This is the 3rd in a series of blog posts about my return to the classroom.
If you have not read previous posts, you can read them here: WEEK 1 and WEEK 2
We start our week with a picture talk inspired by this illustration. In my class library I have a copy of En mi familia by Carmen Lomas Garza that has a lot of illustrations depicting the artist’s childhood growing up in a Spanish-speaking family in Texas.
While we picture talk, a sort of group interview emerges as I ask if students have ever attended a tamalada (one student), and then, are there occasions when your family all cooks together. Slowly we compare our lives with the family in the illustration. At first, most students insist that their lives are different: “my mom does the cooking”, “I’m not allowed in the kitchen when she’s cooking”. But slowly a different picture emerges: shucking corn at a summer barbeque, a neighborhood oyster-grilling party (my students live on the coast), church picnics. There are smiles as my students are developing a deeper, emotional connection to the family in the illustration.
There were quite a few students who have never tried a tamale, so we watched this video about the green chile and fresh corn tamales made at El Cholo, a legendary Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles. Plus, there is a bonus scene depicting making a good homemade tortilla, which students admitted looks a lot better than a supermarket tortilla.
Towards the end of the class period, I erase the whiteboard and I pass out lined notecards. I have decided to give them a little push. After all this talking about the illustration and writing on the board, plus a full Write & Discuss text (now erased), students are expecting a quick and easy exit quiz. There is shocked silence as I announce that, for today’s quiz, they simply have to fill the notecard with sentences about the illustration still projected against the screen.
“In English?”, one student asks. I’ve never asked them to write on their own (except copying the W&D texts). Class has been a whole lot of listening and reading thus far.
For the first few weeks of class I gave simple exit quizzes, mostly requiring yes/no answers or one word answers in either English of Spanish. Over the weeks I saw that all students naturally transitioned from responding in English whenever they could to, now, responding in Spanish. I see them revert back to English when I increase the complexity of the sentence, but if I keep it very simple, their responses are in Spanish.
If I’m being honest, I don’t always “keep it very simple”. There are times when they respond in English (they understand), but I really want them to process a longer sentence with multiple clauses. So I turn and write the whole sentence on the board, break down each clause by writing the translation below, and I accept that they are having a hard time keeping the entire phrase in their short term memory.
For instance, the difference between these two phrases:
He eats the tamale. (easy)
She puts a tamale in his hand and tells him to eat it. (a bit harder)
The second sentence is just a little more taxing for them. Yet they are processing the short sentences quickly enough that their responses stay in Spanish. I don’t think they even notice that this is happening.
I was originally planning to administer their first fluency write at the end of the week, but I realized that would be a big ask since I have just focused on listening and reading for this entire time.
In a fluency write, the students are given a blank paper and instructed to write as fast as possible for ten minutes. If they can write 100 words, they get 100%. Grammar doesn’t count. Spelling doesn’t count. Put 100 words that reasonably make sense together, and you’ve got your A+. The activity is not only empowering (students are amazed that they can write so much), but also extremely informative when I look at the writing samples to get a sense of how their instinctive understanding of the target language is developing. I notice developmentally expected errors and don’t worry, but sometimes I notice that I am not providing enough language around something that I think they should be grasping at this point. Reading their fluency writes also clues me in on what they are beginning to acquire. This is how I often decide which points merit a grammar pop-up. I never provide a pop-up explanation for something that my students are not already beginning to acquire.
To my relief, they write. It flows out and, for the most part, the writing is not bad at all. I see a wide variety of verbs from our high-frequency verb charts hanging on the wall, and it is not limited to super-simple “subject + verb” type sentences as I had feared. Of all of my classes, four students pass in blank notecards. Maybe 5% of the notecards contain language that is difficult to follow, even for a sympathetic reader such as a teacher. However, the vast majority of notecards contains language that pleasantly surprises me. The upper 15% contain vocabulary or phrases that I forgot I had used in previous classes. It turns out… they are listening to me.
Before passing in their cards, I ask them to flip the card over and explain, in English, who this guy is. I point to the center of the illustration at the man in the doorway with a young girl. Pointing to my head, I say “imaginación”. Their responses informed a week of story-creation that ultimately led to our first student-created story that we titled “Drama de familia” (Drama in the Family).
On Tuesday I drew a narrative arc showing students that problems will emerge before a final climax when everything is resolved and, most importantly, there will be a happy ending for all. In each class period on Tuesday and Wednesday we spent 5-10 minutes brainstorming possible complications along the narrative arc.
It is important to note that together we created ONE story among all of my classes, so that individual classes were not surprised when the story took a different shape than they had imagined. I took photos of all of the ideas as they were written on the board, and then on Wednesday (after school) I merged it together to create one written story for all classes to read on Thursday. I threw away the many proposed fight scenes and added a surprise twist ending that I had been contemplating.
It all started with one student’s suggestion that the man “is Jaime with his secret daughter, from Beyoncé”. The abuelita invites Jay-Z to the tamalada so that he and Jaime can “talk it out” for the good of Beyoncita (Jaime and Beyoncé’s daughter), who is of course a total innocent. But family problems are complicated, and on top of that, the abuelita has a secret plan of her own which involves her delicious tamales. In the end, the simmering feud between a jealous Jay-Z and Jaime did not lead to a fight. And all week long, whenever I needed to regain control of the class conversation, I asked in Spanish: WHERE IS JAY-Z? and the whole class responded in chorus: HE IS IN THE BATHROOM!
On Wednesday we created drafts of the story using every one of the high-frequency Sweet 16 verbs posted on the wall. This is a great way to expand any picture talk. Just have a list of verbs and tell students that we need to create sentences with all of the verbs. I didn’t end up keeping most of the plot developments that we imagined, but it was a good activity to get everyone noticing all of the verbs posted on the walls.
On Thursday, now that I had the final draft written, I started class with a list of the main verbs used to retell our story written on the board in the order that they were used: Hay, hace, escucha, dice, dice, sabe, dice, viene, va, viene, ve, sabe.
Then I retold the story with very simple sentences, without the surprise ending, just focusing on each verb:
Hay una abuela. Hace tamales. Escucha a su hijo que habla por teléfono. Jaime dice que quiere a la mujer que está en el teléfono. La mujer le dice “This aint Texas (Woo!)”. Ahora la abuela sabe que la mujer es Beyoncé. La abuela le dice a Jay-Z…
I had them turn and retell in partners before I gave them a copy of the full story, which they translated, word by word, as a quiz. No fluency write, but a big translation instead. Yeah, that felt like a bit of an evil teacher move, but I really wanted to make sure that everyone understood everything.
You can download the short story here. However, I guarantee that it will NOT be great reading for your classes. This kind of story delights mainly because students all interact together to co-create it. Each little detail emerges from a process of story-creation in class.
For instance, I asked how the abuelita knew that Beyoncé was the mother of Beyoncita. Little by little we developed various scenarios (naming the child “Beyoncita” wasn’t enough, we considered and decided against the idea that maybe Jaime knew Beyoncé’s songs before the album dropped) until finally we hit upon the idea of the abuela listening in on the phone conversation and hearing Beyoncé singing on the other side of the line.
Students are contributing a lot of the imaginitive ideas in English at this point in the year (although I hope to enforce the “two words only” rule later). I turn their ideas into extremely simple Spanish sentences, repeatedly acting it out. Having students slap their heads every time we act out the moment when, at last, “¡ella sabe la verdad!” (she realizes the truth) leads to a culture of class jokes in which every line of the story refers back to an engaging creative process. It is the process, not the final story, that makes this work as a good language acquisition activity.
This class-created reading isn’t the only text we were reading this week.
We start class each day with a chapter from one of my extremely easy-to-read books. The books feature all of the words translated in the margins so that there are never any pre-reading activities necessary. It doesn’t matter if students don’t know some of the vocabulary. It’s all right there. So, the first time that students read the chapter, they do it on their own.
Within 5-7 minutes of the start of class, students have already finished reading the next chapter. Once students have finished, I ask them to join me with re-reading the chapter aloud.
This week I cited the research of linguist Paul Nation enough that on Thursday, when I asked them why we re-read texts, one of my students muttered, “that Australian dude”.
“Yes”, I responded, “linguist Paul Nation a.k.a. ‘that Australian dude’ has shown that reading a second, third and even a fourth time has a bigger impact on our vocabulary development than the first time we read a text. So it is very, very good to reread”.
The second time, as I read aloud (and students read along silently), I read in Spanish, but I also translate phrases as I am reading. Not the entire page; just phrases that I think are important. After our second reading, we all turn back to the beginning of the chapter. For each page I ask a few artful questions (otherwise known as “circling” from TPRS 1.0) to make sure that students can respond to questions about the plot of the novel. Often, I will add a personalized question or two.
For example, in Spanish I might ask, “In chapter 7, where is Esme?”. Students respond in chorus: “la biblioteca” (the library). I hear someone say “library” in English, so I turn to a student who definitely knows the right answer and I ask (in Spanish): “¿cómo se dice ‘biblioteca’ en inglés?” (how do you say ‘library’ in English?). Then I turn to another student and ask “¿cómo se dice ‘library’ en español?” (how do you say library in Spanish?). Finally, I ask the whole class, “¿Hay una biblioteca pública aquí en XXX?” (Is there a public library here in XXX?). I write “pública = public” on the whiteboard. We talk for a moment about public libraries: did they used to go to the library as kids? Did librarians tell them stories? Who has a library card? What is the town library like… is it a big building? I can do this mostly in Spanish with some code-switching. Then back to the book until we finish the chapter.
The final step in this reading session is a little TPRS 2.0-style questioning. I choose one verb and write the conjugations for first, second and third persons on the board. For example:
estoy – I am
estás – you are
está – he/she is
I tell my students that they are going to pretend to be Esme from our book. I am Mr. Peto, of course. “Esme”, I call out, and then I make eye contact with a student named Claire. “Claire-Esme, ¿dónde estoy?”, I ask her.
“en clase de español”, Claire responds.
“Correcto, but say it with the verb: YOU ARE in Spanish class”, I respond.
“Estoy en la clase de español”.
I point at the board.
“You just said, ‘I am in Spanish Class’. I want you to say, ‘You are in Spanish Class’”.
“Estás en la clase de español”, Claire responds.
“Y tú, Claire-ESME, ¿dónde estás ahora?”, I ask.
“Estás… Estoy en la biblioteca”.
“Correcto. Estás en la biblioteca. Y yo… ¿estoy en la biblioteca o la clase?”, I ask again.
“Estás en la clase”, she responds confidently.
“Y Jay-Z, ¿dónde está Jay-Z?”, I ask her.
“Jay-Z está en el baño”.
Actually, it took more repetitive questioning before she responded with confidence, without looking at the board. I continue asking Claire about where our characters are until she is using the correct verb form consistently, without pausing. Then I might do the same routine with another student, or maybe not. However, I am convinced that the entire class benefits by observing this routine every day. The second student always picks this up better than the first student. The next day I choose a different verb, asking who has something, or who wants something, etc. Each day we choose ONE verb. Slowly, over the course of several weeks, we are going through all Sweet 16 verbs, methodically exposing students to the 1st, 2nd and 3rd person conjugations of each verb.
I have added this TPRS 2.0 routine to my whole class reading session that starts the class. Sometimes we do it again towards the end of class if we have time, but most of class is dominated by the third-person conjugations as we describe picture talks, movie talks, and find other ways to talk about people and places. Even in the card talks that we have been doing, I haven’t used much of the 2nd person as I talk about what students illustrate. Instead, I look at a drawing and announce, “Jillian likes to use her cell phone” as I hold up her card.
In the next few weeks I’ll schedule more student interviews and I will make a point to add more personalized questions such as the questions about the town library so that I can be sure to use more 1st and 2nd person conjugations in our conversations.
The three books that I am using for low-level reading (with all words defined on the page) are the two Esme & Beto novels and the “Cat can be a hat” comic book. These books are available in French, German and Spanish .
If you are interested in the activities that I describe, they are all presented in detail with video demonstrations inside the CI Master Class (um, which is on sale during February—50% off!!). This is virtually a zero-prep approach to creating a conversational language class that reacts to and develops the creativity of your students. And it includes all of the eBooks!
I’ll try to write updates about my classes every Saturday, describing the magical moments that happen while fine-tuning the approach so that my students acquire with confidence and joy.
Mike