In the summer of 2022, I was lucky to attend a seminar put on by the Goethe Institut titled “Sprache, Landeskunde, und kulturelles Lernen” that explored the concept of integrative Landeskunde in language instruction. That is, exploring how to teach our students not only facts about our Target Cultures, but also skills of intercultural communicative competence and discourse about cultural phenomena – all through the Target Language. It was an absolute blast to take the course entirely in German with German teachers from four continents, and the ABC-Quiz stuck out to me as a fun way to get students thinking, moving, and engaging with cultural concepts.
Why should you do it? Because our dear kids need a bit more movement in their school day, even if it is just a little bit of standing up and walking around! Plus, they tend to get competitive about finding the “right” answers, which ups the engagement factor as they think about cultural Products, Practices, and Perspectives.
When do I use the ABC-Quiz?
The ABC-Quiz is primarily an input-oriented activity as students read and process questions about cultural phenomena in the Target Cultures, voting with their feet as to what they believe to be the correct answer, and it can be inserted into a unit just about anywhere – either to introduce a topic and relevant vocabulary, or to extend learning about a given topic.
If you use an ABC-Quiz early in a unit, you will definitely want to preview new vocab in some meaningful context, or build in that contextualization into the Quiz itself.
In this example slideshow that I can use very early in my German 1 course, new academic vocabulary is bolded, and contextualized given students’ knowledge about the world. Even if they maybe think that “Hauptstadt” means “largest city” at first, they quickly learn that it means “capital,” and can then use that knowledge immediately for the next prompt to guess / state Germany’s capital. The number ranges in the population and number of states questions also give clues as to what is being talked about before students are asked to guess facts about Germany, based first on their learning the new vocabulary in German as relates to the home country (in my case, the USA).
Otherwise, the vocabulary in this example is very limited to basically “is,” “has,” and then names of countries! With more language proficiency, students will obviously be able to read and contextualize more information and new vocabulary.
How do I do it? – Logistics
The main principle of this activity is that students are given a multiple choice question, and move to a designated part of the classroom to indicate what they believe to be the correct answer. You can simply use scrap paper, writing “A” “B” and “C” in large print on three separate sheets, and then lay those sheets across the front of your classroom to designate three areas. Perhaps you already have a “Four Corners” procedure with country names, cardinal directions, or some other indicators in your classroom that you can use in the same way.
You will also need to prepare either some slides, or, much more challengingly, an oral text with multiple choice questions about your Target Cultures. This can range from geographical facts, like in the example above, to questions about the Products and Practices of your Target Cultures. See below for more inspiration in this regard!
How do I do it? – Procedure
Explain to your students that you will be asking them questions to see what they already know about the Target Cultures (and maybe also their Home Cultures!).
Tell learners that they will answer the questions you ask by moving to what they believe to be the correct answer, and indicate the areas for A, B, and C (or whatever other system you use in your room).
Start with a question that could be fairly easy to answer, and model wondering aloud about any new vocabulary that might show up. Referring to the example above, maybe you say, with special emphasis on the italicized words, “[In the L2] The capital…of the United States is…Los Angeles…New York…or Washington DC.? Hmm…the capital. What does capital mean? I wonder…What do you think? Go to A, B, or C, and we’ll learn together!”
Reveal the answer to the question, and celebrate all students’ answers. Reread the complete sentence with the correct answer in it, and do a comprehension check on any new vocabulary (or maybe even the meaning of the whole sentence) by asking, for example, “[In L2] What does capital mean in English?” Celebrate the answers you get for that!
You can easily reinforce new vocabulary by asking follow up questions using the newly-learned word, indicating with a gesture when students can give a choral response (or if maybe they should just shout it out). “[In L2] Ah, so Washington, DC is the capital of the United States! Is [our city] the capital of [our state]? What is the capital of [our state]? What is the capital of France?” All along the way, restate the correct answers, using the new vocabulary, in complete sentences.
Continue on asking content questions, having students move, showing the correct answer, and extending the input with further questioning. If you want to make sure any new academic vocabulary really sticks, you might limit yourself to 3-5 new terms that you use in a variety of contexts throughout the activity.
What do I do with it now that we’ve finished?
Because you may be introducing new information to students through this activity, it is recommended that you follow up with some sort of review activity. Maybe you do a Write and Discuss with your students about what they learned, or just engage in some oral questioning.
In the example slideshow above, I provide students a gap-fill reading that reviews all the information students learned in a short paragraph that uses connecting words like “and” and “but.” It is simple enough for a Novice learner to understand, and all they have to provide in that example is place names and numbers! You could confirm correct answers as a class by reading the completed paragraph aloud, and then have students complete a Volleyball Translation in pairs. Gap fill paragraphs like this could easily have larger gaps or more complex clauses for students with higher proficiency, like “When entering a restaurant in Germany, it is polite to…” or “Something that is similar to my culture is that…”
This activity is a great way to discuss cultural Products and Practices, so written reflection or discussion about the underlying Perspectives is also a natural place to go after an activity like this. I like ACTFL’s reflection question that is included in the Intercultural Can Do reflections: “What new insights about yourself and others have you gained from thinking about this?”
Pro Tips!
Extend the learning! To drive up the amount of input and thinking in the activity, make a discussion out of every answer. Use new target vocabulary to ask personalized and knowledge questions, and share experiences with any cultural phenomena come up.
Follow up! A gap-fill text, multiple choice questions, whatever – just make sure that students have to recall the information they learned. It can get exciting to move around and try to “win” during activities like this, so it helps to have a paper-to-pencil component that confirms what was learned and what might need reinforcement.
Go beyond facts and products! For illustrative purposes, my examples above use geographic facts about Germany, but we could train our students’ Intercultural Communicative Competence even further by discussing social situations and phenomena that students may discover in the Target Cultures. (This would be the Practices P of the 3 Ps!) Let the image below provide some inspiration for possible topics for an ABC-Quiz:
What do you think? Do you have ideas for an ABC-Quiz you could do with your students? Comment below and send me any questions you might have!
One of the tricky bits of acquisition-drive language instruction is providing meaningful, contextualized repetitions of new language without simply repeating the same sentences over and over again, or beating new information to death with a battery of activities that sap the fun out of what was learned. The Mysterious Person in a game that always has my students at the edge of their seats, processing language to win against their classmates.
Why should you play? Because the Mysterious Person is a fun way to get in repetitions on new language and information, while also insuring that you and the class are building greater knowledge of each others’ lives.
When do I use the Mysterious Person?
The Mysterious Person is a great review game that you can start using after about the first or second week of class, and whenever you like thereafter. You need enough shared class experiences so that students know information about each other (or figures from the Target Culture, perhaps!), which is the material for the game.
How do I do it? – Logistics
This can be played with no prep, or minimal prep!
No prep: Literally, you’re just making up the prompts/descriptions on the spot and providing them orally. (If you Just Can’t, you could also write them on the white board or doc cam.) Rely either on your own memory of what the class has learned together, or a compiled Write and Discuss document, for inspiration.
Minimal prep: Type up some descriptions of students from a given class, which you can project for your students to see. (I use the “Fade In One Paragraph At A Time” transition to make sure we’re focused on one description at a time.) These are descriptions using known information (preferences, ambitions, physical descriptions, etc.) that slowly get more specific so as to point towards one student that everyone knows about.
How do I do it? – Procedure
Tell the class (probably in L2) that you are going to describe a Mysterious Person, who is someone from our very own class! If they know who the person is, they should raise their hand to give their guess.
Using known language and your skills for comprehensibility, describe someone from the class. I recommend starting with the most general/vague (“The mysterious person…is a girl…” “The mysterious person…is wearing glasses…”) and slowly getting more specific (“The mysterious person likes…to read…comic books…” “The mysterious person is a girl…who is wearing glasses…and the glasses…are black…”). This helps you get in a lot of language input, while also keeping students on their toes.
Describe the Mysterious Person as much as you care to, and then take guesses from the class – only from raised hands. If a student guesses wrong, celebrate them anyways, and then repeat the description! (I only allow each individual to guess once each “round.”)
If a student guesses correctly, celebrate! Then: repeat the description, using the student’s name. I usually confirm with the student that everything I said was correct. You might also spell the student’s name in the L2 on the board, just for fun.
After celebrating the guesser and the Mysterious Person, start describing a new Mysterious Person! Keep going until you run out of time, run out of known information to use as game material, or the class runs out of gas for playing the game.
What do I do with it now that we’ve finished?
This game is a great way to synthesize any new information you’ve learned about your students, and also retrieve old information from students’ memories! This leads nicely into an activity like Write and Discuss, where you co-create a written summary of the class conversation. (This can also serve you in the future as reminders to you as the instructor of what has been learned about the class. I have a horrifically bad memory, so I rely a lot on each class’ Write and Discuss document to have material for each Mysterious Person game.)
This activity can also be a nice sponge activity if you have a few awkward minutes, so maybe now that you’re finished – brrrrring! The period’s over and your kids played a fun review game.
Pro Tips!
Add rules to prevent wild guessing! Students sometimes get squirrelly and want to guess after the first syllable. One rule I have used is that if someone guesses correctly, their whole row/group gets some sort of prize (points, stickers, candy, etc.), but if someone guesses incorrectly, the whole row/group cannot answer for the rest of that round. This helps put the brakes on students guessing at random without listening to the information.
Don’t tolerate blurting! Blurting ruins the fun for everyone. If a student blurts an answer, you can 1) eliminate them from guessing for a round, 2) eliminate their row/group from guessing for a round, 3) make them write their answers on paper or a whiteboard, or 4) just end the game. Preempt this by modeling how to answer as part of the instructions, and cutting the game short if students aren’t ready to follow instructions.
Weave in physical descriptions! I have had a hard time working on physical descriptions in my lower level classes – I just never seem to incorporate them as a topic somehow – so The Mysterious Person is an easy way to weave in tall/short, hair and eye colors, glasses, clothing, etc.
Use famous people, perhaps from the Target Culture! This game is not only limited to the people in the classroom: you can also bring in figures from your school community, or people you have learned about from the Target Culture(s).
Learn more about your students! If you’re struggling to come up with material to play the game with, it may be time to learn more about your students through other strategies, like Card Talk, Special Person Interviews, or Small Talk.
What if I want to learn more?
I wasn’t able to find tons of resources related to The Mysterious Person game, but I did find this great video of a teacher playing the game with her middle school French class!
What do you think? Do you feel ready to play The Mysterious Person? Comment below and send me any questions you might have!
I tend to forget about Special Person Interviews for a while, and then when I start doing them again and kids are CLAMORING to be interviewed in front of the class in German, I’m like…what have I even been doing? They are easily adapted to align with curricular goals, interesting, and FUN.
Why should you do Special Person Interviews? There is no easier way to make your students the stars of your curriculum than by literally making them the “Estrella del día” / “Stern des Tages” / “Class Superstar” for an entire lesson! Students also get natural modeling of so much beautiful language, and, as Mike Peto says, we can effectively model the Interpersonal skills of thoughtful, engaged conversation for our learners. We need these skills perhaps now more than ever.
When do I use Special Person Interviews?
The Special Person Interview occupies the “Input” portion of your lesson, creating a common experience for your students as they engage in the interview of one of their classmates. It is highly recommended to follow up with some oral or written review of the information learned in the interview during the same period the interview is completed, and to do a Write and Discuss to summarize and review the information you learn about your Special Person!
As for when in the school year to do Special Person Interviews: I recommend doing them early in the school year, and regularly throughout the year thereafter. The Special Person Interview process establishes students’ lives as the focus of the curriculum, build community and connections between students, and build student skill in listening and responding during whole-class interactions.
How do I do it? – Logistics
The first step to conducting a Special Person Interview is…finding a Special Person! This could be any student, and maybe after a while, anyone from your school community. You definitely want to pick someone who shows some interest in being interviewed / being a star. An unwilling interviewee will likely give you very short, deflective answers that won’t be compelling to your class and won’t give you much language to work with as the instructor. I generally sweeten the deal by rolling out my Very Cool Swiveling Teacher Chair from behind my desk for the Special Person to sit on during the interview, and you might offer a cool prop or costume item if that’s your style. (And if all else fails…stickers…)
Ahead of the interview, you will also want to prepare about 5 interview questions. That doesn’t sound like very many, but between the follow-up questions that you end up asking to get more details, the reactions from the class, and your comprehension checks / review questions, you will likely end up with an entire period’s worth of conversation that you have to cut off for lack of time. If you have questions that you know that can be simpler to answer (“How old are you?” “Where do you live?” etc.), you can fill those in as makes sense, too, but 5 juicy questions are a safe bet.
You will likely get the most compelling answers if you allow your students to answer with a short response in the L1 (designate ahead of time “a phrase or single sentence” “2-3 words”) so that you can reframe the response in the L2 to control the flow of new language. Remind the class that though the class is interviewing the Special Person, the instructor is the one framing the interview and keeping it in the L2 so we can meet our two goals of 1) learning more about our classmates and 2) learning lots of L2. (Obviously, if the class has the proficiency and confidence to ask questions and follow ups…GO FOR IT! That is when it gets really fun for you and them.)
I display the questions on slides like the one shown below, with an option for the student to answer in a sentence in the language. This models different language forms very naturally for the class and gives high flyers a chance to try out some L2 for themselves. You can always prompt the interviewee to respond with the 1st person form once you have introduced any needed new language, which also helps recycle the information for the class as listeners.
This year’s most compelling answer: “moldy spinach.” Our Star had seen some really terrifying moldy spinach, but chosen not to eat it. (Phew.)
How do I do it? – Procedure
Introduce the Special Person Interview to the class. I always try to frame it as the class interviewing a local celebrity who is really cool…someone in our class! You can accept volunteers, skillfully select an outgoing student who is game for most things, ask a student ahead of time and then announce them, or pick randomly (with the option to decline). To avoid the awkwardness of uneven clapping volumes for more or less popular kids in the class, I always prompt the class for a “dignified golf clap” as they take their seat in the SPECIAL CHAIR or don the SPECIAL WIG.
Introduce the “Star of the Day” “Special Person” “German Class Superstar” or whatever you end up calling your interviewee. It usually goes something like this for me: “(in L2) This is Billybob! The class says, ‘Hello, Billybob!'” “HELLO, BILLYBOB!” “The class says, ‘Good day, Billybob!'” “GOOD DAY, BILLYBOB!” (something silly or ridiculous) (the class repeats that) AND THEN: I spell the interviewee’s name out loud and on the board in the L2, confirming with them once I am done.
Quietly instruct the interviewee in L1 to answer however they feel comfortable, but try to keep it to [your limit of L1] for the answer. Tell them you’ll have sentence starters on the screen if they want to try to respond in L2, and of course, you as the instructor will help!
Instruct the class that their job today is to learn information about their classmate’s life, react to what they learn in the L2, and answer any review questions you have for them!
Pose your first question with linguistic support. Repeat the question in L2 as the Special Person thinks, pointing at the supports you have on the board (translations, images, etc.), and maybe slip in a reminder to keep their response either in the TL or within [your limit of L1].
Depending on how the interviewee responds, either reframe their response in the TL, adding anything to the board that may help (the new terms plus translation/images/etc.), or just repeat what they said back to them (in the 2nd person). Then, report out to the class in the 3rd person, prompting for reactions if the info is especially interesting, or perhaps a “Me too!” if the class has commonalities with the interviewee. (Credit to Annemarie Chase for this!)
Ask natural follow up questions. Shelter the language in the follow up questions to known language or that which you can easily support, such as with Sweet 16 postings or question word posters. It is easy to introduce tons of new vocabulary words in a lesson with open-ended questions, but we have to be careful to not overload our students with mountains of new language. I try to set a limit for myself of how much new language I allow into an interview, such as just down one side of my whiteboard.
Bounce between interviewing the Special Person, and comparing / reviewing with the class. This helps with class engagement. I typically try to ask the class a similar question with a “yes/no” answer, or something that can be answered with a hand raise so as to not get lost in a side conversation. (“Class, are you also afraid of spinach?” “Billybob said he has a cat. Who has a cat? Who has a dog? Who has a hamster?” etc.) Once I’ve moved on beyond a question, I always try to go back and review what we’ve learned by asking review questions. (“What did Billybob say he was afraid of, again? Oh yeah, he’s afraid of moldy spinach. Did he eat the moldy spinach that he saw? No way!”)
Linger on each question for as long as there is interest and material. Again, it’s prudent to limit the amount of brand new language that is generated from an interview, so keep that in mind as you follow up with the student. The length of the interview and follow up questions will likely correlate to the proficiency of your students – teach to their eyes, and keep track of how confidently they are following along and responding.
Celebrate the Special Person at the end of the interview, perhaps bestowing upon them a sticker (kids love stickers at any age), or Knighthood in the Micronation of Fisherlandia. (Wait that might only work out in my specific classroom…)
What do I do with it now that we’ve finished?
Review review review! You likely just learned some cool new info about one of your students through the interview. Oral questioning (of the whole class or maybe individuals) can be a simple, but effective, follow up.
If you’ve done a couple interviews, you can play The Mysterious Person by describing someone from the class with info that the class has learned, and having students guess who is being described. This is a fun way to recycle language and also make sure that you are regularly making students’ lives the center of the curriculum: it’s hard to play Mysterious Person if you don’t keep learning new information about your students!
Always following up with a Write and Discuss helps turn the interview, which was mostly sound, into written language. In addition to modeling strong writing in the L2 and helping connect sound to form, this can become material for a class yearbook, a comic about the student’s life, or a display about the students in your class!
Rounding off the period with a Quick Quiz gives students one more recycling of the new language from the interview, gives you as the instructor formative assessment data on student comprehension, and gives the whole experience a “school-y” sheen.
Pro Tips!
Ask natural follow up questions! Through this process, we are modeling conversation skills in the L2, so if a follow up question comes to mind based on the student’s response, ask it! You’re doing this on behalf of your class, who may not yet have the L2 to ask the question but want to learn more!
“With whom?” and “Where?” are often great follow up questions! If you draw a blank when trying to pose follow up questions, these two power questions are often very interesting to pursue. Generally, leaning on question word posters will give you the inspiration you need for a follow up question.
Go slow! If we want to model being a thoughtful conversation partner, it is natural to react, repeat, and rephrase the things we hear about. If you need to stall to think of a good next question, just repeat what you just learned. That is much better than rushing through to fill the silence and feeling frantic.
Switch up the questions! Mike Peto recommends coming up with a new set of 5 questions after using them for about a week, and Annemarie Chase builds up from having her first interviewee answer just about 5 questions, to a slideshow of almost 20 questions. Maybe not all 20 questions get asked, but the idea is to add variety and build on students’ growing proficiency.
Switch up who gets interviewed! Why not bring in a person (whether or not they speak the L2) from the community to be a Special Person? This could include L2 speakers from your community, your administrators, or L2-speaking friends and colleagues from across the world!
Switch up who does the interviewing! I sometimes ask for volunteers to read the questions off the board, and then I (the instructor) reframe and ask the follow up questions. Students with more language might be able to do some follow up questioning of their own!
Orient your questions towards the unit you’re teaching! If you have a pacing calendar to keep up with, or certain themes/vocab that you need to hit every year, use the Special Person interviews to introduce, deepen, or reinforce those themes. Here were some questions from a “Food Unit” that were super engaging for one of my German classes and helped reinforce tons of relevant vocabulary: – What did you eat this morning for breakfast? – What can you cook? – What is the name of your favorite restaurant and what do you order there? – What food do you personally find gross? – What is a food that you could eat every day?
…or don’t! Maybe your goal is not “hitting this specific vocab,” but rather, “learning more information about my class.” That is a very worthy goal – pick questions that you think would be fun and interesting for your students!
Cécile Lainé created this post as an FAQ document for Special Person interviews, and has potential questions aligned to ACTFL proficiency levels, graphic organizers if the instructor wants, and a helpful list of ways one might follow up on the interview process.
Warm Ups (Do Nows / Bell Ringers / Entrance Tasks / etc.) inspire mixed feelings, according to my conversations with other educators. Some don’t want to deal with the paperwork of having students do that writing every day (and are unsure how much follow up / checking of the warm up sheets to do), or want to give students a chance to breathe a bit between classes before jumping into academic content. Others value the structure it provides to the beginning of class and appreciate the time it gives the teacher to breathe before jumping into academic content. (Jon Cowart lays out his arguments here for how having a Do Now procedure helps with strong classroom management.)
I appreciate the time it gives me as the teacher to take care of administrative tasks: taking attendance in a timely manner, signing stuff for students going on field trips, checking in with individuals. I also use my very simple warm up sheet as a note catcher for new vocabulary, grammar pop ups, and a place to write down the weekly password into our class. Warm Ups also remind me to spiral and retrieve older content in a more structured way instead of always forging forward. I try to make mine mostly input-focused, but scaffolded output is also possible!
Here was my Warm Up slide from the day I wrote this post!
Here are the formats I generally use for Warm Ups – I hope they serve you!
L2 -> L1 Translation
This is a go-to for me: take sentences from a recent story, conversation, using recent vocab, whatever and have students translate them to English. This helps review previous content, see the written form of the language, and review any grammatical differences between the languages.
L1 -> L2 Translation
I use this one a little more sparingly, and only after students have had lots of input on any given structures. This can help students build confidence in their writing skills in the L2 if they see they can put sentences together.
Fill in the Blanks with New Vocab
Create sentences that are missing new vocabulary terms to review new terms and build sense of how they fit into new sentences.
Sentence Frames
I have seen Steve Smith call this “Start the Sentence” or “Finish the Sentence.” Give students a subject and a verb, and have them finish the sentence as makes sense to them. (“I play…” “I am…” “I have…” “I was…”) AND/OR give them a detail to incorporate into an original sentence. “on the weekend” “with my friends” “German and English”
Question and Answer
Just ask an interesting question! I sometimes provide a sentence starter to get students going, or I just leave the students to respond at their own proficiency level. (Words, phrases, sentences, etc.)
Matching
This can obviously be done with terms and their definitions in the L1, or terms and pictures, but you can also do this with sentence beginnings and endings. This helps increase the amount of input and builds reading skills.
Reorder Sentences
Also sometimes called a discourse scramble, having students put events in a logical sequence (based on common sense, something discussed in class, or their predictions) can be another great way to get input and build literacy.
Imposter Reading
Sometimes this is done with vocabulary terms (“Find the odd one out: corn – carrots – broccoli – pineapple”), but it could just as easily be done with entire sentences. For instance, if you’ve just done a Map Talk, having sentences about the area studied that are plausible, but one describes a different place.
True / False or Multiple Choice
These are good at giving sentence level input, and you could really target whatever language you like with this. You could also give an entire paragraph describing someone, for instance, and then have students choose from options of what that person might do in a given scenario.
Always / Sometimes / Never
Provide students with the words in your language for “always,” “sometimes,” and “never,” and then insert them into sentences where they would naturally fall in the language. Students then decide for themselves which is true for the prompt. For example “I (always / sometimes / never) am bored in English class.” “I (always / sometimes / never) sleep in my math class.” “This character (always / sometimes / never) does the right thing.”
Find the Cognates
I use this early on in my level 1 classes to build student awareness of cognates: project a reading that is likely far above their level, but which contains cognates. Have students list as many as they can, defining them in the L1. (Works less well for some languages, of course.)
Find the Error(s)
Write out some sentences with errors in them, and tell students how many they need to find and correct (or don’t tell them how many!). Use this to point out any tricky grammatical or spelling stuff.
Mysterious Person
Describe a person in the L2, and have students guess who the person is. It could be a person in the class, in your school community, or from popular culture.
Retrieval Grids
Just learned about this one from Steve Smith’s blog – give students a list of sentence elements (verbs conjugated to subjects, objects, added details) and have them create sentences with them. The task could be to create as many sentences as possible, or to make sentences that are purposefully outrageous. When checking, have students read their sentences aloud, and the class could translate them.
Guess What I Did Last Weekend
In preparing this blog post, I keep getting great ideas from Steve Smith: project a chat mat of weekend chat ideas, and have students pose questions in formal language about what you did over the weekend. They pre-write the questions, and then you can answer yes/no or with full sentences + details.
What’s the Question?
Display an answer for a question, and have students come up with as many possible questions to elicit that answer as they can. Even more fun: have the answer be short and slightly ambiguous: “No, not right now.” “I can’t do that since the accident.” Or: focus on specific question words. “By car.” “Yesterday evening, actually!”
How do you start your class? Let me know if you have some more great warm ups below!
One of the things we are asked to do as teachers is provide feedback to students to help move their learning forward. It appears on any rubric for evaluation, and is a natural and necessary part of the teaching and learning process.
Best practice in teaching dictates that we set a clear goal for our learners to begin the feedback cycle. Then, we describe to the learner both where they are relative to that goal, as well as what the next steps for that learner are to meet or go beyond the original goal.
Often, we find ourselves giving lots of comments on student work, and then watch that marked-up work end up in the garbage after a cursory glance at the grade. So, to complete the feedback process, we have to create a need for students to use the feedback as part of their learning. The cycle begins again after students produce a new product or draft using the feedback given.
Here’s the thing…
These processes and practices have been researched and developed as relates to the explicit teaching and learning of facts and processes. Think skills like describing the functionality of a cell, crafting a historical analysis, or modeling a real-world situation using mathematical notation. If students “miss” something or make an “error,” the teacher can show students areas to consciously focus on to improve.
With language acquisition, we can say that there are no “errors,” but rather “developmental forms.” (I take this term from the writings of Bill Van Patten.) A learner’s linguistic system develops in an ordered way in response to basically one thing: comprehended input. Any of the “developmental forms” we hear in a learner’s production along the way are just indicators of where they are in their development, and this development is to be honored and celebrated.
So…the answer for what feedback is needed to develop learners’ linguistic systems: more input! Any explicit feedback about things like verb endings, adjective agreement, etc. will not necessarily make its way into the learner’s linguistic system, because language (in its abstraction, complexity, and implicit nature) does not reside in the realm of consciously learned facts and skills. Indeed, studies on explicit error correction show no lasting benefits for students’ accuracy so…let’s ditch it!
Our challenge, then…
…is to find ways to keep our learners calm and focused on input in a school system that shows great value in always being correct, getting things perfectly on the first try, and ranking systems like grades. To that end, teachers who have moved away from traditional language teaching must make clear to students what acquisition is going to look and feel like, that it’s okay to make errors in efforts to communicate, that progression is going to be messy and seem nonlinear, and that it all just takes time. We as teachers cannot be too explicit about these values – otherwise, students will have no reason to believe that this class is unlike any other class in school, when really, I think it should be. Language is special and different from content area courses.
I also know that there are the linguistics kids out there (bashfully raises hand because I was/am one of those) who want to know more about “proper” L2. It never hurts to throw them a bone with grammar pop-ups during readings once meaning has been thoroughly established! Meaning has to come first, so then we can draw connections between the forms and the meanings they create.
My experience has also shown me that it’s not until usually the third year (or even later!) that many students start to take an interest in how the language works at that grammar-y level, so I’m giving myself permission to hold off on too much grammar-y stuff until that interest bubbles up after lots and lots of input. Again, they need lots and lots of meaningful experiences with the language to contextualize any grammatical musings so, for now (and especially in this age of limited input because of all-virtual teaching!), I’m just going to focus on meaningful classroom interactions.
What about marking up student output?
Some kids might want it – most won’t know what to do with it. I have borrowed Meredith White’s idea of giving an option on any assignment to get corrective feedback on output, if students want it. I usually focus on one or two big ideas that students can focus on, and try to explain “fixes” in non-grammar-y terms that spotlight how the grammar contributes to meaning. (“Oh, this -o at the end of the verb tells us that we’re talking about ourselves, so if you’re talking about yourself, double check that it has that -o!”) Less is more, in this case – no one wants an assignment back that has been given the Red Pen of Death. 🙂
But really – the answer is more input! What systems or tricks do you have in your tool kit to focus mostly on providing great communicative input, while also satisfying the need students sometimes has for your class to look “like school”? Let me know in the comments!
Online learning, for me, has been about simplifying and streamlining my planning processes to yield maximum results without sending me into internet search spirals that last hours and generate maybe one slight adjustment to what I was already going to do in the first place. (It has not, however, cured me of my tendency to write giant compound sentences like the previous one. #BAinGerman)
I have been feeling pretty successful in providing high-quality, personalized CI, given the circumstances. But I had been missing those little bits of memorized language that I was using as “Passwords” (a la Bryce Hedstrom) to get into my classroom – how can I get students those helpful phrases in this online way? Enter The Question of the Week!
Why should you use it? Because often times, students enter language courses with expectations of what they should be learning, and how that learning should look. We can definitely through them a bone with these phrases, which are very useful and help us ensure that they have natural, powerful language for use right away!
When do I use the Question of the Week?
I use the Question of the Week outside of my normal lesson cycle, usually during the “Warm Up” or “Do Now” portion of the lesson, before we really get going where we’re headed that day. It has been a nice ritual for my first lesson of the week with each class because it is expected, and it makes it easy for me to remember to plan it ahead of time!
How do I do it? – Logistics
When thinking of potential Questions of the Week, I have been thinking about phrases that might be expected by the student, given the class or unit content, or are just difficult to weave into stories or discussions. For example, it’s helpful for students to know how to say “My name is…” but awkward to ask it of them if…Zoom just tells me their name on the screen at all times. (These are called “Display Questions” in pedagogical literature – questions to which we either already know the answer or for which the answer is apparent to all and thus for which there is no communicative purpose – they are only for “language practice.” “What color is my shirt?” is not communicative if all students can see it.)
Here are some examples from the first units of my current courses to help clarify even more:
Level 1: What is your name? Where are you from? Where do you live? How old are you? What languages do you speak?
Level 2: What is your favorite food? What is your favorite drink? What do you think about that? (or, “What’s your opinion?” after I make some statement) What do you like to cook?
Level 3: How do you feel? (reflexive in both Spanish and German) What are you interested in? (also reflexive in German!) What does that remind you of? What is important to you?
How do I do it? – Procedure
I introduce each Question of the Week during the first class meeting of the week. I have students note down both the question, and the sentence frame that they can use to respond to it! For example, they would note: “What is your name?” –> “My name is…” in L2, as well as what it means in L1.
Then, I have my class answer in the chat all at once (which I have turned so that they can only chat with me), and I repeat and comment on their answers. “Oh, Soandso is from California? I am also from California! Where are you from specifically, Soandso?” etc etc.
After I get all these initial answers, I move on with my lesson. BUT ALSO: throughout my lesson, I randomly ask the question to my class to make sure they are there and engaged! This helps both reinforce that memorized language, as well as help me make sure that cameras aren’t just off because students are off secretly recording Tik Tok dance videos or something during class.
After we have built a repertoire of these questions, I sometimes cycle through a couple and have students respond to all of them in the chat. Great spaced practice – especially if you ask “Level 1” questions in level 2 or 3!
What do I do with it now that we’ve finished learning it?
Use these questions all the time! I have built the Questions of the Week into stories I’ve told with class, just to build out what we know about characters and setting. Variations on the questions and statements have also appeared in readings I have given my students to reinforce the different forms (person, tense, etc.)
My level 1s have talked a lot this year about “wanting practice speaking,” which we know can be very pleasurable even if it doesn’t necessarily lead directly to language acquisition itself. So I am creating an assignment where students introduce themselves by answering all the Questions of the Week. Because they have practiced and heard these questions and their responses over and over again over the weeks of class we have had together, this will be a slam dunk-easy assignment for students to just speak their memorized answer and get comfortable with the new language in their own voices.
Truly though, if you pick a meaty question (“What is your favorite movie?” “What do you do in your free time?”), you could make the question your entire lesson. Once you start a discussion, you can just focus on a couple answers, write up a summary of the discussion with Write and Discuss, and have spent a good long while getting to know your students and the way their minds work.
Pro Tips!
Pick useful questions and sentence frames! What are some basic sentence frames that allow students to describe, express an opinion, show their emotions? With an eye to useful functions, we can give our students a strong and flexible set of conversational moves that they can apply across their language learning experience. I tend to forget to build some of these phrases into my class stories and experiences, so planning like this ensures that I get the students the useful stuff they need.
Recycle them! Use them over and over as attention getters, in new contexts, make them really stick.
What if I want to learn more?
Bryce Hedstrom’s post about his passwords (which students have to say before entering the classroom) can be a great source of inspiration for ideas of what sorts of things you can build in to your Question of the Week repertoire. Check out his posts about his higher levels, too, to see how the idea scales.
What do you think? Do you feel ready to use the Question of the Week? Comment below and send me any questions you might have!
This post will assume familiarity with the Card Talk strategy. If you haven’t heard of it or done it before, check out my post here about it and then come on back for some thoughts about how to bring it online!
As we move into a school year where many of us are fully online (and many are doing some sort of wonky not-normal something), I have been thinking about high-powered strategies and how to best bring them into the online environment. At the same time, I have talked to so many other teachers who are falling into the spiral of internet discovery that leaves them with too many ideas and not enough confident planning. It reminds me to be clear about what are the most important principles for my teaching – access to high-quality input, personalized discussions about relevant content, frequent chances to read on-level texts, and getting feedback on all of the above – and stick to making those things happen, over and over again.
I have always loved Card Talk for a couple big reasons. For one thing, it is a very flexible strategy. You can give a prompt for any sort of topic/theme, and boom! You have generated content for possibly weeks. For instance, this year level 1’s prompt is the typical beginning-of-level-one “Show a picture of an activity you like to do (bonus: put a picture of you doing that activity!)” Level 2, starting a unit about food? “Show a picture of a food that has meaning to you and/or your family, and another picture of a food you absolutely hate.” Level 3, beginning the year with a unit on art? “Show a picture of an artwork you listen to/view over and over again, and another picture of an artwork that really inspires you.”
The other big reason I love it is because it lends itself so nicely to community building. It does this by beginning conversations around individuals that enable us to draw connections between the members of our classes. This has been helpful to remind us all that behind the screens are real people who share some of the same interests as you – which we will be able to capitalize on once we’re back together in the beautiful future!
Adaptations for Virtual Learning
For synchronous learning: I shared a blank template (like this one you see here) with my entire class, and created an “assignment” on our Learning Management System (LMS) to fill in their slide, and then tell me which slide number they had claimed.
To prepare for class, I scrolled through and found two slides with similar-seeming interests (maybe both are related to sports, or music, or both students do gymnastics!). I copied these into my daily slideshow, and maybe noted some high-frequency or interesting vocabulary that I would need to have a conversation with my students about that interest. (I keep note paper in front of me while teaching asynchronously to keep my thoughts organized.) With some slides, I also had to edit them down a bit, because some students took the directive of “post a picture of AN activity you like” to fill the entire slide with every video game they had ever played ever. I wanted to keep the discussion focused, so I cut it down to about 2 or 3 pictures for each student (and explained that I had done so during class).
During class, I did a big drum roll, and then showed the students’ slides. While doing the activity, instead of sharing the slide fully presented, I instead showed the slide in the “edit” mode, as we would see it when we are working on it. That makes it easy to use the “presenter notes” at the bottom of the slide as a sort of whiteboard to introduce new vocabulary in big font.
With my level 1 students, because they had posted a picture of themselves on the slides, I used that as an opportunity to begin physical descriptions like, “Ah, Soandso has brown, wavy hair. Nice! I’m bald, I don’t have hair. (fake cries)”
Then, I moved into the discussion about that student’s interest(s). The power questions that tend to generate lots of good discussion are where a student does the given activity, as well as with whom. That usually provides enough fodder to stick on the slide for a couple minutes, learning more about the student’s preferences.
With any activity focused on just one kid, it is important to strike a balance between talking to just that kid and panning out to address the whole class. The questions directly to the kid tend to generate most of the content, whereas the questions to the class (“hey, translate what we just said quickly in the chat,” “Do you do this, too?” “Which of these two alternatives is better?”) keep the rest of the class engaged.
After discussing one slide for a while, I moved to the next, and drew connections between the two students. I rounded out the period with some Write and Discuss, Translation of the Class Text, and a Quick Quiz.
For asynchronous learning: I have not done this asynchronously, but I could imagine altering the template for the activity to generate the information I would need to do a presentation without the student there. In the “presenter notes” section, you could include “wh- questions” (who, what, when, where, why) that the student has to fill out in addition to posting their picture response to the prompt. This gives you as the teacher more information to work with as you perhaps create a video recording (I use Screencastify!) of you describing the student’s response with all the information you have, also comparing it to yourself! To check for understanding, you could have students write a short summary in their L1, or do a 4-question true/false quiz in the L2 after watching the video.
In the beautiful future…
I have kind of appreciated having the “cards” online. I didn’t have to spend money on card stock (HELLO) and didn’t feel bad about environmental waste. Perhaps I will make “creating the card” a digital assignment for the future to reduce waste and make it easier for me to see them all at once and plan. Hooray positives!
I also found myself getting frustrated that we were “only” getting through 1 or 2 cards in a long period, but that is also totally okay. Less is more with online learning! Better to feel very solid about even one card versus just hitting students with tons of new info and words about their classmates.
Have you done Card Talk online? How did it go? Leave your tips and tricks below!
If you are in the CI Blogosphere or in any of the numerous fabulous Facebook groups dedicated to discussing Teaching with CI (TCI), you may have heard of an activity called a One Word Image, or OWI. (Another TLA for you!) (TLA = Three Letter Acronym) (Buh dum tss) You may have seen teachers raving about how fun they can be, or the wacky images their students create. But what even IS this activity, whose creation is attributed to Ben Slavic? Let’s explore!
Why should you do it? Because our students are wonderfully creative, and it sometimes seems extremely rare that they get to explore that creativity in the current pressurized school environment. Building a character together as a class can be a fun outlet for them (and you!), in addition to accomplishing your Secret Language Teacher Goals. Aka – they get a lot of language input out of it! Not to mention, this character could become a class icon who goes on many adventures, or at the very least lives on in your classroom as a symbol of cooperation and fun.
When do I use an OWI?
The Create phase is a session of Guided Oral Input.
An OWI belongs in the “Create” category of activities in the Star Sequence, or what we might also call the “Guided Oral Input” part of a lesson. This is an experience that generates language and common experience in the classroom, which become the basis for the literacy work of the other star “points.”
A One Word Image is an inanimate object or animal that your class customizes and anthropomorphizes through your questioning and the collective use of imagination. The image gets drawn up (more on that below) so that you can revisit it later and use it for more literacy!
As for when during the school year to create an OWI with your class – it can be whenever! Many teachers use this strategy early on as a bridge to whole class, co-constructed storytelling, but it can pop up whenever in the year if you want to inject some fun and energy into the proceedings. Plus, it is easy to angle an OWI towards whatever unit you’re in. School unit? The image has to be a school supply! Food unit? Food with a face on it is hilarious! House unit? One of my most successful OWIs was a Roomba! (By the way, the German word for “vacuum cleaner” is “Staubsauger” – literally, dust sucker. Ding!)
How do I do it? – Logistics
Before you get started with anything, you’ll need to set up a way to get the image drawn for you! Most teachers find it useful to hire two student artists to draw the image as you and the class build it. This allows you to use the image later as an anchor for further discussion and literacy activities. Elementary teachers sometimes draw the images themselves to make it easier to see and more accurate.
Tina Hargaden once recommended announcing that you need to hire someone who is very good at drawing, so everyone needs to point at someone who is very good at drawing on three! One, two, three! A lot of the time there are 1-3 artists in a class that just rock and everyone knows it. You can use positive peer pressure, or just asking the student to get them on board. They then will need an assistant to help them out, so I take volunteers for that part and let the primary artist choose someone with whom they are likely to work well.
I set my students up at an easel with a giant piece of butcher paper, some chart paper markers, and some colored pencils. (You’ll also want for them to have a pencil sharpener and maybe a ruler, just in case.) My instructions to the the artist duo are as follows: 1. Draw exactly what I say (not what the class says…it’s easy to get distracted), and the Assistant has to follow Artist 1’s direction and vision 2. Take up the whole piece of paper so that the image is easy to see 3. It should be more cartoony than realistic – like a logo! 4. Do the outline in marker, and then color in with the pencils 5. Do not talk at more than a whisper so you can hear me and we don’t get distracted 6. Work quickly! They will have essentially 20 minutes to make this happen, in most cases
Many teachers also choose to hire a Professor #2 in this moment. This student will make the final call on details if there is a huge disagreement in the class. It is best to choose a student who may be quiet or not quite fully integrated into a group in the class, as this gives them a moment to be an important part of the classroom community without being overshadowed by the more…uh…active participants in your room. When there is a knockdown, drag-out fight about whether the Roomba is blue or red, Professor #2 makes the call and it is final. Instruct the students to respect the decision and move on.
How do I do it? – Procedure
The first time I do it, I say in L1 that we are going to create a character as a class using the power of our imaginations. We are going to create something that doesn’t exist already – so no rehashing of a famous character or person. It could be any sort of object – a car, a food, a piece of clothing – just not a person, or a character that already exists!
Then I start taking suggestions. Don’t bother translating to the L2 at this point – you’re going to get lots of excited suggestions. I take raised hands, and if students say anything that causes The Teenage Giggles (something inappropriate or that could be construed as such), I just say, “No,” and give a lingering glance to the student who suggested it.
A lot of the time, there will be one suggestion that has a lot of resonance with your class – pick that one! If there are a couple warring factions, propose 2-3 ideas and then just make a decision for the class. Write the object in L2 with L1 below it on the board. (Be prepared to learn a lot of random words in your L2…like when your students want to create a muskrat and you have no idea how to say that in German…)
Switch into the L2 (I have a student yell “DEUTSCH” to make that happen), and repeat the word for the object in the L2. I then tell the class to look at the object (again, in L2), while gesturing to a space in the front of the classroom. Saying the word with wonder and admiration, even asking students if they see it too and exhorting them to really look, adds a bit of magic to this initial moment. (I usually try to find a good moment to pop over to the artists and quietly whisper that they should start drawing a basic outline of the object, but without a face or color yet.)
Then, ask students in the L2 if the object is big or small. Use your body to convey these terms to students if they are not quite fully acquired – for example, I usually draw out my arms really widely for “big,” and then say the word in L2 so that students’ brains are cued up to hear the L2 word for its meaning. Then, do the same for “small.” If there’s a split decision, send it to the Professor #2 to make the call. Then, repeat the size with wonder, looking at the imaginary object you’ve established. I also say things like, “Wow, this muskrat isn’t small, no…it’s big!” in the L2 to just give more input. After that base detail has been established, you can play with the degree. For example: is it big, or VERY big? Is it VERY big, or is it GIGANTIC??? (Gestures galore!) This can be a fun way to up the ante and introduce students to similar words in a natural context.
After size, I usually ask what color the object is. It is helpful to have some sort of colored poster, like this number poster from Teacher’s Discovery, to quickly establish meaning for the colors. After the class chooses the color (or you defer to Professor #2 to make the call), it can be fun to compare this to objects in the class. Is it red like a Coca Cola bottle, or is it red like Jackson’s sweater? All the while, gesture to the imaginary object in the space you established earlier. Tell students to look at it, and repeat what it is. “Wow class, look here. We have a gigantic, red vacuum cleaner in our classroom. Hello up there! My name is Herr Fisher! How are you?” HAVE FUN. HAVE FUN!
After size and color have been established, compared, and wondered over, ask if the object is happy, or sad, establishing meaning through gestures or writing on the board in L1 and L2. With both options, I usually go back to the object to play with that a bit… “Hey! How are you doing? Badly? Oh no!! Don’t cry…it’ll be okay!”
For the first attempt, having these three class-decided details may be enough. Make sure you ask some questions along the way as a memory refresher for you and your students (“Wait…is our vacuum red or blue? Oh yeah! Thanks, y’all. It’s red! Wow!”), and don’t be afraid of playing with the wonderment of creating something together. This also can buy your artists some time to finish up their drawing.
You can do this as part of a written exit ticket, or asking the class as a whole: ask why the object feels the way it does. It helps to contextualize the emotion with details that the class has established. For example: “Why is this gigantic, blue muskrat so sad??” This can help focus the problem that students generate. Have them create the problem in L1 so their creativity can run wild! If it is written, you can tactfully combine ideas for the next class (or see if there is a dominant theme you could follow), and if you decide as a class, you’ll have to be prepared to do this live, gently turning down ideas that are too insane/violent/whatever.
I like to wait on the reveal of the character until the next class meeting, but whenever you do it, make sure it is done with a drum roll and some celebration of the artists for their contribution to the class’ history!
What do I do with it now that we’ve finished?
So you’ve created a character, and somebody (maybe you, maybe some students) drew it up! What’s next you ask? The possibilities are endless!
The obvious first step is to reveal the artwork to students. Now, because you’re working so heavily in the imagination during the creation of the character, you’re going to have as many imaginings of the character as there are students in your class. I like to preempt any negativity by saying, “Now, we’re going to show our appreciation to our classmates for creating this artwork for us! How much positivity and love can we give them?” (You may still have to address students privately who think they “could have done it better,” or publicly if the class is being unkind. Just prepare a set statement like, “Soandso took a great risk by volunteering to create something for us, so we will only honor their bravery and artistic choices!”)
After revealing the artwork and having the class show appreciation for the artist(s), talk through the character again in the L2. Maybe some features are easier to see than imagine all together – the large image is a great visual scaffold for you to talk about many more aspects of the character’s life. Maybe it has especially expressive eyes, the artist gave it a shock of crazy hair, or it’s interacting with its environment in an interesting way! Talk about that in the L2, conveying wonderment with your voice to show appreciation to the artists.
It is easy to segue from describing the character to a Write and Discuss, where you write up a description of the character with the class. At this point, you’ve repeated the language of the character description a lot, so students may be able to contribute to the paragraph that you write up on the board with ease and enthusiasm! A nice Quick Quiz after writing the description and rereading it can make the whole thing feel like a very academic experience – even if it was insanely fun!
If you feel like you want to try your hand at storytelling, you can use the problem generated at the end of the OWI process to turn into a very simple story. For example, the aforementioned vacuum cleaner was sad because he didn’t know where his parents were. Easy peasy! Mike Peto suggests a sequence of story creation that goes along these lines: 1. Describe the character again, where they are, and who they are with (usually a friend of a similar character species) 2. Describe their problem and the character’s reaction to it 3. Attempt to solve the problem a first time, and fail 4. Resolve the story by either solving the problem, failing, or failing and rethinking the problem
This can generate a quick story that can then be used for more literacy! And the language will naturally repeat, so student will get lots of CI in many restated contexts.
Beyond the Basics
Usually after a first class character, you can extend the time you use to create the class character, as well as the breadth of the questions you ask about the character. I got many of these ideas from Ben Slavic and Mike Peto. Consider asking about the following traits:
Kind or Mean
Intelligent or Dumb
Rich or Poor (gets old quick… Gucci belt Gucci belt Gucci belt #seventhgraders)
Brave or Scared/Timid
Optimistic or Pessimistic
Hardworking or Lazy
Honest or Dishonest
If you find some of these not-so-inspiring, try different traits! This keeps it fresh and can also help start discussions about these values.
Also consider asking the following, which can be hilarious and so fun:
Character’s name
Likes and dislikes
Age
Job that they have
A superpower they have
Pro Tips!
You don’t need to have a certain personality to do this! I am a zany person, but you do not need to be loud and extroverted like me to make this (or any “TCI” strategy) work. I have seen teachers regarding their imaginative creations with calm, professorial wonder, where I’m hopping around, crawling on the ground, etc. Try this strategy again and again until you develop your own relationship to it – don’t feel the need to BE any one teacher until you’ve experimented and found what works best for you.
Don’t let it run wild, part one! Kids are extremely creative, but it’s easy for things to get out of hand if you allow students to interject constantly with “Does it have seven legs?” “Is it wearing a tophat?” “Does it speak with an Italian accent?” You, as the teacher, need to make clear that creating with large groups of people can be very difficult because everyone is creative in different ways, so YOU will be the one asking the questions and will only accept answers to those questions. And when you have to cut it off, you will for the sake of actually getting something done and created. This can feel creatively disappointing, but we sometimes have to accept our ideas not getting used, and maybe they will be used next time!
Don’t let it run wild, part two! Kids like inappropriate stuff. When you are creating something in a more open-ended way with students, they will attempt to push the boundaries and say things that will make their classmates laugh. If you get a sense that there is a secretive in-joke laugh going around because of a suggestion, just nip it in the bud by lightly turning down the suggestion and giving a meaningful glance to the students suggesting it.
Sometimes you just have to make the choices! Students will likely feel very strongly about this activity, as it is quite unlike the rest of their classes and assignments. Sometimes you just have to make the call for students (often with the help of Professor #2), and accept that not all students will be satisfied. (“No one even wanted that one!”) Understand that these are your loudest voices and don’t necessarily represent your whole class. Let them know that a decision just had to be made, and that we can all accept our feelings of disappointment and hope that our ideas get chosen next time. (Sometimes students will strike deals with each other about a detail, saying that they’ll save something for next time…hilarious. And quite cooperative!)
Offer choices! Sometimes, asking questions such as “What color is it?” can lead to seemingly hours-long discussions that never get anywhere. Especially early on as students are acquiring these terms, just offer 2-3 choices – one that is kind of logical, one that is a little more out there. “Is the apple red like normal, or BLUE??” Students will usually have some sort of response as long as you show them what each word means, and you can decide if it will be normal-seeming or…not. (Most of the time, asking the class, “Is this a normal ____?” leads to an emphatic “NO!”)
Make it quick! As I said above, lingering on an open-ended question can just feel like an endless L1 slog of pain and misery. Keep the conversation moving: offer choices, allow for a short moment of lively debate, and then make a decision (relying on your Professor #2, when necessary). This can be a very fun activity – don’t let it, uh, fester.
End it if you have to! Some groups are not used to their teachers offering them such fun choices, and can get overstimulated very quickly. We (people who teach with CI) have all had a class who just couldn’t even. In-fighting, debates that got personal, no consensus building, etc. If that is happening to your class and it is starting to feel a little out of control and not so fun for you, tell the class you have all you need for today, and shift gears to something like a Dictation or a Quick Quiz. It has to be something quiet to signify, “hey, this didn’t work so well this time.” Reuse whatever language you were able to come up with as a class, and maybe add a detail or two yourself as the teacher, clearly establishing meaning and making sure your artists are with you.
If it fails, try again! Sometimes, we try a new strategy, and the first go-around feels quite…train wreck-y. Students don’t get it, you feel unsure, you question your abilities to teach “this way,” it doesn’t seem like it did anything for your classes, etc. We can have any number of thoughts go through our heads as we try something new, and this is absolutely normal. You’re learning something new and those muscles aren’t conditioned yet for maximum performance! I encourage you to try the strategy again, and as SOON as possible. Get back on the horse! That way you can implement the lessons you learned the hard way RIGHT AWAY and leave class with a sense of accomplishment, not a sense of defeat, embarrassment, or bitterness. End on the best note possible – practice again and again!
What if I want to learn more?
Check out the Bite-Sized Book of One Word Images by Ben Slavic and Tina Hargaden – this is an excellent resource that I have drawn a lot of my inspiration from. Ben Slavic is credited with creating the OWI, and his work with Tina in this book is very illuminating when it comes to how using images inspires our students’ imaginations and gets them so focused on creation that they effortlessly acquire the language used along the way.
Sarah Breckley has this video that shows her trying an OWI for the first time, with real kids!! It is very brave of her to show a first attempt – and can give you some inspiration as you learn for yourself.
Here’s Brett Chonko seamlessly working from an OWI to a Write and Discuss – what a pro! This can show you how these two strategies interact and lock together seamlessly to provide some awesome CI to your students.
There are many more videos of teachers doing OWIs on YouTube – search “One Word Image” for a treasure trove of different teaching styles!
What do you think? Do you feel ready to create a One Word Image (OWI)? Comment below and send me any questions you might have!
Generally, in CI World, we know that students acquire vocabulary most efficiently from comprehensible messages in the Target Language. That means that Ye Olde Vocabulary Lists of yore are not quite as helpful as we used to think. Trying to memorize them engages the brain’s explicit/conscious learning faculties, versus the implicit/unconscious learning that is capable (and more durable, in the case of language) when focusing on getting students as much comprehensible input as possible. For this reason, many CI World teachers have ditched vocab lists and just focus on providing rich, repetitive, compelling comprehensible input in class. And that’s all!
…but what if I want a vocabulary list? What if my students want one? There’s something satisfying about the neatness of a list. It implies and provides structure, and is something to refer to when feeling lost. And maybe your department/school/district requires that you provide and teach students thematic/semantic sets of vocabulary. This is the situation I’m currently in with my school’s Spanish department (I’m a singleton with German – I have more freedom there), so this is something I’m thinking about this year as well.
We have to be mindful that students sometimes struggle with classes that don’t “look” entirely “like school.” Especially in the early levels, we’re mostly asking students to just listen, read, and show that they understand. That is VERY different from any other class they have taken, where they may have to take and summarize notes, respond frequently with their own thoughts, elaborate on those thoughts, work out individual written responses to prompts, etc. Just understanding what you hear and read sounds like a murky goal – even ifwe as teachers know that it is what they need. But maybe having a vocabulary list gives students the comfort they want in “learning” the language when we secretly know that we are creating class such that they acquire the language.
This question actually opens up to two different contexts with distinct solution sets, so let’s explore each context and see how we can best support our students on their quest toward language proficiency.
Context 1: I have a mandated vocabulary list
This context is affecting my Spanish teaching this year. This year, I’m teaching second-year Spanish. I’ve come in to a new school whose Spanish department adheres pretty closely to the scope and sequence provided by a textbook, which is not how I teach. But! I was told that as long as I cover the vocabulary and structures present in the chapters my department uses over the course of the year, I can teach however I want. My district seems big on teacher autonomy, which is truly a blessing.
So, what am I going to do? Here have been my plans for “covering” the vocabulary lists I’m expected to cover this year:
Calendar Talk: Calendar Talk is great for introducing all sorts of new vocab, because it necessarily includes compelling events from students’ lives. In addition to reviewing the Spanish 1 calendar basics (days, months, etc.), we’ll be able to review future plans, and start talking about what students did over the weekend. A seamless and natural introduction to the past tense forms!
Card Talk: Card Talk can be angled to introduce any subject – check the linked post for ideas how to use Card Talk prompts to push conversation towards thematic vocab. School unit? Have kids draw what goes on in their favorite class. Talking about places in town? Have kids draw their favorite spots, and go in on what is around them, where they are located, etc.
OWI: Specify that the One Word has to fit some sort of theme – it has to be an article of clothing, it has to be a toy of some sort, it has to be a food, etc. This will likely draw in other related vocab – pieces of clothing are often friends with other pieces of clothing, for instance. #BillylaBufanda
Storytelling: As with OWIs, unscripted stories can be angled towards problems that mirror the language introduced in a thematic chapter. An OWI that is a pencil can be at school and have some sort of problem with its history teacher. Or, you can go the route of purposefully building in vocab list vocabulary into stories. Or let someone else do it for you! I am a huge fan of Anne Matava’s Story Scripts, just because they’re so wacky and fun, and I’ll definitely be using “You, In the Corner!” and “An Important Test” early on during the school unit because those have always inspired much hilarity.
Picture Talk: Picture Talk can be used to kill 2 birds with 1 stone – I can pull up an image from the Target Culture, and discuss both what is going on in the picture, and if it is different from an analogous context here in the US!
Story Listening: Now, I don’t do Story Listening exactly as Dr. Mason describes, but I love using it to include cultural tales in my classes. I think it will be a fabulous way for students to hear lots of natural language, and because I’m teaching Level 2, it will be good for them to hear the different Spanish past tenses in natural contexts.
There are so many ways to weave in “required” vocab – we just have to be a little creative in sequencing our classes and providing specific communicative contexts so that the vocabulary just happens to come up. (Or, it just seems that way to our students! *wink*)
I think you can also get your kids in on it a bit, too. I explicitly told my students that we have to do similar stuff to what the other classes have to do, but that we’ll try to make it as fun as possible. If we ever run into a situation where interest is waning, we can remind ourselves that we’re doing our best to have fun and “cover” all the stuff. Kids usually like a conspiracy…er…challenge. *wink again*
Context 2: I do not have a mandated vocabulary list
This is my situation with German this year! I am the best only German teacher at my school, and my district (again) provides teachers lots of autonomy, so I have a lot of freedom to teach whatever vocab seems best. For me, I am aiming for natural language usage. So, I’m creating contexts for communication, and we’ll use whatever language comes up!
This does lead to things being a bit unpredictable, and honestly, I’ve found it difficult in the past to keep track of what I’ve said to whom. Sometimes I find myself “introducing” a gesture for a verb, and the class is like “omg Herr Fisher get it together, we got this!” Other times, I have discovered that a fairly high frequency / useful word hasn’t come up in a long time, or at all, and I end up doing mental gymnastics trying to introduce it to the class.
Then, I stumbled upon this article by Justin Slocum Bailey, who is an outstanding Latin teacher and teacher trainer. He had an idea that was so simple, I went YEAH: just ask kids at the end of class what words/phrases were most central to the day’s interactions, and what seemed most useful. Boom! The students help you build out a vocabulary list, so there’s a feeling of mutual responsibility. You can then just make a spreadsheet (I keep mine in a Google Spreadsheet) with all the language you’ve used, so you know what each class has heard and used. Boom!
I also check back on my Write and Discuss from each day to see what has come up in class. I write mine by hand on the board to keep them shorter, and then type them up into a Google Doc during my prep. I do this in conjunction with asking the class, because sometimes certain language stuck out to them more, and that language doesn’t always necessarily show up in the Write and Discuss. (See: a super random vocab word a kid asked for during class, a fun interjection, you accidentally taught a swear word when you walked backwards into a chair and fell over and politely remind your students to never ever use ever, etc.)
Now what do I do with this word list, once I have it? The first thing is feel relieved, because if anyone ever asserts “we (they?) don’t even do anything in there!” I can whip the list out and be like “well then, what is all this language we’ve used?! (dramatic music)“
I also have thought out some other, non-affective uses for such a list, which could include: – Building new readings that are recombinations of familiar vocab, either for days when I need to sit to refrain from dying, or for performance assessments (both throughout an instructional cycle, using AnneMarie Chase’s Quick Quizzes, or at the end). – Spiraling the vocab that appears in my Bell Ringers, which are usually reading (input!)-based. – Playing games! I could easily make these a Quizlet set for students to study, if they should so choose, which easily turns into either a Gimkit or a Quizlet Live. Same idea with a Kahoot! – Printing the list for a parent or child. Sometimes they just want some sort of proof, something to study. This could be it! – Reminding myself of other useful stuff that hasn’t come up yet – and then magically bringing it up!
Sometimes, you might want to target other useful vocab that could wow their next level teacher and make your classroom life more flowing. Slip a new word or phrase into the classroom convo when it makes sense, and boom! You have a more proficient user of the target language.
Overall:
If we communicate to our students via lists, they will produce…lists. I’m aiming to use class time to communicate in real questions, statements, stories, etc., so that hopefully one day, my students will be able to do the same. But for as long as we need to hold onto the idea of the vocab list for the world language classroom, then we can certainly provide – and make it useful to us, too!
What do you think? Do you have to follow a set list, or do you have more freedom? Do you have an argument for vocab lists that I’m not thinking about? Let me know your thoughts and ideas below!
Recently, I went to a workshop with Lynn Johnston, who is an absolute rock star and will be PNCFL’s representative for ACTFL Teacher of the Year this November in Washington, DC. I have seen her present multiple times at WAFLT and WAFLT-COFLT conferences, and so appreciate her creativity and energy. I feel like her students’ brains must be bursting with L2 at the end of class – she has fabulous systems in place to make sure kids are getting tons of input every single day. She is also a reading rock star, and really turned me on to doing WAY more reading with my students.
One thing I have been thinking about a lot is how Lynn uses sentence frames to give students opportunities to express themselves, while also modeling higher level language use. In CI World (disclaimer: not a real place slash no one owns “CI”), teachers are often discouraged from “forcing” output – that is, pushing students to output beyond whatever mental representation they have acquired. This makes sense: you can’t wring water out of a dry sponge. But we also know that outputting can be motivating to learners (especially secondary learners), and that it may provide opportunities for their interlocutor (here, usually the teacher) to provide even more input as they follow up on whatever the learner said.
So, maybe we can provide sentence frames with most of the language filled in, and students can use those to express themselves at higher levels than they would be ready to produce on their own. This can give the teacher a brief break from providing all the input, while also modeling correct language usage.
I saw someone say once that even if students are working on super complex/”advanced” grammar and topics, if they are filling in a blank, they are only functioning at a Novice level – just words! With this in mind, if I’m working with Novices, I can provide them the structure to use their Novice-level words and phrases skills to build simple sentences. We each provide about 50% to get them successfully functioning at 100% Novice High, and we can do this early! Then we can push them towards Intermediate-Low (strings of sentences with supporting details) by modeling how to do that, too.
Ultimately, you get out what you put in. If we consciously feed our students a healthy diet of comprehensible language steps above their level, they will eventually (truly eventually – we’re playing the long game) be able to work at that level independently – because they have had repeated opportunities to see what that level looks like. If we’re only speaking to them in short, choppy sentences, or just short phrases, or via vocabulary lists, then…that’s what we’re going to get back. (“Hey Jimmy, how’s it going?” “Pencil…teacher…desk…Sit down please…”)
So! I’m going to try to give my students comprehensible, useful sentence starters/frames that match our topics. I can use them for quick turn and talks, as support for whole-class interactions, or even as exit ticket assessments. Again – I will be providing the grammar/vocab that pushes them up the proficiency scale, and they are filling in with information personal to them. I will have to support that with helpful vocab and input, too, and it will lead to some satisfying student language use in class.
I’ve been doing a training recently to assign performance levels to L2 writing, and I’ve learned that one of the indicators that a student has moved from Novice-High (simple sentences) to Intermediate-Low (strings of sentences) is the inclusion of supporting details, usually in the form of prepositional or verbal phrases. So maybe if we’ve been talking about food, I can model for my students the addition of details that move it towards Intermediate-Low writing/speaking. Take the simple sentence “I like to eat pizza,” for example. If it were in a composition with other similar sentences like “I play videogames. I rarely shower.” it would be rated at Novice High. But with some prepositional phrases, it can look like this:
With this image, I enter the Great Internet “Pineapple on Pizza” Debate. (For the record, I think it is a nice sweet counterpoint to the saltiness of the pizza, so I like it.)
Again, not life-changing in terms of wild L2 complexity, but by adding on any of these details, you’re moving out of Novice and into the Intermediate range. If we, as teachers, can model a variety of ways to add detail like this to our sentences (either through using these sentence frames as conversation pieces during class, or during Write and Discuss), we will push our students to use them more, as well. And all we would have to do is put up a sentence frame like “I like to eat _____ with _____” or “I like to eat _____ at _______” and students can fill in to their heart’s content!
The jump from Intermediate-Low to Intermediate-Mid is marked by increased use of “Complex Components,” which are dependent or subordinated clauses. Think clauses like, “When I was younger…” or “I like people who are…” or “I shop in stores that…” Those conjunctions build complexity by linking together clauses, and this is what really makes a student’s writing/speaking flow. Upper-level students could definitely benefit from getting sentence frames like these, especially when applied to AP/IB themes or topics!
This year, I am going to try to use more sentence frames so that students can “get practice” speaking the language and feeling successful. (Even though I know that this does not necessarily contribute to their acquisition of the language in the most efficient way, as I’m taking a bit of time away from providing more compelling input, we serve many masters in school jobs. This might help students feel more like they’re “doing something” in class beyond just trying to understand, and might head off possible administrator comments about a class being too “teacher-centered” or that the students never “actually speak the language.”)
But I can start small! Early in level 1: My name is _______. Then: I like ______. Do you like _______? Then: I eat a lot of __________. I can leave these frames posted for a certain amount of time, so students can refer to them and secretly get a bit of input if they look at them. Maybe I can put them in a pocket chart, or dedicate a section of wall to them. I want to commit also to changing them out regularly, so we don’t get to April and I’m like…uhh…Why is “Me llamo…” still cheerfully posted? (Last year, I was super gung-ho for rejoinders, but sadly only managed to post like…5 different ones. Oops. Growth area!)
This use of sentence frames for structured student output will also (hopefully) remind me to create related Writing Checklists for our class Write and Discuss work that will help us incorporate more strong writing moves into our shared writing. I’ll start small with conjunctions like “and” and “but,” and work my way up to including storytelling elements like “First…then…finally…”, nice transition words like “Nevertheless,” and those subordinating conjunctions that help build “Complex Components”: that, who, which, when, if, etc.
Here are some example sentence frames, linked to their performance indicator and a theme you might find in AP or IB.
Can you think of sentence frames that you could incorporate into your units or daily lessons that will push your students towards the next proficiency level? (Oof, there were prepositional phrases and two subordinated clauses in that one sentence! You get Intermediate-Mid, Benjamin.) Comment below with your thoughts and wonderings!
