Rereading a text is a powerful way to increase students’ acquisition, so we have to get clever about giving students meaningful tasks that help them reengage with texts, giving their brains more chances to acquire different aspects of the language. In addition, any discussion of “grammar” or “language structures” needs to be contextualized and connected to the meaning that those structures convey. I love Horizontal Conjugation for hitting these two goals!
Why should you do it? Because Horizontal Conjugation gives an opportunity for another meaningful engagement with a text, while also contextualizing discussions what the “forms” of grammar actually mean. Once you have taught students how to do it, Horizontal Conjugation can go into your rotation for whenever you need a rereading activity that gets you off the “stage” for a while.
When do I use Horizontal Conjugation?
You will want to use Horizontal Conjugation with a text that students are very familiar with, and a narrative works best. These could be stories co-created out of an OWI character, or perhaps scripted stories. You could also conceivably do Horizontal Conjugation with information learned about students in class via Special Person Interviews, or Card Talk. In short, you need a text that is about a person or people, not a general informational text about a topic.
Student familiarity with the language is also key. I would use Horizontal Conjugation during a second or third “pass” at a text, so that the difficulty lies not in interpreting the text (as for a first time), but rather changing the perspective of the text.
How do I do it? – Logistics
Make sure students have a copy of the base text. You might project the text, but having a copy in hand is best. You can also provide a second sheet of paper onto which students can write the Horizontal Conjugation text, but they can always use the bottom half of the page, or the back of a page, if there is room.
How do I do it? – Procedure
- Tell students that we will be rewriting the text we have been reading from a different perspective. (Do this in L1 or L2, depending on the level of your students.) Use this to review perspective, which will maybe win you love points from their ELA instructors. “What perspective is this text written from? Hint: it’s ___ person…” Once they have identified the perspective (1st person, 3rd person, etc.), provide lots of examples of that perspective in L1 and L2. “Ah, this is 3rd person perspective because we’re saying HE does this, HE does that. ER geht in die Schule und ER sieht seinen Deutschlehrer Karaoke singen.”
- Tell students that we are going to pretend that we are now the character/real person in question, and will be retelling it from our own perspective. Instead of retelling events as if some 3rd person did them, we will be saying “I do this, I do that. I go to school and I see my German teacher singing karaoke.”
- Model this for a few sentences for your student. I typically have them translate a line into the L1, ask what that same line would sound like in the other perspective (still in L1), and then ask what that would be in the L2. I then write it up on the board.
- After completing a few lines of this together, I reread the new text written in the other perspective, and often have students translate it back one more time just to emphasize that it is in the new perspective. This is a natural time to point out the language features that convey the perspective (verb endings, pronouns, possessives, etc.).
- Once students are getting the hang of it with my guidance, I set them to working on it independently, or with a partner.
- Once most students have completed, I share how the text should look if fully converted to the other perspective, and usually have students trade their work with a partner for them to check it.
What do I do with it now that we’ve finished?
You have generated a new(ish) text with this activity, so you can do any literacy activities you like with it. That being said, it is also wise to not beat a text to death for fear of boring our students to death, so it’s also okay to move on once the activity is complete.
I sometimes take student copies of the new text for a completion grade, and/or have them put the newly created text into their binders as another text they can read as “review,” aka for more input.
Pro Tips!
- Provide lots of modeling! This is a very “language class” activity that takes a second to get your head around – it’s not something we do often out in the world. Thinking aloud about how to change the perspective helps students do this thinking for themselves, which is actually getting them to think about what parts of the language convey the information about perspective. Maybe this will help them notice and acquire these features, or maybe it’s just a good strategy to satisfy any demands for you to “teach grammar”.
- Provide a word bank! Students with a lot of language may be able to do this activity more independently without a word bank, but Novices can benefit from having correct forms nearby to help make the changes. This obviously is very helpful if you have stem-changing or otherwise irregular verbs and you want to give students the feeling of success on the first try.
- Maybe you don’t do this for some languages! As I was typing this post, I was thinking about Japanese and Chinese, which don’t have subject-verb agreement. If you were “changing the perspective,” it might be just changing out pronouns, and that could feel silly. Horizontal Conjugation works really well to show how verb forms influence meaning, so if this is not an issue in your language…try a different rereading activity!
- Retell story in the past tense! An alternative to changing perspective might be changing the tense. If a story is told in the present tense, it can be flipped to the past tense with a prompt like “Imagine this story happened yesterday. How might it sound then?”
- Try out plurals! I have seen some teachers use a prompt like “Imagine that the main character has a twin, and they are inseparable!” This forces students to use 1st person plural forms.
- Turn it into an opportunity to develop empathy! A story told about someone else puts some distance between the teller and the subject. Reworking something into a first person perspective might be an opportunity to place oneself in the shoes of another person. What are they thinking? What are they feeling? How might they be experiencing their story differently than I would? Why?
- Starting this later is okay! The temptation to “teach about conjugation” has historical precedent in how languages are taught: level 1 is for “mastering” the present tense, level 2 is for the preterite/imperfect, etc. Students need lots of written and auditory input of different forms to acquire them, so they will have a more intuitive grasp of this concept the further along they are in developing their linguistic systems. I start Horizontal Conjugations with my level 2 students – and it’s been a great at-level task because they have the linguistic resources to start thinking metalinguistically!
What if I want to learn more?
Here is a blog post from The Comprehensible Classroom about Horizontal Conjugation, with a handy graphic at the bottom to remind you of how it works! This second post describes using student Free Writes as base texts, which would be so fun, and a way to honor student writing. Martina also made this video explaining the process!
Here is Elicia Cárdenas’ great post about how she thinks about grammar instruction in her classroom, and how she differentiates Horizontal Conjugation in her classroom.
Here is a video of Sil Perera presenting to the Northern Indiana TCI Conference explaining Horizontal Conjugation.