of the object (including setting how far the mouth opens), and then adding an audio clip that is no longer than 30 seconds. This audio clip can be from a song, movie, or recorded by the creator using a microphone. For this video, I downloaded the audio clip you hear above, then used iTunes to make it an mp3 and create a series of clips short enough to put into the program. For this one, it was at least 6, which meant that each time a different person spoke or I had to reupload my image, redo the mouths, and add the audio. (It was totally worth it.) After I had all of my blabbers made, I downloaded them and put them together in Windows movie maker, and saved them as the video you see above. 

I must say, this was a lot of fun to do, and I think, like Don Gato y Señor Perro this is something I can see myself creating a character for use in the classroom to provide examples and give students a laugh or two. This is also something that is easy enough to use that I would be okay with my students making a few blabbers for class projects or to spice up their own presentations. 

The one thing I will say, is that it seems the window for deactivating accounts is very short. I made this about a month and a half ago, and I was unable to get back into my account today. It’s not a big deal given the nature of this piece, and because I have all of the files downloaded on my personal computer, it is something to keep in mind if you don’t plan on using this very much. The account is free, and I’m sure its easy to make another account, but make sure you download your blabbers as soon as you make them, in case it happens to you!

[srta-jax-blog]

Prezi Vs Emaze

So before this assignment, I had never heard of Emaze, but it’s the same basic concept as prezi. You create an account, and then you can create interactive presentations in a web platform, making them accessible basically anywhere. I made a presentation on why someone should study spanish, and will eventually go back and beef them up a little bit.

The two presentations are below the cut

Prezi

Emaze

I tried to make them a little different from each other in content, and I was mostly trying a whole bunch of things with the Emaze.

Each site has it’s pros and cons, like all things do. Prezi is great for being very intuitive (at least in my opinion) and making transitions very easy. It’s also very open in terms of what you can do with it because you can always add more layers of information with a simple zoom in/out and dropping an image or text into place.

Emaze can make some very polished presentations that look modern and professional, sleek and savvy. There are a lot of cool themes and layouts you can draw on, just like with Prezi, and putting images and videos is a snap.

On the other hand, prezi has a tendency to lag or get cranky about how things are placed, and some may find the transitions a little nauseating. I had a lot of trouble with my work not saving in Emaze, so I had to redo a lot of my content whenever I went back to working on it, and its interface is not nearly as intuitive as prezi’s was.

If I were to pick one platform to use, it would probably be prezi. I like having an open canvas that I can tailor to exactly what I need, and its very easy to add or remove text, change fonts and sizes, and make a presentation that is exactly what you need. Emaze would be great for just displaying some pictures and then talking about them, like for an art history class or a discussion of different characters in a literary or cinematic work.

I’ll have to play with emaze some more and see if I like it.

[srta-jax-blog]

Comic Strips in Google Presentations

Believe it or not, you can use Google Presentations to create comic strips and even animations. There are some great videos of animations made in GP on Youtube, you may want to check that out sometime.

Here’s a Comic Strip I made for class to introduce Cantar Del Mio Cid (We had just read it in one of my other classes, so it was on my mind.)

The tricky part is getting all of the transitions worked out and finding clipart. I recommend using sites like openclipart.org, which provide clipart that is not copyrighted, and therefore free for you to use. For this one, I had to eliminate the whitespace around our Chihuahua friend, Sr. Perro, and I colored in the knight I used for El Cid, because I couldn’t find anything suitable that was already on a transparent background in a position I liked and colored the way I wanted. (Both were done using GIMP, an open source program similar to Photoshop)

PROS OF GOOGLE COMIC STRIPS:

-Great way to introduce a Unit of Study

-Fun way for your students to present information (Whether it be a JIGSAW or part of a research project, or a summary of instruction)

-Doing it via Google Drive makes it collaborative and students can work on it from anywhere with internet access.

-It’s best for small snippets of information or brief reviews of plot

CONS OF GOOGLE COMIC STRIPS:

-It can be time consuming to produce and time everything properly

-Students may get caught up in making things pretty/using cool transitions (This can be mitigated in the project specifications, but it’s important to keep in mind)

-Not ideal for presenting significant amounts of information (especially when you consider the time put into creating them

The Bottom Line:

In my (future) classroom, I can see myself using Don Gato y Señor Perro comics to introduce units, topics, and vocabulary to my students regularly, and I might use it once or twice a semester as an activity for the whole class, and make it an optional addition for projects if students so wish. This is not something I would recommend students creating regularly in class, unless it was a 3 slide (+title slide) vocabulary review or something similar that could be created in 15-20 minutes because it is rather time consuming, and I would rather be playing language games or exposing my students to aspects of Hispanic cultures.

[srta-jax-blog]

The Technology Doesn’t Always Work the Way It’s Supposed To.

This is something my Technology In The Classroom professor said the first day of class, and it something we would all do well to remember.

I’m studying to be a foreign language teacher, and right now, my foreign language focus is in Spanish. (Post-graduation, I will be adding other languages to my repertoire, because I would like to be able to offer multiple languages to my students in the future.) One of the College of Education’s goals is to help us develop our own philosophy of education. During my time in the department and the classroom, I have come to have a very low technology-based philosophy. Of course, I recognize that technology can be very useful in the classroom, and I fully intend to use digital presentations and project student work and show videos in class, but when it comes down to it, I would be completely happy in a school where the students didn’t have tablets or computers on their desks ever.

I’m still required to take this class, and so far I’ve found a number of things useful. I’ll be sharing my reflections on the various resources we work with here as well as the products that I create using said resources. The goal of this blog, asides from that, will be to share resources and information and tips that I learn as a student and as a teacher with a specific focus for foreign language education.

¡Vámonos!

-Srta. Jax