Month: January 2024

Upcoming Webinar: The Personalization Mindset: Using Card Talk to Build Proficiency and Community

I’m super excited to announce that I will be presenting a webinar for ACTFL on using Card Talk to personalize language learning, and build the skills of creating comprehensible input and interactions in your language classes!

Who: The CCLT SIG and the German SIG (join for free if you are an ACTFL member!)
What: The Personalization Mindset: Using Card Talk to Build Proficiency and Community
When: March 4, 2024 from 4-5pm PST
Where: Online! Register for the webinar here.

As for why?
– Maybe you want to learn how to do the activity Card Talk because you’ve never done it before.
– Maybe you’ve done it before, but want to work through some trouble spots you encountered.
– Maybe you want to learn different ways to utilize Card Talk in your class.
– Maybe you’re looking to build more skills of creating comprehensible interactions with your students.
– Maybe you’re brand new to “teaching with CI” and just want to soak up as much information and perspective as you can!

If you’re looking for somewhere to get started, I have blog posts about Card Talk, as well as doing Card Talk online that can be a good place to start.

Looking forward to seeing y’all then!

Are you going to be there? Let me know in the comments below!

Reflecting on Fall Semester 2023

Inspired by the reflections of Bill Langley, I wanted to take a moment to look back at fall semester 2023 and reflect on what I learned and experienced.

Questioning

My goal for this year has been simple: more questions! Asking lots of what Mike Peto calls “Artful Questions” allow students to hear more language in context as students get repetitions on vocabulary and grammatical form. I think I’ve upped my “artful questioning” this year so that students feel very comfortable with new language pretty quickly. I was also super interested in this research article by Gardner and Lichtman, which showed that contingent questions (aka either/or questions) helped students be more confident and accurate in their own output – I’ve upped the volume of either/or questions in my classes and am looking forward to more confident student output!

What has also gone well for me this year has been adding more personalized questions with new vocabulary. I’m always trying to find ways to connect what we’re learning with the lives of my students, and I feel like I know my students better this year than any other year. When I’m unsure what to ask next, leaning into the use of Sweet 16 verbs and question words helps me find the next logical (and engaging) thing to ask.

Leaning Into Card Talk

I used to do Card Talk for a week or two at the beginning of the unit, and then sort of abandon it after interest had run out or I wanted to move onto something else. A lot of “cards” went unused, even with students asking if one day we would look at theirs.

What has been really nice this year has been returning to the “cards” from the beginning of the year throughout the semester. Honestly, any time I was struggling with planning and needed a quick “filler” that still felt worthwhile, displaying a new card and chatting about it with the class turned out to be super engaging for students. There has been lots of personalization in my class because of this foundational activity, and it’s been fun to see how much language growth we’ve achieved in one semester when we pick up and talk about a new card.

New Activities

Overall, I try to limit the amount of different things I do just to make my own planning easier and not have to teach new activities to my students all the time. It saves time and we can go deeper with language if we’re not constantly explaining new activity formats. But! I do love trying stuff out, and these three activities have been huge winners for me, so I’ll be keeping them in the rotation:

  • Quick Draw (AnneMarie Chase)
    This is a great, fun game to review a text that students are familiar with that takes the teacher off the stage and engages students’ competitive spirits. Students love drawing, and half of the fun is the images they create! But they’re also secretly reading and rereading a ton…! (AnneMarie is a master of secret input!)
  • Input-Based Vocabulary Quizzes (AnneMarie Chase)
    This is the first year of a dual-credit “college in the high school class” for upper level German, and I am beholden to a textbook for the first time since I started at this school. As such, I have wanted to make sure kids are getting lots of exposure to each textbook chapter’s vocab, and these input-based quizzes have been really great to meet the textbook’s goals while also meeting my goal of getting students lots and lots of contextualized input.
  • Hatschi Patschi (Cécile Lainé)
    I had heard of this activity before, but never saw how to implement it in my own classes until I read Cécile’s blog post linked above. Though it got a bit, uh, physical, my students LOVED this game. A great way to practice answering questions about familiar topics, and also have FUN.

TPR

I have used gestures in the past to help students remember specific target structures, but never done just classic TPR. I think part of what stopped me was not knowing what to start with and how to build up with it over time.

I got a copy of Berty Segal Cook’s Teaching English Through Action and everything clicked into place. By following (but also modifying for my own needs) the lesson plans provided, I was able to inject some movement into my students’ days, which really has helped with focus. Having someone else’s structure made it easy to modify for my needs (most specifically for my deskless classroom).

But it also helps with listening and vocabulary! TPR gives immediate feedback to both student and teacher, so it’s easy to see what needs more repetitions and practice before moving on. I’m a fan – I think 7-10 minutes of TPR most days will remain especially for my lower level students to build listening stamina and vocabulary.

Warm Ups

I’m still pondering on this one: I find that the same students aren’t doing my Warm Ups every day. Many are able to answer questions I ask while we are checking the warm ups, but my wish would be that they write down German at the start of class to get their minds into German mode while I have time to take attendance and check in with students.

I had contemplated handing each student a quarter sheet of paper every day with the warmup on it that they return to me at the end of class (the other blank side could even be used for the end-of-class Quick Quiz), but that feels wasteful. Having a warmup sheet with 2 weeks of spaces on it, like I do now, is more environmentally-friendly, and gives space for notes, new vocab they learn during the warmup, writing down our weekly Classroom Passwords…

Still thinking about this one. I’m thinking I just need to make clear that doing the warm up is part of our opening routines, and warmly insist that students follow the routine with greater fidelity.

Setting Up for Absences

I went from being almost-always at work to feeling like I was missing tons of days this year. Between ACTFL, family events, illness, and PD opportunities, I’m missing a lot of time this year.

Luckily, I knew about many of these things ahead of time and could plan for learning to happen, even if I wasn’t there. Part of the success I’ve had was training students on my expectations of where to find assignments if I wasn’t there, and part of it was setting up students with specific jobs for my absences that help the class function very well. Sub notes have been very complementary and kind, and work completion is up over other years, even on days where I was unexpectedly absent. Even in years where I am anticipating being in school most of the time, I will continue to train students to adjust to my absences without missing a beat.

Writing

I just purchased Eric Richards’ book Grafted Writing a couple weeks ago and have already implemented three of the activities into my own classes. I highly recommend it as a way to scaffold student writing in class in an input-focused way!

German Club Planning

This has felt really great: since I put out the call on social media that I was soliciting ideas for a German Club Ideas Master Document, so many teachers have shared their amazing resources with me, which I have been able to share back to other German teachers who are spread too thin. (A special thanks to Amanda Beck, whose Central States presentation on German Club activities formed the backbone for a lot of the list.)

The result of this is that German Club has gone from something that really weighed on me to something that is not at all stressful. My officers have resources to plan with so it’s not always on me, and we’ve tried tons of new activities this year that members have loved. Win win win!

What have been your reflections from fall semester 2023? Comment below!

ACTFL Policy Speech

Dear Reader – in November of 2023, I was a finalist for ACTFL National Language Teacher of the Year. Though I didn’t end up winning, it was an incredible honor to be nominated and to share the stage with four colleagues I now consider friends. And Alicia is a really incredible teacher and advocate, so really, everyone wins!

As part of the application process, I had to write and deliver a 3-5 minute policy speech, like one might give to a political group. This is not exactly my wheelhouse, but I did the best I could, with LOTS of help from JJ Melgar, my BHS colleagues, and my husband. I am posting it below in all its imperfection so that maybe you might learn something from my experience, too. I have tried as best I can to link all citations and sources, and get the wording as close to how it was when I actually delivered it. (The draft I printed got a lot of marking up, even in the final hours before I had to deliver it!)

So…here it is! Enjoy…? 🙂

Prompt: THREE-to-FIVE-MINUTE PLATFORM/TOPIC OF INTEREST SPEECH GIVEN TO A CIVIC GROUP OR OTHER OUTSIDE ORGANIZATIONS, MAKING THE CASE FOR WORLD LANGUAGES. (as taken from the ACTFL TOY Selection Rubric)

Do you remember where you were when you found the words for what you believe in?  Do you remember where you were when you realized how you will thrive, connect, and contribute in society?

For countless young people, these moments of discovery happen, as they did for me, in world language classes.

But we are at a moment in which we have an important decision to make: do we accelerate a trend of condemning K-12 and university language programs to wither and die, as is happening at West Virginia University and across our country, making the lives of our countrymen smaller, teaching our young people to cast a wary eye toward difference?  

Or do we champion a bolder vision, do we set our hands to the creation of a more prosperous society that can mediate those differences, do we amplify our collective pursuit of happiness through intelligent investments in multilingualism for all?

Consider: At present, the Census Bureau reports that 79% of US residents speak only English, and the American Councils for International Education estimate that less than 20% of K-12 students are studying a language other than English at their school.

At the same time, the demand for multilingual employees is rising across the skill spectrum, including in healthcare, trade, and technical services.  A survey by Ipsos Public Affairs indicates that “nearly one in four employers surveyed acknowledged losing or being unable to pursue a business opportunity over the singular lack of foreign language skills.”  Businesses across our nation are pleading for investments in a more multilingual workforce, and why wouldn’t they?

Studies show that multilingual people have better reading abilities than monolinguals.  Multilingual people have better overall academic performance.  Multilingual people even show more rational decision making in their additional languages, and craft more creative scientific hypotheses.  But these skills, these societal gains are lost with every program that gets abandoned.

I see the growth of these important skills in my own classroom across years of study.  My first year learners initially encounter cultural differences as strange and off-putting, but with time, they are more able to observe other cultures from a stance of suspended judgment.  Students move from using evaluative terms to more relative or descriptive terms for other cultures.  Not bad, not strange, but different.

Our profession has evolved from fill-in-the-blank teaching toward engagement with the authentic voices of other cultures.  Learners of German, Spanish, Japanese, are learning not only about, but with and from members of diverse cultural groups through multimedia documents on a wide variety of topics.  They are reading magazine articles about futuristic technologies, watching video essays about intercultural identities, and analyzing infographics for trends, all in their new languages. 

And instead of taking for granted what others might try to convince them about a given culture or group, they are listening deeply into these cultures and experiencing them through their own words.  This is what we stand to lose if we turn our back on multilingual education.

We turn our back on international connection and business, on reconnections with family and heritage, on opportunities to find shared belief and shared humanity.  Charlamagne is quoted as saying that “To have another language is to possess a second soul.”  A soul is something that you must nurture and care for.

We must nurture and care for multilingual education, and invest in its sustained growth.  We must nurture and restore funding to Title VI and Fulbright-Hays, which changed my life forever.  We must take care to pass the World LEAP Act into law.  We must invest in the protection of language departments like that of West Virginia University, so that our countrymen can thrive.

These programs are not in competition with initiatives in STEM, the trades, and vocational education: these are complementary and supportive initiatives.  They are pennies on the dollar investments in a more innovative, connected, and peaceful future.  I found the words for what I believe, and found humanity in myself and in others in a language classroom.  Let us be champions of that future of possibilities: multilingualism for all.

Thank you.