Last week, I attended the PEARLL Summer Institute lead by Rebecca Blouwolff. Rebecca is an absolute master teacher, so it was such a pleasure to learn from and with her.
I had originally planned on doing a post of takeaways for every day of the institute, but then I ended up taking a tumble during a morning run before Day 2 started and ended up in the emergency room. WOOPS. I’m totally fine – just scraped up – but I missed out on two days of learning, so here’s what I was thinking about coming out of day 1:
Setting goals for students = creating challenges for them, not to-do lists
This year, all three levels of German at my school will be offered as dual-enrollment classes for both high school and college credit. The college I have partnered with uses a textbook, which I have never done in my German teaching!
…and that textbook is quite, uh, traditional. I panicked a little bit when I saw the final exam, but then got my head on straight and am determined: I will teach any required vocabulary and grammar as contextualized as possible. This will require some thoughtful backwards planning, and some creativity when it comes to choosing contexts that bring all the isolated vocabulary lists from the book together into input and interactions that make sense.
Of course, the textbook has goals like “Ask and answer questions about someone’s hobbies” and “Describe the major geographical landmarks in a city” as facades to disguise the underlying strict grammar agenda, so my task this year will be to figure out: why? Why does a speaker of the language do these things? In what contexts?
A fellow participant framed the selection of Can Dos by saying that communicative goals “feel more like challenges to our students, versus just long to-do lists.” That is helping me engage my creativity: what problems are our students solving when we do these communicative acts? What will make them feel excited, creative, challenged?
I haven’t fully fleshed out my planning for each level with this lens yet – still hanging on to summer – but I love the idea of a creative “challenge.” As I get closer to the school year starting and have had time to meet with my first-ever student teacher (!), I’ll try to make a post outlining my planning mindset as I work through this challenge.
Dividing up vocab lists: prompt students to build their personalized vocabularies
Rebecca showed us some example unit vocabulary lists, and they were divided into three sections: 1) I need to know how to produce this in order to complete a task, 2) I need to be able to recognize this in order to complete a task, and 3) other language that might be interesting to know and use.
Section 1 (the MUSTs) contained mostly high-frequency vocabulary relating to a thematic unit, including some items referred to as “grammar-as-vocabulary”. That means providing not just an infinitive for verbs, but verbs conjugated to subjects, perhaps even including a common preposition that follows. Sometimes, it was entire phrases that just needed to be completed by an appropriate noun or adjective. Language learners acquire different conjugations more as vocabulary, rather than as “take-infinitive-chop-ending-add-new-ending” as traditionally taught, so this made good sense to me.
Section 2 (the recognition section) contained lower-frequency words and phrases that might help support interpretation of unit texts (including terms that would get students through authentic resources dense with unknown vocabulary). Interestingly, Rebecca also includes the “you-form” questions that undergird the unit theme: “What do you like to do in your free time?” “Which do you prefer?” “When do you…?” She’s not expecting students to produce these from their noggins spontaneously, but they will come to recognize them through scaffolded interactions throughout the unit.
Section 3 (interesting to know and use) is where students can really personalize their learning. I have tried variations on this before – including having a “My Dictionary” section on the back of any vocabulary sheets I give students in anticipation of texts we use in class – but nothing has really stuck. What made this click for me is the realization that students need strong lists of useful, high-frequency language about a topic (found mostly in section 1), but also training on how to expand and track their own personal vocabularies.
Students can learn personal vocabulary from their Free Choice Reading books, from texts explored in class that have words glossed or explained in/by context, by asking their teacher for a word, by looking words up themselves. I think having conversations about the ways we can pick up new vocabulary that’s meaningful to us, as well as compelling their need by asking good, interesting questions in class, will help students put booster rockets on their language acquisition AND their motivation. It feels good to know the words you want to know!
Match vocab list to unit Can-Do statements
This one hit me like OH! …woops. Rather than giving the long list of every possible term related to a topic, really narrow down vocabulary lists to mostly include high-frequency formulations, and make sure that each term is matched to one of the performance objectives of the unit. Ding!
Maybe if a term is only really related to an Interpretive Reading or Listening task, it can just go into the “recognition” section of the vocab list. High-frequency, adaptable terms (“I play…” “I live in (a)…” “I feel…”) can stay in the “MUST” section, and what follows can be sorted by how frequent it might be to your learning community. The 10,000 possible ingredients for a favorite meal? Ditch them, and pick higher-frequency terms to replace them. (So maybe not every possible type of meat, for instance, but just…”meat”!)
And if it doesn’t match a specific performance objective, but lives in the topical universe? DITCH IT. MAKE THE LISTS SHORTER. Long vocabulary lists do not make kids learn more words. Exposure to large amounts of comprehended input in different contexts makes kids learn more words! And this all needs to be contextualized within the framework of a given unit.