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.
Justin Slocum Bailey’s post about Choral Translation includes a video demonstration if you want to see the technique in action!
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.