Welcome back to another #LangBook blog post where I write my thoughts about the book Common Ground: Second Language Acquisition goes to the Classroom by Florencia Henshaw and Maris Hawkins. I couldn’t tweet live this week due to parent-teacher conferences but I didn’t want to miss out on this opportunity for reflection and discussion. This week, the facilitator was Lisa Shepard from Columbus, Ohio! I feel slightly strange that this wonderful individual lives 20 minutes from me and we have never met. This must change. This weeks #LangBook was all about Input/Compelling Input and reviewed chapter 3 of the book. Here are the questions that she created (or co-created?) for the week.
Interestingly enough, I just hosted a #LangChat about authentic resources and the purpose that they serve in my classroom. You can check out the Wakelet summary here! For me, I choose to use resources made for language learners BEFORE using an authentic resource if my goal is to show the vocabulary or topic in a real-world context. For example, I am in my school-themed unit and we are currently pretending that we are getting ready to study abroad for a month in Guatemala. By the end of the unit, students need to be able to identify school supplies in an authentic commercial, participate in a text conversation between them and a peer back in the USA, and write a postcard back home to their Spanish teacher about their Guatemalan classroom. I take 0 credit for this context because it is in my Voces textbook IPA.
So, we are currently looking at resources that increase their knowledge of the vocab they need to use like a story about someone studying abroad that I wrote, a teacher-created listening activity about school supplies, and some speaking activities (not for a grade) that encourage them to use the vocabulary verbally. Once we do these and get familiar with the vocab, I bring out the authentic resources. We will watch authentic commercials, look at real postcards and how they are addressed, and look at some printed back-to-school ads to focus on supporting details and the main idea.
There are times that I use an authentic resource, like a picture, to introduce vocabulary, as well! In my school unit, I used images of classrooms around the world to show different items in the classroom. Students used the phrase “hay” (there is/there are) to describe what they saw. Then, they described our classroom. This will help them with their final assessment when they have to look at a classroom picture in Guatemala and describe it in detail when writing a postcard. Phew, that was a lot! Let’s move onto question 2.
I think the word compelled here for me might be a synonym for engagement. Whenever I create a task for my students, I like to ask myself “what is the purpose for this / how will this help them in the future?” I will admit that this is an area of improvement for me and I have enjoyed seeing the different input examples in the book Common Ground that can compel students to want to actually engage in the activity.
I hate this topic. Yup, I hate talking about it because it makes me feel like I will never have the right answer for some people and it is an area of growth. I am a people pleaser in the WORST way! In college, we were told to give them all L2 as much as possible regardless if they understood it because they would just figure it out. I had to realize that using the L2 for the sake of giving them input doesn’t count if they can’t make any meaning out of what I said. I had to learn that speaking Spanish doesn’t count as input if it is just noise, just like the authors suggest. So, I do my best to provide comprehensible input when I speak to my kids and I do strive to provide them with input opportunities where they can make meaning. The only time that I could see myself just using the L2 that is more advanced is in an elementary setting where they absorb information and language faster like a sponge. I am curious if anyone has tried only speaking Spanish right off the bat with their high schoolers and didn’t see kids drop out of their class like flies??
Something I do not put in the L2 in my novice classes are written instructions. Here is why:
1. I have many students who need to finish work or get support during an academic lab where the teacher does not speak Spanish. The teacher does an amazing job learning right along side them but it is helpful to have directions in English.
2. Chronic absences are at an all-time high and those kids might not be able to get support for understanding the directions. Directions in Spanish require support for understanding from me during class.
3. The amount of kids who struggle with executive functioning in my classes is high. Just the “simple” (not exactly simple if you struggle with it) act of getting started on an activity is really challenging and I do not want the ability of understanding the directions to be a barrier to them interacting with the language.
Oh the 90% rule. I reached out to a mentor of mine and the author of Musicuentos.com because I wanted to know if she knew how the 90% rule came to be. I was FLOORED to find out that the 90% rule came from a survey that ACTFL gave to language teachers. Teachers were asked what percentage they thought was good to shoot for. 90% was the most common. This is not a scientifically proven number but rather something that people who took the survey thought was appropriate. I think it is a great number to shoot for, but it is interesting that this did not come from a peer-reviewed research article given that it is pushed really hard.
I think I struggle with this the most because I will never sacrifice relationship-building with my kids for the sake of a 90% L2 rule. However, we are going to do something called “No English November” where I am going to encourage my students to use 90% or more Spanish in class for 1 entire week. This will be something that I will need to plan HARD for. We will use chat maps, our word walls, and hopefully some acquired language to stay in Spanish as much as possible. I have thought about giving kids a reflection sheet to fill out each day we do this but I am unsure what that looks like at this point.
I do have some non-negotiables for when we all have to use the L2 and these are explained to students over time. These non-negotiables are really locked in during the 2nd quarter after we know each other, have a classroom community, and have built some speaking confidence.
I love my coworkers and I don’t think we have this issue but I think I would ask them if they have checked to see that their students understand what they expect them to produce. I find that explicit grammar teaching is done because we want kids to produce higher-level output whether it be through writing or speaking. If you ask kids to write about their childhood using the imperfect and preterite correctly but you have not given them compelling input, how in the world do you expect to get compelling output? If you just teach them words and endings but you don’t show them how to make meaning, what do you think will happen? I have kids in 9th grade that don’t know what a vowel is (I am not kidding) but they can tell me that someone is a boy who is athletic and goes to school and what classes they are in and what teachers they like….and that seems to be more important and compelling than knowing the difference between a consonant and a vowel.
I would really encourage my peers, and do encourage my coworkers, to focus on communication and not whether or not they can conjugate a verb. Another thing is that we have to recycle the language constantly. Don’t just teach food vocab and some ordering phrases and move on. Recycle! Find a grocery shopping ad in the L2. Look at the food, discuss the colors of the food, discuss the quantity of food, look at prices, look at descriptive words….and do that over the course of several units with the same ad! Write about all of the previously mentioned things. Add to the writing over the course of several units and watch how they grow!! You can offer corrections, give a 5 minute mini-lesson focusing on editing 1 type of mistake. Do this without spending days on grammar and see what they can produce without ever making a conjugation chart.
Our Spanish 3 students last year just received scores back from the CAAP exam that is free through Ohio State. Our students really struggled with understanding vocabulary and with reading comprehension. However, they did score well with writing. To me, that says we need to break out more novels, short stories, and authentic opportunities to expose kids to new vocab through compelling input in ways that contextualize the words and aid in acquisition.
I am really enjoying reflecting on my practice and learning from the chapters in this book. If you have not yet purchased a copy, you are really missing out!
Next week, I will be in SPAIN during #LangBook so I will once again need to #SlowBook at a later date! This trip was originally planned for August of 2020 and well, you all know what happened there. I am in utter disbelief that I will be there so soon eating all of the tortilla española that I can.
Looking forward to a time where I can join everyone live again! Happy reading 🙂
