Become a more confident language teacher.
Can you believe that I didn’t realize what a glyph was until last year? I mean, I had been using them, I just didn’t know what they were called. I kept seeing the word ‘glyph’ on Pinterest and ignoring it because it sounded like something I wouldn’t like. Some kind of a really intense reading…
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I enjoy coming up with (or discovering) different kinds of questions to ask my students. It must be some sort of a sick teacher thing, because I can’t think of any reason that my students would be excited that a new question type popped up on their most recent assessment. I guess I like finding…
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Thanks to Samantha Uebel, who sent me French translations for my QAR materials, all of you French teachers out there can rest easy knowing that you can pop into class tomorrow and try out QAR without having to do the grunt work of translating everything for yourselves!! Yippee! Click here to download the materials in French,…
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If you attended my workshop on QAR Strategies for Differentiating Questions at iFLT this past summer or its condensed counterpart at AFLA just a few weekends ago, you will be happy to see this post! If you didn’t, I hope that you will be happy to have found it once you’ve read through it. QAR (Question-Answer Relationships)…
Read MoreIn my PQA Hooks presentation at iFLT, I shared several activities that I use to get repetitions of target structures other than traditional PQA or Storyasking. For each of the activities, I asked participants to brainstorm ways that they could use them in their classes, and I’ll be sharing their ideas over the next few…
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About two months ago, I wrote a post explaining how second language teachers can use the Common Core Anchor Standards for Reading to give depth to their reading assessments and challenge students to think critically in the target language. Read it here. Understandably, some readers were left wondering what an assessment composed of CCSS Aligned questions…
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Scott Benedict is the king of assessment, so if you have never before pondered accurate assessment, standards-based assessment, etc., you should probably hop on over to his site, Teach for June, and spend the next few weeks there before you come back and finish reading this post. If you have already reached the conclusion that it…
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I love this simple activity that I found on Pinterest because it is just so adaptable and takes zero preparation! As Comprehensible Input teachers, we are always looking for new ways to revisit stories, readings, and discussions so as to provide students with additional repetitions of target structures. Jeopardy Q&A is backward questioning–providing students with…
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I used this activity for the first time as an icebreaker at our MOPS group, and it was so fun! I love using it in class, because it is a great way to give everyone an opportunity to speak without eliminating teacher-guided discussion. So here’s what you do: Decide how many groups you want to…
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I love using QAR with my classes, but it’s always difficult to train students how to (1) write questions themselves and (2) write questions that fit into a specific QAR category. This year, I am trying to ease my students into question writing gently before we learn actually tackle QAR. First, I gave my students…
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