What is grammar instruction? What does it do for language acquisition, and what should its role be in a language classroom? These are some of the questions that a group of enthusiastic language teachers tackled on Friday evening at OFLA with Keynote speaker, Paul Toth (read his bio here). Following Carol Gaab’s address at the OFLA awards group,…
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After four decades of research in the area of second language acquisition, it is clear that language is acquired not from practice (drills), but from consistent and constant exposure to input. Input is indispensable to language acquisition–meaning that language cannot be acquired without it. This idea of the indispensability of input was largely absent from my language…
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Grammar. You just cringed; didn’t you?! I knew it. Golly there seems to be a lot of discord in the virtual realm lately—lots of professional disagreement about many different aspects of language teaching; but nothing that seems to bring out the war cries like a good old-fashioned mention of grammar. As Justo Lamas croons in…
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We’ve all said it at some point: “HELP! My students don’t get [when to use ser or estar][how to form the subjunctive][the difference between “I have” and “you have” in Spanish]! What should I do???” We run to our fellow department members (if we are fortunate enough to have any) or turn to our PLC for…
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Yippee Yay! Dana Wilson emailed me most of the French translations of my Spanish question word posters earlier this week, and Catherine Ousselin (@CatherineKU72) helped me out with a few more! Mercy beau coup! Click on the image to download the file. What else is new for the 2015 school year? Check out these recently…
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I need to make an FAQ page. Here is one that came through today: …I was looking at your website and I was curious if you teach the “nosotros” or “ustedes” forms in Spanish 1. If so, is there a certain unit in which you teach it? Thanks! The answer is, “YES, absolutely!” I don’t…
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I am a very bossy person by nature, and unfortunately I didn’t realize it until right after I graduated from high school. By the grace of God, I’ve learned how to tame my nasty natural instincts…although it’s not always easy! Being married helps 🙂 I think that this is why the game that I’m about…
Read MoreI promised a reader I’d have these uploaded by the 20th, and by golly I’ve made the deadline! Use these notes to teach a focused grammar lesson on the present indicative of -IR verbs without departing from culture or comprehensible input. Your students will learn about the guajeros of Guatemala–children that live and/or work in garbage…
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A reader recently wrote and requested that I add -ER and -IR present indicative verb notes to my TpT page, and I am very excited about the facelift that I gave the notes that I used to use! Since I am always trying to work cultural into the content that I teach, I figured that…
Read MoreThe journey continues…and I am continuing to love it as my students continue to have great success learning new structures and producing grammatically correct past narration! Woohoo! We followed up our focused study of -AR regular preterite verbs, using the “La muchacha y la ardilla” story, with a focused study of -ER and -IR regular…
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