“I Took 9 Years of Spanish, and All I Know Are The Colors and Taco”
What was your experience with learning language in high school? Was it fun? A lot of “fiestas”? Brutal grammar and conjugation drills? or my favorite: memorizing dialogues: “Me llamo Juan. ¿Dónde está el baño por favor? ¿Dónde está la biblioteca, Maria?
When asked, many people may say that they remember the random dialogues that they were forced to memorize, maybe a conjugation or two, the colors, and not much else…
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The way modern language is being taught is ever evolving. In high school, I had one of the toughest teachers around. She drilled all of the conjugations in 24 tenses for the most random verbs and we painstakingly memorized these verbs, and I LOVED IT! (I am not most people).
Last week, I had the tremendous opportunity to see a different way to approach language instruction with my department at a seminar in Gilroy, California (yas garlic!). It was a one day event with A LOT of information jam packed into a very engaging, informative and USEFUL seminar. I have so many things to say about this seminar, that I will probably blog about more takeaways at a later time. This seminar was taught by Mike Peto, language instructor extraordinaire. He demonstrated his lessons in Portuguese because most people don’t understand Portuguese, and he was making a point that his lessons were going to teach us another language.
Mike Peto’s lessons focus primarily on Comprehensible Input and the lessons that go with CI. A few takeaways for me were the OWI (One Word Image) stories, Movie Talk, and Student Interviews. These are practical ways to get students engaged with the language, to help them build confidence in their language skills and to speak and write the language with increasing fluency. We practiced some of the lessons in the seminar, and after the day was done, I was excited to immediately try some of these lessons with my students the very next day. (Fortunately, these lessons don’t require too much planning because they are extremely student centered). They seem quirky and random at first, and I was a little skeptical, but I decided to try these lessons out…
One Word Images goes like this: the instructor has several criteria written on the board or the projector: What is the object, the size, color, emotion, likes and dislikes, job, rich/poor, kind/mean, and what is a superpower. Students are tasked with taking an inanimate object, like a pineapple, or broccoli, or a seashell and giving it life. (This is a period 2 drawing)
Students create a story around this object. They provide adjectives, and superpowers, and likes and dislikes and a job for this inanimate object. They create a story around this one image, and they end up creating dilemmas around this new living image. While students describe, there is a designated artist, who is drawing an illustration based on what is being described by the class. The teacher facilitates the story, and by the end, there is a final product: a story and an illustration that accompanies the text.
I had my doubts that this wouldn’t be “academic” enough to prepare students for the AP Exam, however students are providing profound connections, without even realizing it…In my 5th period class, my students picked a broccoli who was very sensitive and depressed because he was white and yellow and not green like his friends. He was a professional ballet dancer, and he didn’t fit in with his friends because they all played sports.
After the story, we talked about identity and the roles that we all play in society, and interpersonal relationships and what is ideal in society. These are in the AP themes, and we discussed all of these bigger themes entirely in Spanish, and even the students who don’t participate much in class were compelled to speak up, and that was a truly empowering feeling. I have decided to create digital story books that are written by and illustrated by the students, per class so that each class builds their story every week.
Students were able to retain a large amount of information without studying the vocabulary or the structures. They were able to recall the information orally and they were able to write the information presented on paper when they were finished with the lesson. Student feedback was overwhelmingly positive and students felt accomplished and engaged in the language. This sure beats memorizing dialogues or a shopping list of conjugations like we did when we learned a foreign language.
