Planning is often one of the most fun aspects of teaching. I tend to get lost in authentic sources or good stories, fantasizing about how to engage students with such interesting ideas, and getting more input for myself. I fantasize about how units and lessons will go, and dream of the day I have “covered” all the things I mean to “cover” every year. (A loud “gulp” is heard.)
But then the summer ends, or I am brought back to reality by the ringing of the bell. I have 165 students this year, teach levels 1-4, am managing 7 students doing an independent study of their 4th year for the first time, and have a student teacher. The time needed for creative, expansive planning thinking is not exactly abundant.
Then I go to conferences, and Everyone Is Doing Something So Interesting and Cool That I Am NOT Doing. I get a burst of pedagogical energy, but still don’t have enough time to follow through on the zillions of creative ideas that other teachers have devised in their contexts. There is a certain measure of guilt that comes with not being able to do Absolutely Everything I Know Would Be Good / Cool for My Students.
I have heard this described as picking up activities like candy. New, creative ideas from conferences are enticing and look sweet, but they are not always the healthy foundation for most of what we do. Things can sound amazing during an energized 45-minute conference session, and be an absolute mismatch once you are back in your own context.
So, what makes up the healthy foundation for language classes? If I were to try to save myself time by limiting my planning focus, how would I do that? The way I see it, it’s just: 1) Loads of input 2) Interaction – with the input, and each other
So, I created a planning menu that focused on effective ways for providing input, and a variety of ways to interact with that input. I found that the fewer choices I gave myself, the easier and quicker it was to plan for interesting content – cultural, or a curriculum-directed Can Do. Instead of having to plan for content and delivery simultaneously, I was just slotting interesting content into a consistent framework. There was just enough variety to keep things novel for me and my students, without having every activity be some new procedure to teach. Less truly was more!
I share it here with you in the hopes that it will inspire you to make your own menu, and to really pare it down to just the activities that you know you can do consistently and efficiently. Using Write and Discuss can be useful to generate the texts you need for many of the activities, but they all also work well for working authentic texts, comprehensible novels, and so on. I have linked some blog posts to help learn more about some of the activities. I hope this helps you free up some time and space in your mind – it certainly has helped me!
Hi, blog friends! I’m excited to announce that I’m partnering with Klett World Languages and NNELL to present “Maintaining Momentum in World Language Classes” on September 9th, 2025, at 6:30pm EST (3:30pm PST). Register for my webinar here, and then check out the list of all the other great webinars that Klett has going on!
In this webinar, participants will learn how to plan for and teach classes that leave both students and the teacher wondering, “Wait! It’s already over?”
Participants will optimize the amount of “flow” in their class periods by clarifying and explicitly stating “to-do” expectations, allowing class periods to quickly snap between high-yield activities that absorb student attention. Students will make progress towards their goals with confidence and support.
Participants will also learn how to apply questioning strategies that can increase student attention and thinking ratio, preventing them from “tuning out” of class content. Teachers will have a questioning toolbox that they can deploy with confidence and ease.
Finally, participants will learn and share activities that allow for students to see each other as fellow humans and connect across differences. This includes activities that specifically personalize content to students’ lives, and brain breaks for the purpose of energizing or focusing.
Participants are invited to join and reflect on how to build and maintain momentum in the world language classes that power an entire school year of learning and fun!
We want our students to read extensively in the Target Language to receive as much input as possible, but we also want to take some time in class to look closely at how Form (which we sometimes call “grammatical structures”) contribute to the meaning of a text.
This hits ACTFL World-Readiness Standard 4.1, Language Comparisons: “Learners use the language to investigate, explain, and reflect on the nature of language through comparisons of the language studied and their own.” If we are using texts that were products of actual communication in class (learning about a topic, a story the class is reading, a co-created text, a summary of a class check-in conversation, etc.), we can provide context for the study of Form that still allows us to provide lots of Comprehensible Input and meaningful interaction to our students. This is a sidebar “linguistics moment” in a class mostly focused on teaching communication.
Why should you do it? Close reading of a text can help students discover how Form contributes to meaning in the L2, satisfies the linguistics nerds in the class (including the teacher), and can maaaaybe help students notice and subsequently acquire specific linguistic forms. (That’s an emphatically hedging maaaaybe – we can’t ever guarantee that students acquire something specific from our input because every student acquires differently, regardless of what we are trying to “teach.”)
When do I use Choral Translation and Pop-Up Grammar?
Choral Translation and Pop-Up Grammar can be used after working with any text as a class. Students should be very comfortable with the meaning of the text, as measured through a variety of frequent comprehension checks, though they may not necessarily know what each individual word in a text means.
I actually do Choral Translation and Pop-Up Grammar on the second day of my level 1 class, after my class has engaged with Card Talk and produced a text using Write and Discuss. This is the first chance for my students to really see that “German isn’t just English with different words” (aka start making Language Comparisons) by seeing that the word “gern,” which means “gladly,” is how you talk about liking to do an action. (“I like to read novels.” = “Ich lese gern Romane.” = “I read gladly novels.”) I deploy these strategies across levels and throughout the school year.
How do I do it? – Logistics
Students need access to a text. This could be projected to students in some way, written on a whiteboard, or a hard copy of a text for each learner held in hand, perhaps with the teacher projecting a hard copy on a document camera. Students will be looking at the text that the teacher is pointing to. It’s helpful for the teacher to have ways to annotate the text in front of students, and for students to also have pencils and/or pens to copy your annotations, or make their own.
How do I do it? – Procedure
The first time I do this with students, I say in English, our L1, that we are going to translate the text from L2 to English.
I say, “I am going to point at individual German words, and you are going to say what that word means in English. Don’t go faster or slower than me, and say it loud enough for my geriatric Millennial ears to hear. If you aren’t sure, skip that word, and then come back on the next one you know.”
Count students in, with your hand or a pointer underneath the first word in the L2. If the whole class translates that word confidently into L1, move your pointing to the next word, continuing on to the end of the sentence.
If there are any points where most of the class is weak in their choral translation, support students by writing an L1 translation or drawing a picture of the word underneath the word, and then go back and start from the beginning of the sentence so that your students can make it through the entire sentence with confidence.
If there are any interesting grammatical features that you would like to draw students’ attention to, translate through the sentence with your students, and then rewind to the interesting spot. This could be funky word order, verb or adjective endings, prepositional phrases or verbs that differ from L1, whatever! Give the briefest possible explanation in L1 about how that form affects meaning, perhaps highlighting the form with a different color marker.
Some Spanish and German examples: “Oh cool, this -o at the end means I am doing the action!” “We used this -s at the end of the adjective because we were talking about multiple [things].”
“This -en at the end of the verb means that more than one person is doing the action.” “Because we used this conjunction, the verb got kicked to the end of the sentence. That’s why ‘I am tired, because I not well slept have.’ sounds so crazy translated to English, but Germans just understand it as ‘I am tired because I didn’t sleep well.'”
Keep explanations very brief and in not-too-technical language – seconds long so that they really just “pop up” – and move on.
Continue on, translating sentences as a whole class, as long as you like. Keep rewinding when you get weak translations, popping up interesting language features, marveling at the wonderfulness of your language, until you’re finished with the text, or time or waning interest dictate a change of activity.
What do I do now that we’ve finished?
These activities together function as a formative assessment, so you may move on to extension activities after working with a text in this way. This could be taking the text away and playing The Mysterious Person, administering a Quick Quiz to get more repetitions on new vocabulary and get easy grades into the gradebook, acting out the text, playing The Q&A game – whatever extends the learning.
You may also have your students pair share one thing they learned about how the L2 is written based on the pop ups that you provide. They could also write this down on a piece of scrap paper to turn in to you with the prompt, “What is one thing you can now teach an [L2] beginner about how [L2] is written based on the work we just did?”. You might even have them write down a sentence or phrase that they found particularly tricky, just to see what is still throwing them for the loop.
Pro Tips!
Make sure the class stays with you! High flyers want to charge through to the end of a text, but rewind the whole class to the beginning of sentences if they translate past your pointing. We want to give a chance to our students who process more slowly, and having time and space to hear their stronger peers giving correct answers can help boost their understanding. If the class is translating too quietly, remind them that them being quiet signals to you that they’re not understanding the text, so you want to be sure that is true and that they’re not just getting shy/tired.
Mark up the text! This can be adding translations and illustrations of new vocabulary to help students over stumbling blocks, or circling all instances of a particular language feature. These support meaning-making for our students.
Rewind after stumbling points! Sometimes we have to really battle through sentences because they contain new vocabulary, or the L2 diverges from the L1 greatly in how sentences are formed, and it can feel like a slog. Rewinding to the beginning of a tough sentence and speaking it through with confidence can help build feelings of competence through greater fluency.
Plan your pop-ups! I have struggled in the past with what to pop up, when. There’s so much happening in the language all the time if we use it in context! Now that I have to teach a dual-credit college course with specific grammar points listed on the syllabus, I will be planning to consistently pop up the grammar features that the textbook emphasizes while we’re in that unit of study in my class. To help myself out, I’m going to list them by class level at the back of my classroom, so I’m always looking at what I need to be popping up as a reminder to myself. If you are beholden to a grammatical syllabus but want to introduce language in context, make a plan for what you “need” to pop up and just focus on those pop-ups for a set period of time.
Try translating in L1 and L2 word order! German word order in particular is wild, wacky, and crazy. Translating German into English word by word reveals some big differences to my learners. Sometimes I switch it up and tell my students to make it sound like a normal English sentence, while running around my whiteboard to point at the various elements in their German places. This adds variety and emphasizes the differences between the languages in another way.
Differentiate your pop-ups! I learned from my SLAyyy colleague Bill that we can differentiate our pop-ups. Our slower-processing students can, after enough pop-ups, be asked to repeat the pop-up information with a prompt. “What does this -t at the end of the verb mean?” On the other hand, our high flyers can be given questions like “Why is it ‘Ich bin ins Kino gegangen.’ and not ‘Ich habe ins Kino gegangen.‘?” “Why is it [this] and not [that]?” can push students to notice the variety of forms that convey an idea based on person, gender, number, aspect, etc.
Try popping these techniques into other moments in class! You can ask students to chorally translate any time you have some text you’re working with in class, just to check for understanding or clarify any differences in Form. And pop-ups can come at any point in language use so that students learn to hear them as well as read them!
Don’t overdo it! We don’t want our students to think that “translating the language to [L1] fluently” = “what it means to be a proficient [L2] learner/speaker.” Use these techniques as one way to check comprehension and make Form-meaning connections. This is just a check for comprehension before we start extending our use of the language via other activities.
What if I want to learn more?
Keith Toda’s blog is a treasure trove of resources and activities, and his post on Choral Translation helps frame how Choral Translation fits into the grander scheme of how we want to work on the language with our students.
The Comprehensible Classroom has a great post here about what Pop-Up Grammar is and is not. They also have a post here that shows the many ways that we can read a text with students that are not necessarily Choral Translation!
Bryce Hedstrom has some great reading here about “Contrastive Grammar,” which is a great description for how we use differentiated comprehension checks to pop-up grammar features.
What do you think? Do you feel ready to use Choral Translation and Pop-Up Grammar? Comment below and send me any questions you might have!
I took notes from student reflections at the end of last school year, but never made it to typing out a blog to process my thinking, as I had intended. So, better late than never, here are some thoughts I am carrying in to the coming school year!
Unexpected Ways to Make Students Feel Cared For
When I solicit feedback from students, I usually ask students to signal their level of agreement with the statement “My teacher cares about me.” I want their German class to be a place where they feel safe to explore their identities and the world, so I try to pay close attention to which students are marking just “agree” or disagree with the statement. I’m shooting for “strongly agree” for all students. I want to make sure that there’s no barriers in our classroom to feeling like they can come along for the joyful ride of acquiring another language.
Sometimes, students use the language of care when providing feedback about class activities and routines at the end of the year. I was surprised at what a couple students interpreted and highlighted as care, and it’s making me reflect on how to provide more of these things throughout the coming year.
The first thing that made students feel cared for was when I ensured comprehension. Taking the extra time to add a gesture, define words in the L1, check whole class comprehension, provide examples, show or draw images, circle back around to check in with students whose demeanors showed struggle: these actions communicated more than just language input to students.
It makes me consider the inverse statement: students feel like we don’t care when we just plow through, even if they are not understanding. This really makes clear to me that we must do everything in our power to support and check comprehension, and continuously work on our skills of providing comprehended input. Without this, students won’t acquire anything, and they will come away thinking, “That person just didn’t care about me.”
Another surprise was a student mentioning feedback on their writing was a way they knew I cared about them. Writing feedback?! Don’t all students fear The Red Pen of Death? Not necessarily. I think because I provided options for what kinds of feedback students could receive (credit to Meredith White for this idea), they always got just what they asked for.
I know from research and working on the podcast that feedback on writing doesn’t produce the greatest ROI for student acquisition and output, but we can’t always do everything for our students in a mode of “SLA Purity” or whatever. Students interpret this feedback as care, and are showing genuine curiosity that I, as a relative language expert, can speak to.
I will just need to find a way to streamline my feedback process, and really pace myself so I’m not giving feedback on 8,000 compositions at once. This will require very clear project guidelines, and walking students through our Presentational Communication rubrics so they know where I’m coming from with my feedback. I will also have to make sure that students have to do something with the feedback (probably a rewrite and resubmission) so that it is worth all our while.
Whole Class Novel Working Arrangements
I have been ending my school year in levels 2 and 3/4 with whole class novel reading, and it has been a great way to relax out of the school year when my brain has been turned into sauerkraut. I follow the teacher’s guides, every year adding some new cultural exploration and activity embellishments, and it’s been a great choice for me.
The books are usually about 10 chapters long, and I like to give students a variety of options for how we read the books. I usually start with me reading chapters 1 and 2 aloud, then do a couple chapters each of partner reading, individual reading, and group reading with reading roles. This year, I also used the audiobook recordings that came with the teacher’s guides, and the voice acting and sound effects were a huge hit. We always end the book with me reading the final chapters aloud so we can all share the experience of getting to the end!
My assumption going into this year was that students preferred working in the small groups most of all because who doesn’t like sitting around chatting? It sometimes would be in English, but it was the end of the year, I was exhausted, and students were making steady progress through the books, so I let it slide.
It turns out that students did NOT prefer the group setup! They preferred me reading to the class, or using the audiobook. I’ll have to try to learn more as to why that is, but my guess would be that when I read aloud, I provide clarification and paraphrasing that increases comprehension and feelings of success (see above). My guess for the audiobook is that they loved the voice acting, because it was hilarious. Good to know for this coming year, where I’m going to even try to end level 1 with a novel! (gulp)
Gamifying Class Target Language Usage
To help with student blurting and English use, I started using Annemarie Chase’s Timer Trick to incentivize staying in the Target Language for long stretches. Basically, I set a timer, and for every 7 minutes that students didn’t say anything out of turn in English, the class got a point. Once the class had 5 points, we played a quick game all together. Score!
Students really enjoyed it, and it helped reset some…energetic classes towards the end of the year and throughout Testing Season. Favorite reward games were Hachi Pachi and ¿Dónde está la araña?, which we played with my adorable plastic octopus. Many students were Pop Up! haters, but that won’t stop me!!
The Two Minute Drill
I implemented the Two Minute Drill by Ben Tinsley with my 3/4 class, and one student shouted out that it helped them feel like other students were really interested in their lives with the questions they asked. I, too, felt like I learned a lot about what made many students tick, either through the questions they asked, or the answers they gave. And it was a joy to hear them all speaking to each other, laughing, and learning about each other’s lives!
I kinda fell off doing the routine towards the middle of the year, but I think I’ll reserve a day every week for the Two Minute Drill because it was very cool. And if they want more (more students interviewed per day, or more days of the week), then we can add more!
I would also love to summarize what we learn through the Drill in a Write and Discuss text, either by taking quick notes during the Drill and then using them to review with students, or just by asking for the most interesting/surprising things the class learned. I want to get more mileage out of the language, and highlight how important each individual is by purposefully making them the subjects of our texts. Maybe I’ll even expand the routine down into my level 2 class!
My Level 1 Students Wanted…Homework?
Are these children okay? Just kidding, kind of. But some students were requesting homework for German class, and I was a little stumped at the time. I don’t generally give homework as a philosophical choice, but I also know that getting students to engage with the Target Language and Target Cultures outside of school hours fulfills the Communities Standard and helps them become independent learners of the language.
When I was a Spanish teacher, I made a homework choice board that I was pretty proud of, so I could try to make something similar for German. Notebook homework, where students read and translate a text from our class to a home adult, could be another option. Real World Homework, a more open-ended option that probably needs some scaffolding to get students pointed in the right direction, has been a hit with my high schoolers.
I am still on the fence about assigning regular homework in my classes, but if I do, I will try to lean on self-grading listening and reading work to avoid having to police student use of online tech tools to create their output, and to avoid me having a stack of paperwork to deal with every week. I may lean more on my subscriptions to TextActivities and EdPuzzle to provide more reading and listening input to students, while sprinkling in some of the assignments I named above for some healthy variety and cultural exploration.
I am feeling cautiously optimistic about this school year – how about you? What mood and lessons learned are you bringing into the new year?
Last week, I attended the PEARLL Summer Institute lead by Rebecca Blouwolff. Rebecca is an absolute master teacher, so it was such a pleasure to learn from and with her.
I had originally planned on doing a post of takeaways for every day of the institute, but then I ended up taking a tumble during a morning run before Day 2 started and ended up in the emergency room. WOOPS. I’m totally fine – just scraped up – but I missed out on two days of learning, so here’s what I was thinking about coming out of day 1:
Setting goals for students = creating challenges for them, not to-do lists
This year, all three levels of German at my school will be offered as dual-enrollment classes for both high school and college credit. The college I have partnered with uses a textbook, which I have never done in my German teaching!
…and that textbook is quite, uh, traditional. I panicked a little bit when I saw the final exam, but then got my head on straight and am determined: I will teach any required vocabulary and grammar as contextualized as possible. This will require some thoughtful backwards planning, and some creativity when it comes to choosing contexts that bring all the isolated vocabulary lists from the book together into input and interactions that make sense.
Of course, the textbook has goals like “Ask and answer questions about someone’s hobbies” and “Describe the major geographical landmarks in a city” as facades to disguise the underlying strict grammar agenda, so my task this year will be to figure out: why? Why does a speaker of the language do these things? In what contexts?
A fellow participant framed the selection of Can Dos by saying that communicative goals “feel more like challenges to our students, versus just long to-do lists.” That is helping me engage my creativity: what problems are our students solving when we do these communicative acts? What will make them feel excited, creative, challenged?
I haven’t fully fleshed out my planning for each level with this lens yet – still hanging on to summer – but I love the idea of a creative “challenge.” As I get closer to the school year starting and have had time to meet with my first-ever student teacher (!), I’ll try to make a post outlining my planning mindset as I work through this challenge.
Dividing up vocab lists: prompt students to build their personalized vocabularies
Rebecca showed us some example unit vocabulary lists, and they were divided into three sections: 1) I need to know how to produce this in order to complete a task, 2) I need to be able to recognize this in order to complete a task, and 3) other language that might be interesting to know and use.
Section 1 (the MUSTs) contained mostly high-frequency vocabulary relating to a thematic unit, including some items referred to as “grammar-as-vocabulary”. That means providing not just an infinitive for verbs, but verbs conjugated to subjects, perhaps even including a common preposition that follows. Sometimes, it was entire phrases that just needed to be completed by an appropriate noun or adjective. Language learners acquire different conjugations more as vocabulary, rather than as “take-infinitive-chop-ending-add-new-ending” as traditionally taught, so this made good sense to me.
Section 2 (the recognition section) contained lower-frequency words and phrases that might help support interpretation of unit texts (including terms that would get students through authentic resources dense with unknown vocabulary). Interestingly, Rebecca also includes the “you-form” questions that undergird the unit theme: “What do you like to do in your free time?” “Which do you prefer?” “When do you…?” She’s not expecting students to produce these from their noggins spontaneously, but they will come to recognize them through scaffolded interactions throughout the unit.
Section 3 (interesting to know and use) is where students can really personalize their learning. I have tried variations on this before – including having a “My Dictionary” section on the back of any vocabulary sheets I give students in anticipation of texts we use in class – but nothing has really stuck. What made this click for me is the realization that students need strong lists of useful, high-frequency language about a topic (found mostly in section 1), but also training on how to expand and track their own personal vocabularies.
Students can learn personal vocabulary from their Free Choice Reading books, from texts explored in class that have words glossed or explained in/by context, by asking their teacher for a word, by looking words up themselves. I think having conversations about the ways we can pick up new vocabulary that’s meaningful to us, as well as compelling their need by asking good, interesting questions in class, will help students put booster rockets on their language acquisition AND their motivation. It feels good to know the words you want to know!
Match vocab list to unit Can-Do statements
This one hit me like OH! …woops. Rather than giving the long list of every possible term related to a topic, really narrow down vocabulary lists to mostly include high-frequency formulations, and make sure that each term is matched to one of the performance objectives of the unit. Ding!
Maybe if a term is only really related to an Interpretive Reading or Listening task, it can just go into the “recognition” section of the vocab list. High-frequency, adaptable terms (“I play…” “I live in (a)…” “I feel…”) can stay in the “MUST” section, and what follows can be sorted by how frequent it might be to your learning community. The 10,000 possible ingredients for a favorite meal? Ditch them, and pick higher-frequency terms to replace them. (So maybe not every possible type of meat, for instance, but just…”meat”!)
And if it doesn’t match a specific performance objective, but lives in the topical universe? DITCH IT. MAKE THE LISTS SHORTER. Long vocabulary lists do not make kids learn more words. Exposure to large amounts of comprehended input in different contexts makes kids learn more words! And this all needs to be contextualized within the framework of a given unit.
These are my developing thoughts for now. What do you think?
In writing my Teaching for Proficiency 101 post, I stated my goal is teaching for intercultural communicative competence, teaching so that students become proficient, thoughtful users of the language. That post ended up focusing mostly on aspects of instruction related to communicative competence and linguistic proficiency.
This post seeks to complement the last, and expand on what I find to be fundamental in language teaching with regards to guiding learners towards becoming thoughtful intercultural communicators.
If we want to explore interculturality and meet our national Cultures standard, we should have a working definition of what “culture” is. ACTFL uses the “3 Ps” model: Products, Practices, and Perspectives.
Products are tangible and intangible creations that emanate from the beliefs of a culture. These can include food, music, books, laws, homes, and so much more. Practices are how people in the culture interact with each other: how does one show respect, and to whom? What rites of passage exist in a culture? How do people show that they are listening in a conversation, or during a presentation?
Products and practices reveal underlying perspectives, how cultures make sense and meaning out of the world. Understanding perspectives, and being able to explore them empathetically, helps people become more thoughtful and respectful towards others they deem “different.”
Again, I have turned to ACTFL for a definition of intercultural communication. Through exploring Products and Practices at a variety of skill levels, learners become increasingly able to interact in empathetic and culturally sophisticated ways, with the aim of being able to serve as a mediator between and among differences in cultural Perspectives. This ultimately helps the world interact more peacefully and productively.
In putting the skills of intercultural communicative competence into a similar framework as the linguistic skills, we have a helpful trajectory that show us how we might push students to grow. Students have to start by being able to just identify and list Products and Practices in the Target Cultures, while also reflecting on how they think these Products and Practices reflect underlying cultural Perspectives. Then, they can make comparisons between (and among) the Target Cultures and the Home Cultures. This builds towards understanding and explaining diversity in Products and Practices, and being able to suspend judgment in evaluating them and the underlying Perspectives. Note that I have put “objectively” in quotation marks on the graphic above, because I do not believe that objectivity exists in the strictest sense. Each person brings their own experiences and biases to every situation, and will have to be cognizant of those in mediating differences in cultural perspectives.
I think that this sequence is not a fixed, step-by-step sequence for learners that just aligns to their linguistic proficiency: students can list Products and Practices, and then make some comparisons. Through more in-depth exploration, they might be able to begin explaining some diversity, even if they were exploring the topics linguistically at the Novice level. They might even be able to help others avoid cultural misunderstandings by acting as a mediator with limited linguistic skill in the Target Language! But that is the key: culture is so many things, so students need practice in applying their skills of interculturality to a variety of cultural Products and Practices. With an increase in knowledge about and experiences with the Target Cultures, students will perform more consistently at the higher levels of skill.
So if these are the skills of intercultural communicative competence that we want to teach to, what principles can guide our planning? (Because these skills only grow via thoughtful planning from us as instructors – not by chance!) Here is where my thinking is right now:
Build an Understanding of the Home Cultures
I have found that many students, especially white, US-born students, think that only other places “have culture.” They can’t quite see that every thing we do is culture, and need practice in identifying the aspects of culture that are all around them. This is where activities like Card Talk and Special Person Interviews can help reveal the cultures of our school community by making discussions of students’ preferences, opinions, and experiences the topic of discussion. There is so much diversity even within our own classrooms, and building awareness of the cultures in the room helps prepare students for making more thoughtful, nuanced comparisons.
I try to think aloud with students about things that are familiar to them to point out that the way things are indicates a lot about culture. I use questions like the following to make our US-American culture a little weird to them:
What do our hobbies say about us as a culture? Why do you think that?
What do you think it says about our US-American cultural values that our schools schedules are the way they are, instead of like German schools?
Why do you think these foods are very popular here and not as popular in Germany? Why are their foods popular to them and not here?
Why do the downtowns of their cities look like that? Why does the downtown of OUR city look like that?
At what points in history has the US censored artworks in a way similar to this art exhibit in 1930s Germany? What do you think was the aim at that time?
Students need to build the reflex not to just think “oh, they’re so different/weird,” but rather to think “they might also see some things we see as normal as different/weird…I wonder why they might think that way?”
Push Students to Be Descriptive Rather Than Evaluative
Learners sometimes get stuck when exploring culture because of a gut reaction they have to what they’re learning. We cannot accept “that’s weird” or “that’s gross” and also “they’re so much better than us [US-Americans]” without interrogating the “why” behind those statements.
If we hear statements like these, we just need to pause and ask, “Why?” “Why are you laughing?” “Why do you say that?” The thinking that follows reveals even more of the underlying cultural Perspectives of our students, which we can reflect back to them to help them see their own cultures as objects for study and comparison in our classes.
Provide Frequent, Repeated Exposure to Cultures
Students need A LOT of exposure to cultures, in the same way that they need A LOT of exposure to comprehensible language in context. We have to plan for culture to be everywhere in our curricula for them to have a fighting chance at being able to be intercultural mediators. My students have commented that as much as they love growing more proficient in their use of the language, they love exploring cultures, so building more exploration of Products AND Practices into our learning increases student motivation and investment into learning the language, too.
This can also mean seeing the same text more than once. One thing I learned from Alicia Dallman Shoemaker‘s TOY presentation is that in order for students to have “aha!” moments about their learning, they sometimes need to revisit texts/photos/media multiple times to give their brains time to digest all the new information they are taking in. Students might need to read a text more than once, or watch a video again on a different day, after having time to process and live some more, in order to get the most out of their cultural explorations. We can then ask how students’ thinking has changed over time to build the self-awareness and empathy necessary to become intercultural mediators.
Cultural “Texts” Can Be Many Different Things
To give students access to cultures, we can use a variety of media in our classes. Here are some ideas of things we can “read” as texts in our classes:
Photos, videos, infographics, songs, their lyrics, their music videos, children’s rhymes, games, books, posters, websites, TV shows, movies, blogs, maps, guest speakers, physical objects from the Target Cultures, postcards…
The possibilities are really endless, and all offer opportunities for learners to explore Products and Practices with our guidance to increase their understanding of the underlying Perspectives.
Provide Many Perspectives on Cultural Products and Practices, Including from Historically Marginalized Groups
To develop the ability to see the variety of ways Perspectives express themselves in Products and Practices, students need many different takes on the same topics. If we hear from one German speaker about What German Schools Are Like, we might believe that that is the authoritative One Answer To The Question, when really schools in any country are quite varied for a variety of reasons, for example. We have to be careful to paint a more nuanced picture of the Target Cultures by letting there be multiple (sometimes contradictory) takes on cultural phenomena.
My finding is that centering voices that have been historically marginalized can also helps us better see the cores of the cultures on whose margins those people live. I have personally learned a lot about how Germans conceptualize their national identities from Black and Muslim Germans, about how accessible German culture is from disabled Germans, about how Germans feel they “live diversity” from LGBTQ+ Germans. Consider adding voices from historically marginalized groups to every topic and unit to build a fuller picture of the Target Cultures, and increase empathy and understanding of those who are considered “different.”
Plan for Language to Explore Cultures through Own Voices
Any exploration of another culture is always filtered through the identities of the students doing the explorations, as well as that of the teacher selecting the materials and topics. To access the most authentic picture of another culture, we need to let members of those cultures speak in their Own Voices.
This necessitates building the linguistic capabilities to be able to explore authentic media from the Target Cultures. When we are planning for specific language functions in our curricula, as mentioned in the previous post, we can plan for one of those functions being the interpretation of authentic texts. Having pedagogical tasks that front load vocabulary and perhaps some cultural understandings build the scaffolding towards those functions.
The Fourth P: People!
Many who teach for proficiency acknowledge that language is too abstract and complex to teach explicitly, but we are also working in a model of culture that focuses on three abstract nouns: Products, Practices, and Perspectives. The way culture emerges is with people, their actions, and their use of language, rather than by stepping outside of it. This is much like the acquisition of a language, which happens with communication and use, rather than by observing a languages features from outside of it.
Behind all these Ps are People! Through the experiences of individuals, we can see culture and the 3 Ps in action, and also develop empathy for others who are different from us. A “different” culture is easy to write off as “strange” to the Novice eye, but it’s possible to find commonalities with any individual human, learn from their experiences, and see cultures through their lives. Individual lived experiences are more memorable anyways, versus just learning “cultural tidbits” as they are strewn randomly through textbooks and class “Culture Days.” If “adding more of the 3 Ps” to your curricula feels abstract and unattainable, try thinking of “adding more People” to your curricula instead.
That’s all for now on a high-level overview of teaching for intercultural communicative competence. What’s missing? What’s resonating? Let me know in a comment below!
I’ve been reflecting on what helps me feel focused and calm when it feels like the world is accelerating around me and my head is spinning. What I’ve found is that reminding myself of my fundamental beliefs helps me do the harder stuff better, and make more confident decisions for “what’s next” in my teaching life. (Typing this makes me realize that this also applies to my life outside of school, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.)
So, I’ve figured out that my overall goal is teaching for intercultural communicative competence, teaching so that students become proficient, thoughtful users of the language. How do we go about that?
Input is indispensable
Learners need loads of communicatively-embedded comprehensible input in the language before they can be expected to produce the language themselves. This means multiple exposures to useful, relevant language, and that we, as instructors, have verified comprehension in some way regularly throughout each lesson. Constant formative assessment via talking with learners, rather than at them, is how we achieve this.
The sources of that input is where proficiency-oriented language teachers can diverge. Do we use exclusively authentic resources from the Target Cultures (or what we might think of as found media) to give the broadest possible view into other cultures during our classes, or do we use exclusively resources oriented towards language learners to ensure maximum comprehension of the input, and the best chances at acquisition (or what we might think of as created media)? I, personally lean towards texts created for and with language learners to try to most efficiently use the limited time I have with students over the course of our language program. Authentic resources provide access to cultural perspectives, so they are also very present, but explored with guidance and scaffolding to get the most out of the language.
Interaction, too!
Accessing the linguistic system built via comprehended input builds communicative skill and fluency, and interaction with learners about their lives and the world builds interest and attention to input, furthering acquisition. We can provide interact to students as a whole class, in pairs, and in teacher-student conversations.
We need to be prepared, as instructors, for students to interact at their own levels. Knowing that communication is not just achieved via language, this might mean that students begin by communicating using gestures, nods, or movements, graduate to using words and phrases, and move on to sentences and more complexly structured discourse over time. We can adjust our expectations and demands of students again through formative assessment, gently guiding our learners towards more extensive language use.
We are teaching communication, not “The Language.”
Using the language to express and interpret meaning in different contexts for different purposes is both our goal for learners, and the means to achieve that goal. Knowledge of abstract grammatical principles does not necessarily contribute to “accurate” language usage, and is a less useful investment of our limited time with students than just using the language in ways that students understand to accomplish nonlinguistic goals.
If we wanted to teach our students about linguistics, we could teach them that. But if our goal is to teach students how to communicate, then we are going to practice by actually communicating. One doesn’t learn to ride a bike by reading a description of how the legs work in conjunction with our balancing skills to propel the bike forward: one learns by simply riding, maybe first with training wheels, but actually riding.
Goals: Language Functions
What follows from the last point is that our goals for our programs, units, and lessons are oriented towards language functions. These include understanding audio and texts (often conspicuously absent from the goals of more traditional programs), asking and answering questions about topics (not “conjugating regular verbs”), expressing opinions, thoughts, and experiences (not using “gustar” and “gern” correctly), narrating stories (not using the preterite, imperfect, and perfect tenses), and so on. If we want our students to be able to use these functions about various topics, we need to show them the language being used for those purposes, and use these functions in our classrooms. You might draw student attention to how grammatical forms contain meaning, while also keeping in mind that this won’t mean that students will reproduce forms correctly, or soon. The focus should be on expression and interpretation of meaning in a given context for a given purpose (the definition of communication provided by Bill Van Patten).
Many who use a Comprehension-Based Communicative Language Teaching (CCLT) approach have found that stories, both fiction and nonfiction, model a lot of these functions very naturally in context. Added to the fact that narrative helps any learning be “stickier,” you might reflect on the role that stories play in your curriculum and choose to insert more narratives into your teaching. These can be novels, short stories, personal stories shared in class by either the students or the teacher, narratives the class co-creates with the teacher – there are lots of possibilities here.
Understand the Proficiency Levels: Realistic Expectations
If we are going to teach for proficiency (vs. for grammatical accuracy), then we need to have concrete look-fors when it comes to students’ developing proficiency. What are the differences between Novice and Intermediate language? What about in the low-, mid- and high- sub-levels? Any SLAyyy listener will know that Bill and I are huge fans of the Avant ADVANCE training offered by the creators of the STAMP test, which helped both of us develop a more granular understanding of the proficiency levels and sub-levels.
Once you have that foundational understanding, learning how long it typically takes for students to achieve specific proficiency levels will help you set realistic expectations for student production and comprehension. We can relax the grammar perfectionists living inside us, and live in the knowledge that language proficiency just takes time. Let’s celebrate when students exceed our more realistic standards, and celebrate when they meet those standards, too!
Understand the Proficiency Levels: Use Performance Assessments and Grade Accordingly
Once you’ve set realistic expectations for where students will get in their language proficiency throughout their time with you, you start creating performance assessments based on the topics you explore in class that ask students to use the language at the appropriate level. Your students won’t necessarily be set up for success on exams about specific grammatical phenomena because that is not what they are learning. They are learning to communicate – so assess their ability to communicate: to use the functions described above.
The grades we assign to these assessments should hopefully reflect holistic assessments of students’ language proficiency (vs. their work habits or classroom behavior). I work off the idea that students meeting the proficiency target for a course should be at a solid, low A, with A+s for students who exceed the target, B for a sub-level below the standard, etc. You might listen to our episode about Standards-Based Grading to hear more considerations about grades and proficiency.
Comprehension Is A Goal
It bears repeating that students need lots of comprehensible input to acquire and then use a language, so our goals for our programs, units, and lessons also need to include lots and lots of comprehension of Target Language input. These goals often get left out of discussions that are focused on only what students are producing, but it will be impossible for our students to go out into the Target Cultures and engage with others if they don’t comprehend what is being communicated to them.
We also need to take our students beyond just literal comprehension and into interpretation, which is to say that we want our students to be able to read texts deeply. This means making inferences and predictions about the text, making hypotheses about cultural perspectives, and using any text as a springboard to learn more (nuanced) information about a topic. We have the opportunity to reinforce the vital reading skills our students need across their lives, but only if we can let go of the feeling of control we feel when teaching the tiny elements of grammatical accuracy. Let’s embrace the big possibilities available to us when we embrace and teach to the humanity of our students, and the humanity living in our Target Cultures.
That’s all for now on a high-level overview of teaching language for proficiency. What’s missing? What’s resonating? Let me know in a comment below!
Because we start school so late in Washington (typically after Labor Day), we ended our first semester in the second-to-last week of January. I’ve had some thoughts about the first semester simmering in the weeks since then, and I figured I’d finish typing them up here as part of my continuous reflection process.
More personalized questions!
There are many ways to provide communicatively-embedded comprehensible input to students, from storytelling to content-based instruction. I have adjusted my balance this year toward sharing even more pictures, videos, infographics, etc. from the German-speaking world and discussing them with students in comprehensible language. Somehow, I feel like I haven’t been using enough personalized questions to connect the content to my students.
Last year, I leaned heavily into Card Talk, which loans itself very well to learning more about the people in the room and building connections between them, and that helped me know so much about the people in my classes. I don’t feel that same level of connection this year, so I want to be more purposeful about connecting with my students and connecting them to the content, either by doing more Card Talk with students, or by planning more personalized questions related to the content I plan to teach about.
Move from just comprehension to language use
This somewhat relates to my previous reflection, which is that it seems a lot of my questioning has stayed lower-level (yes/no, this or that questions) or just comprehension checking (“What did I just say?” “Does _ mean this or that?”). I went to an excellent Garbanzo webinar last week about questioning, and was reaffirmed in my commitment to using questioning to advance language acquisition. It’s also making me consider more how I use questioning to advance discourse in my classes.
It is helpful to remember how new language feels SO new to our students – it’s all brand new combinations of sometimes unfamiliar sounds! Lingering on new language until it feels very confident, and then adding one detail at a time helps build out communication more solidly. Just using one question word, using processing questions to get repetitions on the new information, and only adding additional info after eliciting confident reactions to questions about all the previous info will be key to building more extended discourse, instead of just series of isolated simple sentences.
Chat Mats, the Reawakening
I see the value in having Chat Mats for students. They feel that the language is at their fingertips, and the supports help them get input because they are more or less just reading the language off the mat. But I’ve struggled with feeling like I’m using them like giant vocabulary lists, expecting students to acquire all the rich language after what feels like a “reasonable” amount of time, rather than acknowledging that they are supports for tasks and the language will take its time to get acquired.
My colleague Missy told our PLC that she gives each class a single chat mat, and lets them use them for an extended period, like a week or two at a time. She lets them chat with each other about the chat mat’s topic, and challenges them to see how long they can keep in the Target Language, how many juicy follow up questions they can ask in the language, and how much they can learn about their partners. Students naturally rise to those challenges, and increase in their ability to stay in the TL and build their confidence.
What’s even better – she gives the same mats to every level! Even upper level students need time to revisit “old” language, and feel the growth they’ve experienced since they first “learned” those linguistic skills. The conversations are more confident, richer, more exciting for them. I can see trying this more as a great way to recycle older language, and give students a marker on their path of language acquisition that helps make clear how much they have grown.
Gestures work great!
If we have told any class stories with targeted vocabulary, I have been very consistent this year with teaching gestures as part of establishing the meaning of the new phrases, as well as reviewing older gestures for other targeted vocab. Kids every year write about how much they appreciate gestures, and they are eating it up this year. The other day, a student forgot the next word in our class password, and I did the gesture, which helped unblock their brains and get the entire (correct) password out. Getting stuff into the body works so well!
Research backs this up, and ever since I have leaned more into TPR in my classes, I have seen lots of easy growth in my students’ vocabulary. For a video I’m teaching after we get back from our midwinter break, I have already planned to TPR some of the vocabulary before we even watch the video, and I know that students are going to feel so comfortable with that vocab by the time it comes up in the story of the video. More gestures! Across levels! More!
WTF is my curriculum
This…is a yearly reflection. I am not tied to a curriculum at my school, which is a blessing and a curse. I get to decide everything my students learn, and I also have to decide everything my students learn. As a result, after I “cover” the “expected stuff” in my first two levels (hobbies, family and friends, school, food, cities, travel, houses, etc.), it’s kind of the Wild West as to what we’re going to learn next.
I decided over the summer that my goal is for every themed unit to center a marginalized group in German-speaking society, and got excited about making this happen. There are so many possibilities for me to learn more, and to open my students’ eyes to the world as it truly is outside of our little suburban bubble. Our unit about housing can center accessibility, the “hobbies” unit can center Black and LGBTQ+ German speakers, “foods” can explore the diversity of food cultures across the German-speaking world and the influences of immigrant food cultures on the German-language food scenes, etc etc. The possibilities are endless and so interesting to me from a curriculum design standpoint. But! These units are still in the “wouldn’t that be nice?” phase of design. I just haven’t had the time to solidly plan them out, and that’s okay.
This year, I have been teaching a unit to my upper level class about art in the German-speaking world that builds up to learning about the “Ausstellung Entartete Kunst” (“Degenerate Art Exhibit”) that the Nazis put on in the 30s to ridicule Expressionists, Impressionists, Jewish artists, and others. It feels like a really powerful way to learn about censorship, othering, and the variety of -isms that are brewing to the surface in our society right now. I have had the idea to teach this unit for a long time, but it was only seeing Carrie Toth’s “Bajo la mesa” unit that finally gave me a structure and ideas of how to incorporate lots of rich language into our studies of visual art, which admittedly is not my personal forte. But having someone else’s work to bounce my ideas against has been very powerful, and I’m grateful for the inspiration it has provided.
The conclusion that I’m coming to is that it will all just take time. I can only make and find new resources for a couple units each year before my brain gets overloaded with building the plane while flying it, so I am trying to be content with the new that I create, as well as the less-than-perfect old that I sometimes have to rely on. That’s okay! I also do well when I have a model to look at and build off of. Carrie’s unit is necessarily different than mine – hers is based on a music video that I don’t have for German, and my ultimate end goal is some informational texts about a Nazi art exhibit – but accessing someone else’s thinking is great way to see what works for me, what doesn’t, and where I need to go to plan the next improvement. If I can only revamp a unit or two every year, that is fine, because it just has to be. Everything will be okay.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion are the point
The new government has been launching an all-out attack on marginalized groups across our country, and it has been horrifying to witness. It affirms to me that although ideally, every student would come away from my program with Intermediate-level proficiency or better in German, what I really want is for them to understand the joys and benefits of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and to fight for them in their own ways in their own lives.
They will work and live in a world of diverse backgrounds and experiences, and need to be able to meet diversity with warmth and curiosity in order to thrive.
They will discover unjust systems through their lives, and need tools of critical thought to push towards equity for all.
There are forces in the world that seek to dehumanize and eradicate historically marginalized identities in grabs for power, and the use of inclusive practices is not only most likely to achieve the goals that we set for our students, but also model for students how to live in a democracy where all are truly equal and free.
I wish for teachers to not self-censor, to show the world exactly as it is to our students, and prepare them to make a better future for all. It will not be easy, but it will be the right thing to do.
What are your reflections as we are moving through second semester? Let me know in a comment!
I was unable to attend ACTFL 2024, but lucky me, language teacher colleagues are nothing if not generous! After making the move over to Bluesky, I’ve been on the lookout for #langchat colleagues, and people I’ve met over the years on social media. I was able to reconnect with Dorie Conlon, whose work I really respect and admire, and saw this tweet about a session she attended by Cécile Lainé (another source of inspiration):
This post really struck me. Many who teach for proficiency acknowledge that language is too abstract and complex to teach explicitly, but we also work in a model of culture that focuses on three abstract nouns: Products, Practices, and Perspectives. The way culture emerges is with people, their actions, and their use of language, rather than by stepping outside of it. This is much like the acquisition of a language, which happens with communication and use, rather than by observing a languages features from outside of it.
Behind all these Ps are People! Through the experiences of individuals, we can see culture and the 3 Ps in action, and also develop empathy for others who are different from us. A “different” culture is easy to write off as “strange” to the Novice eye, but it’s possible to find commonalities with any individual human, learn from their experiences, and see cultures through their lives. Individual lived experiences are more memorable anyways, versus just learning “cultural tidbits” as they are strewn randomly through textbooks and class “Culture Days.”
I find it very important for my students to learn about historically marginalized communities to build their critical thinking and empathy. If students are only presented elements of culture and people that confirm their prior beliefs, which are often informed by cultural stereotypes, I have done nothing to build their ability to communicate competently with members of other cultures. The interactions of minoritized individuals with majority cultures reveal a fuller picture of those cultures, as well. I look to the ACTFL Intercultural Communication Benchmarks, which at the Superior level read as such for the “Investigate” strand:
These are obviously skills that we are not expecting immediately from Novice learners. But in order to get to consistent “suspension of judgment” and “sharing understanding of culture,” students need practice being confronted with difference and engaging with the thinking of others. This supports working towards the Social Justice Standards of Learning for Justice, across all the four major strands, and builds their capacity for empathy.
So, I’m inspired. Here are some individuals I have shared with my classes, starting with level 1, and the activities I use to help students think more critically and empathetically about culture. The biographies are easy to share with students in the earliest stages of their language learning, and are easy to “level up” for higher levels by drawing in information and media from other sources. I think it’s important to follow up with reflection activities that help think more deeply about the individuals presented, and how their identities might affect their interactions within the Target Cultures.
Even if you aren’t a German teacher, maybe you will find some value in my thinking and planning for these experiences with German speakers!
Student reactions to just seeing Conchita often quickly reveal their underlying assumptions and feelings towards the LGBTQ+ community. Students have sometimes been confused about the difference between a drag queen and a trans woman. Meeting Conchita, who presents both feminine and masculine personas, challenges students’ understandings of gender and sexuality.
I like to show Conchita’s Eurovision-winning performance to let her undeniable talent shine. Students are blown away by her artistry and the theatricality of the performance. The key question I ask students after getting to know Conchita and her talent is: “What do you think the reaction to Conchita was like?” If given time and space to think, students often speculate about potential backlash from groups connected to European countries competing in Eurovision, and what cultural factors might influence that backlash. Conchita’s Wikipedia page provides a lengthy catalogue of the vitriol that she faced, as well as her defiant and proud responses. All this, because she dares to put on a dress, put on some makeup, and sing.
I’m a huge Olympics fan, and was so excited to hear about a Black German Olympian who also studies at one my alma maters, UT-Austin! Even better – he has a YouTube channel where he makes content in German AND English! Introducing my students to Leo Neugebauer helps to challenge the notion that “German = white.” “What it means to be German” is a cultural discourse that has evolved drastically over the last few decades, and we get our first steps into that discourse by meeting Germans with identities that don’t match our preconceived notions.
After reading Leo’s biography, my classes and I defined the ten disciplines of the decathlon (which was a learning moment for me), and decided which we would ourselves ideally compete in. (I would probably do one of the running events!) Then, we watched his video “CULTURE SHOCK in America!” and discussed our reactions, which was a lot of fun. While I was absent one day, I had my students rewatch the video and write a 2+-sentence reflection on each of his culture shocks. I included the following questions:
Does what he says surprise you? Why?
Do you think there is truth to what he says?
What do you think it says about Germany and German culture that these things stood out to him?
For me, the last question is key to help students build their inquiry into “what German culture is.” After we analyze whether or not his “culture shocks” align with our own local cultures, we can form hypotheses about how the shocks reflect Leo’s own cultural expectations. This opens us to testing those hypotheses in future meetings with German cultures.
My Olympics obsession also introduced me to many German-speaking Paralympians, including swimming phenom Taliso Engel. I have been working towards including more disabled people in my teaching, and learning about Taliso Engel helped me learn so much more about the Paralympics, the various classifications involved for different disabilities, and the athleticism required to be a top-tier competitor.
After reading Taliso’s biography, I found a couple videos that detailed Taliso’s training and reasons for getting into swimming. The first video on the slideshow above also shows an approximation of what he can see, which helps provide some nuances to students’ understandings of vision impairments. Then, we can stand up and play “Either / Or,” showing our preferences by moving to the side of the room corresponding to the image of our preference. These “either/or” questions are asked to the Paralympians in the final video, which provides students another opportunity to get to know German athletes with disabilities. Connecting their own preferences to those of disabled athletes helps build empathy and understanding.
Bonus: Heiko Burak
I don’t have a biography written of hard-of-hearing German Sign Language teacher Heiko Burak, but I found his videos very clear and easy for students to understand. For Disability History and Awareness Month in October, I showed my students the video above to learn 10 essential German signs. This gave us a good opportunity to talk about the various sign languages around the world (Austria and Switzerland don’t use deutsche Gebärdensprache – they have different sign languages!), as well as compare to what we know about ASL. (I’m currently learning ASL, and have a few students who know some sign, as well.) Finally, students learned and practiced all 10 signs, which was really cool to see. Some have even continued to use the signs in conversation in class, well over a month later, which is even cooler. The German sign for “no” got a lot of love from my class, which will make sense if you watch the video.
But Ben, I don’t teach German!
Pech für dich. 🙂 But really, I encourage you to be on the lookout for people from your Target Cultures to humanize student learning and build empathy. Ask your teacher communities if they are familiar with inspirational and interesting members of the Target Cultures, and expand the lens of who gets included in your classes. Do you know speakers of your Target Language that are People of Color? Members of the LGBTQ+ community? Disabled? We need language classes that center the lives of the historically marginalized so that our students can treat others with dignity, and create a more peaceful coexistence.
How do you bring students to “the fourth P”? Comment below!
Rereading a text is a powerful way to increase students’ acquisition, so we have to get clever about giving students meaningful tasks that help them reengage with texts, giving their brains more chances to acquire different aspects of the language. In addition, any discussion of “grammar” or “language structures” needs to be contextualized and connected to the meaning that those structures convey. I love Horizontal Conjugation for hitting these two goals!
Why should you do it? Because Horizontal Conjugation gives an opportunity for another meaningful engagement with a text, while also contextualizing discussions what the “forms” of grammar actually mean. Once you have taught students how to do it, Horizontal Conjugation can go into your rotation for whenever you need a rereading activity that gets you off the “stage” for a while.
When do I use Horizontal Conjugation?
You will want to use Horizontal Conjugation with a text that students are very familiar with, and a narrative works best. These could be stories co-created out of an OWI character, or perhaps scripted stories. You could also conceivably do Horizontal Conjugation with information learned about students in class via Special Person Interviews, or Card Talk. In short, you need a text that is about a person or people, not a general informational text about a topic.
Student familiarity with the language is also key. I would use Horizontal Conjugation during a second or third “pass” at a text, so that the difficulty lies not in interpreting the text (as for a first time), but rather changing the perspective of the text.
How do I do it? – Logistics
Make sure students have a copy of the base text. You might project the text, but having a copy in hand is best. You can also provide a second sheet of paper onto which students can write the Horizontal Conjugation text, but they can always use the bottom half of the page, or the back of a page, if there is room.
How do I do it? – Procedure
Tell students that we will be rewriting the text we have been reading from a different perspective. (Do this in L1 or L2, depending on the level of your students.) Use this to review perspective, which will maybe win you love points from their ELA instructors. “What perspective is this text written from? Hint: it’s ___ person…” Once they have identified the perspective (1st person, 3rd person, etc.), provide lots of examples of that perspective in L1 and L2. “Ah, this is 3rd person perspective because we’re saying HE does this, HE does that. ER geht in die Schule und ER sieht seinen Deutschlehrer Karaoke singen.”
Tell students that we are going to pretend that we are now the character/real person in question, and will be retelling it from our own perspective. Instead of retelling events as if some 3rd person did them, we will be saying “I do this, I do that. I go to school and I see my German teacher singing karaoke.”
Model this for a few sentences for your student. I typically have them translate a line into the L1, ask what that same line would sound like in the other perspective (still in L1), and then ask what that would be in the L2. I then write it up on the board.
After completing a few lines of this together, I reread the new text written in the other perspective, and often have students translate it back one more time just to emphasize that it is in the new perspective. This is a natural time to point out the language features that convey the perspective (verb endings, pronouns, possessives, etc.).
Once students are getting the hang of it with my guidance, I set them to working on it independently, or with a partner.
Once most students have completed, I share how the text should look if fully converted to the other perspective, and usually have students trade their work with a partner for them to check it.
What do I do with it now that we’ve finished?
You have generated a new(ish) text with this activity, so you can do any literacy activities you like with it. That being said, it is also wise to not beat a text to death for fear of boring our students to death, so it’s also okay to move on once the activity is complete.
I sometimes take student copies of the new text for a completion grade, and/or have them put the newly created text into their binders as another text they can read as “review,” aka for more input.
Pro Tips!
Provide lots of modeling! This is a very “language class” activity that takes a second to get your head around – it’s not something we do often out in the world. Thinking aloud about how to change the perspective helps students do this thinking for themselves, which is actually getting them to think about what parts of the language convey the information about perspective. Maybe this will help them notice and acquire these features, or maybe it’s just a good strategy to satisfy any demands for you to “teach grammar”.
Provide a word bank! Students with a lot of language may be able to do this activity more independently without a word bank, but Novices can benefit from having correct forms nearby to help make the changes. This obviously is very helpful if you have stem-changing or otherwise irregular verbs and you want to give students the feeling of success on the first try.
Maybe you don’t do this for some languages! As I was typing this post, I was thinking about Japanese and Chinese, which don’t have subject-verb agreement. If you were “changing the perspective,” it might be just changing out pronouns, and that could feel silly. Horizontal Conjugation works really well to show how verb forms influence meaning, so if this is not an issue in your language…try a different rereading activity!
Retell story in the past tense! An alternative to changing perspective might be changing the tense. If a story is told in the present tense, it can be flipped to the past tense with a prompt like “Imagine this story happened yesterday. How might it sound then?”
Try out plurals! I have seen some teachers use a prompt like “Imagine that the main character has a twin, and they are inseparable!” This forces students to use 1st person plural forms.
Turn it into an opportunity to develop empathy! A story told about someone else puts some distance between the teller and the subject. Reworking something into a first person perspective might be an opportunity to place oneself in the shoes of another person. What are they thinking? What are they feeling? How might they be experiencing their story differently than I would? Why?
Starting this later is okay! The temptation to “teach about conjugation” has historical precedent in how languages are taught: level 1 is for “mastering” the present tense, level 2 is for the preterite/imperfect, etc. Students need lots of written and auditory input of different forms to acquire them, so they will have a more intuitive grasp of this concept the further along they are in developing their linguistic systems. I start Horizontal Conjugations with my level 2 students – and it’s been a great at-level task because they have the linguistic resources to start thinking metalinguistically!
Here is Elicia Cárdenas’ great post about how she thinks about grammar instruction in her classroom, and how she differentiates Horizontal Conjugation in her classroom.
