Here is another of many zero-prep activities that’s loads of easy fun and which delivers lots of personalized C.I. This is done entirely in the target language.
At the start of every class, I do my intro routine. When we are finished with this, I often do the following:
1. Get the kids to sit in pairs (threes also work). 2. Put a pen or pencil on the desk between them. 3. Listen to every thing I say. 4. If what I say is true, grab the pen. If what I say is false, leave the pen. 5. If you grab the pen and the statement is true, you get a point. 6. If you grabbed the pen, and what I said was false, you lose a point. 7. If you do nothing, you neither gain nor lose.
Sooo….during opening routine, let’s say Sameeha says yesterday I watched TV and John says I went to my friend’s house. Also, we have established that today is Friday, June 13th, and it’s sunny. I will then say things like
Class, yesterday Sameeha watched a movie! (false) Class, yesterday John went to his friend’s house. (true) Class, today it’s raining. (false)
You can also do things like change the statements to first or third person. EG, if Kiran says last night I studied for a math test, I can change that to class, last night Kiran says she studied for a math test. You can see that I can also add I said or he said that…
September and January mean new classes, and most of us teach Level 2 and up as well as beginners, and so I was asked, what kind of review should I be doing with my 2s?
Today’s question: Should I do a “review unit”? Answer: We can…but we don’t need to.
We don’t need to do “review units” because…
First, good C.I. teaching always recycles vocabulary and checks for understanding. When you start your first story, or Person of the Day or whatever you do on Day 1 of Level 2, you are going to ask eg “are you a girl?” and if the answer is wrong, epically slow or non-existent, well, you stop and stay on that sentence until your student gets it right. When the student gets it right, your class will have had lots of good input, so they will “have it,” at least in their heads.
And when you ask a story, or describe a picture or whatever, you check for comprehension by asking “Johnny, what does el chico no quiso comer la arana enorme mean?” and again, if you don’t get “Johnny didn’t want to eat the giant spider,” you stay on that sentence by clarifying and then asking questions about it. If you are finding, wow, they don’t understand much at all, you simplify your story or whatever.
Second, “review units” are BORING. I don’t know what a “review unit” would look like in a C.I. class– I have never done or needed one– but in my textbook days the kids would say “we knoooow this” or “this is boooring.”
Third, the best way to “review” anything is touse it in the context of something new. Which is exactly what stories, or Person of the Day, or Movietalk, or Picturetalk, are.
Here are a few comments from the on-point crew at C.I. Fight Club:
Adam’s got a solid point: as Blaine Ray puts it, we have to “figure out what they don’t know, and start there,” and his way of doing that is with a story with very familiar vocab.
And Elicia makes another good point: taught =/= got. Anybody who inherits kids from a legacy-methods teacher knows this. Hell, even kids who get As in legacy classes don’t remember much, because their experience is about learning (conscious mind and memory) rather than acquisition. And the kid with academic or personal-life challenges who remembers very little is not going to be happy doing a “unit” that focuses on remembering things from the past. That kid will acquire much more if they are in the comfort of a C.I. class where all they have to do is pay attention.
So…is there any way to review vocab? Sure, as Meg Volz reminds us:
I saw a Facebook post recently where a teacher got the “Teacher of the Month” at their school. Which made me wonder, should there be awards for teachers?
What is an award? Well, it’s public recognition that somebody (or an institution) has done something exceptionally, according to a defined set of criteria, and it often comes with one or more of the following: a ceremony, a prize of some kind, special benefits for the recipient, and public acknowledgment of the recipient.
What is the point of an award? All awards basically say, what this person did and how they did it are worthwhile, and what everybody should do. They are norms, and institutional commands. When Johnny gets a star on his spelling test for getting 9/10– and the rest of the class can see that he got the star–the teacher is saying to the class, what Johnny did was good, and everybody should try to do the same thing. When a teacher gets an award, much the same is true.
Now awards, as Alfie Kohn has spent an entire career pointing out, are absolutely toxic for students. Why? 1. They remove intrinsic motivation, ie, they make students work for An Object, not because they find the work interesting. 2. When The Object is no longer offered, why do the work? 3. They automatically make most students not care, because everybody knows who the egg-head/super-jock is, and knows they can’t compete, so why bother trying? 4. While awards may make sense in some adult situations (eg the Superb Owl, the Word Series), the implicit point of awards– compete, so you can be better than the other people, and then be recognised for it– has nothing to do with what we know about how education (and most of life) best works. Ideally, in education, people do work because they like it and they find it personally rewarding.
So…should teachers get– or accept– awards? I would say, generally, absolutely not. To explain why, let’s see what teachers say about this, from C.I. Fight Club.
POV: when you’re the last one to get the award:
You think there’s politics involved in who wins Teacher of the Year or other awards? Hmmmm…
Ah yes the public B.S. of “who will win?” and the ridiculous amount of work required. While this is fair criticism, awards here are a choice.
You mean, teaching awards are sometimes mere popularity contests?
And finally, this sums it all up:
I don’t think teachers should compete for awards, or accept them if offered. Education isn’t sportsball, and schools should not be about competition. The question should always be, how can the energy, resources and time we devotes to awards be used to make the system as a whole better?
ChatGPT– what is it good for? Schlub work, say it again! ChatGPT is one of the best tools I have ever seen for language teaching because it takes much of the schlub work– the tedium, the boring stuff– out of transcribing class activities.
Low on reading material? Need some reading material about your own students? How about some reading material about your own students which comes with its own simple quiz? Yes, yes and yes, obviously. Well, fret no more: ChatGPTis here to help.
Check it: I asked ChatGPT to “write a TPRS-style story about a boy named Mustafa who likes monkeys. Include humour and dialogue and use a limited number of unique words.“
I then told it to “make a multiple-choice quiz about the story,” and the results are here.
What did I get? Well, it’s not perfect…but it’s pretty damned good, the Spanish is grammatically correct, and it took literally 20 seconds. Some of the modifications I have played around with include:
include…humour, dialogue, descriptions of the weather, numbers 0-30, the names of Latin American capital cities, etc etc
write in the present/past/future tense
use the words ____ , ____ and ______
use only the words ____ , ____ and ______
exclude _____
write at a Grade _____ / CEFR A1 / ACTFL Advanced Low reading level
telling it the plot, or specific elements thereof (eg “include a conversation about food” or “include a car chase”)
The possibilities are endless. For example, say you are doing Tina Hargaden’s One-Word Images or my own Draw And Discuss. Put a kid on your computer and have them type (in English or their L1) a description of the OWI or story into ChatGPT. When the OWI description or story narration is done, tell ChatGPT to create a paragraph about ____ in the target language, press “generate” and poof! the program will spit out a printout of what happened in class.
If you are asking a TPRS-style story, you can do the same: have a kid type in a sentence at a time. At the end, you get a printout of EXACTLY what you asked and the class came up with. One could do the same with Movietalk or Picturetalk.
I did a very very simple experiment last week with my student Mustafa. Mustafa has taken three years of French in a traditional class (speaking “practice,” worksheets, projects, oral exams etc). He has done one year of French at my school but I am not sure where he has done his other two. He has taken two years of Spanish (with me), where all he gets is lots of comprehended input.
I asked Mustafa the same four questions in French, and then in Spanish. This is year 1 and year 2 vocab: high-frequency, and would be part of any beginning French or Spanish curriculum. These questions were unrehearsed, and the conversation was 100% spontaneous. Here is the video; comments follow.
What I noted was:
Mustafa can spontaneously speak a TON of Spanish, and basically no French.
He doesn’t understand at least two of the French questions.
While there a few errors in his Spanish (eg me gusta comi galletas; hace nublado) it is fluent and 100% comprehensible. If he went to Mexico or Spain, he would have zero problems making himself understood.
When he is speaking French– or trying to– you can see his eyes roll up. This shows he is consciously searching for words. He doesn’t do this in Spanish.
What I conclude is, first, C.I. works. By any standard, he’s crushing in Spanish and at best wobbly in French.
Second, C.I. is much more efficient than skill-building. He does three times as well in Spanish, having only had two-thirds of the instructional time.
Third, C.I. is a whole lot more fun than skill building. C.I. Spanish does not include a. tedious “ask your partner the following five questions” (to which all kids already know the answers, and therefore chat in English) C.P.A.s b. oral “exams” involving fake scenarios and role-play c. worksheets (which don’t help people who can’t do them, and aren’t necessary for those who can) d. writing revision, which is something that you need very advanced language to benefit from e. self-reflection, goal-setting, portfolios or any other worthwhile things that become gimmicks in the language classroom
A parent once said to me that what she as a student wanted most from a class was a feeling of competence ie “I got this.” Mustafa’s got it.
Somebody gave me this French 9 (Level 2) exam today and, well, knowing what not to do is as important as getting it right. Sooo…
First, this doesn’t assess meaningful communication. Showing Monsieur that you can conjugate verbs is…linguistics.
Second, it’s absolutely decontextualised. It’s not a story, a news report, entertainment etc. The sheer randomness of this will throw some kids off.
Third, the “sort the verbs into two categories” activity (aka “Dr and Mrs Vandertramp”) is pointless. To put it another way, if a kid says “j’ai allé à l’école” instead of “je suis allé,” is there any miscommunication? Is a French speaker going to misunderstand? No— they’re gonna think je suis hereux qu’il parle du français ❤️❤️. And I guarantee you that no French-speaking five-year-old messes these verbs up, AND I guarantee they have no idea what these verb categories are.
What if you’re a normal kid and you find grammar instruction boring AF, but will pay attention to things that are actually interesting? You could very know from avoir and être verbs— ie by using them “correctly”— and still not be able to sort them into two categories.
I also cannot find a single line in B.C.’s French curriculum’s objectives that includes whatever this test is assessing.
When I went climbing in Colombia in 2008, I found Colombian climbers who all spoke excellent English. Asked how they had learned, all said a variation of school was totally boring and useless…but subtitled movies and YouTube and TV in English are great. When I was in Mexico in summer of 2022, the Mexicans who spoke good English all repeated what the Colombians had said, but with an addition: I play a lot of World of Warcraft/Call of Duty/Guild Wars etc, as well as I use Duolingo (or other such apps).
Is this true? Do people actually acquire lots of language from gaming? Yup..and thanks to C.I. Fight Club‘s Joe Kelley, we now have some solid data. In this paper, Dixon, Dixon & Jordan looked at what effects gaming in an additional language had on gamers’ language acquisition. Here is a brief summary. Discussion follows.
A caveat: these studies measured vocabulary acquisition only. This is a decent, but incomplete, picture of what ppl have picked up from exposure to a language. But it’s a useful base: if we know vocab, we can undertsand the language, and that understanding leads to implicit acquisition of “grammar” over time.
So what did we learn?
Not all games are of equal value. “Non-educational” games produced much greater gains than dumb stuff like Quizlets or Kahoots (which are basically flashcards). Actual fun games also outperformed the likes of Duolingo, which is just a sophisticated flashcard.
Fun matters. The authors note that “Further limiting the success of educational games [eg Duolingo] is the idea that these games replace ‘play’ with “repetitive and superficial tasks in which the learning objectives are too obvious” (Reinhardt, 2019).” Students can smell b.s. a mile away. And while kids may have low “performance” with the language they are acquiring, their brains are cognitively quite advanced. So dumb activities like “match the word to its definition” are going to make ppl feel spoken down to and bored. This is crucial to remember: vocab level and brain development in a language classroom are not in sync, so we must increase the thinking whilst decreasing the amount of vocab used.
Exactly as anyone who reads would have predicted, “[G]ames requiring no output from participants showed the greatest positive effect (d-weighted = 1.60) on L2 learning outcomes.” In other words, students don’t need to speak or write in the target language to acquire it.
There is some interesting discussion about why (in the context of video games) speaking and writing requirements seem to slow acquisition. First, when speaking (or writing), we aren’t getting input, and input is what drives acquisition. Second, the authors speculate that the real-time cognitive demands of gaming overload players. When you are listening to (or reading) a new language, AND moving a game controller AND processing non-linguistic input, AND planning moves, your brain is super-busy. The amount of “conscious bandwidth” available for processing language is limited, and so people pay less attention to everything, including language.
Like anything else one might do in a language classroom, the overall message of gaming studies is, if it’s interesting and comprehensible, people will want to do it and will acquire language from it. I wouldn’t assign games as homework, or have kids play these in class, but I have told them “if you can play a game in Spanish or using Spanish settings, or with Spanish speakers, you are going to pick things up.”
There seems to be a lesson here for eg DuoLingo: stop teaching people, and start interesting them.
It’s January 2022 and Wordle— also in German, French and Spanish— has become the ninth stage of COVID. And to nobody’s surprise, Wordle has gotten some good Twitter press by language teachers who advocate for its use. This happens every few years: a word game shows up, and people love it.
Varied word games’ common threads include the use of fine visual perception, logic and target-language knowledge to find words. Word games include Hangman, Wordle, crossword puzzles, word searches, acrostics and so forth. So, today’s question: Should I use word games in my language classroom?
My answer: Generally, no. And why not?
Well, first principles: language is acquired only by processing comprehended input in a communicative context. And a communicative context is a situation where meaning is created, negotiated and/or exchanged for a given purpose. Meaning is something non-linguistic: enjoying a story, gathering information, evaluating information, etc.
So, what are the problems with word games?
First, you have know the word you are looking for.For example, in Hangman or Wordle, we might get to this: __ R __ L L. If you have lots of English, you will make some guesses such as troll, droll, trill, drill and so on. If you are a learner of English, you will be blindly throwing letters in there, hoping for a hit, and if you get it, you probably won’t know the word’s meaning.
Second, you are not processing meaning with these games. You can find words in a word search, Hangman game or Wordle simply by using logic, visual recognition and guesswork. When Wordle tells you that your __ R _ L L guess, DRILL, is correct, yaaay! you won, and you don’t have to know what “drill” means.
Third, Wordle, Hangman and acrostics are hard in additional languages. I can solve any English Wordle in three lines. Spanish, French and German Wordles completely kick my ass…and I have way more of those languages than do most learners in high school or college.
Textbook publishers sell the wordgame parts of their books & workbooks by arguing that eg “trying to remember French words will help kids acquire them.” Now, there is research from conscious learning domains which says something like, if you practice recalling something, you will remember it better (this is why eg flashcards work). But this is not true for language acquisition. The language version of this is, the more often you process a word in a communicative context (ie hear/read it), the more likely you are to remember it.
Acrostics are especially stupid. If you can see the word, you circle it. Again, you can do this without attending to meaning. I’m reminded of Sudoku. When I saw my first Sudoku, I first figured out what to do (basically if X is here, then Y cannot be, rinse and repeat), which was interesting. Actually doing a Sudoku involves almost zero brain: follow the procedure and you get there. Basically, if a computer can generate it, it’s boring to do.
If you want to play games in the TL, here are two suggestions which involve zero prep, are fun, and involve processing meaning.
1. Grab the pen. After you read/create a story, or do anything, get the kids in pairs, put a pen between members of each pair, and say either a true or a false TL statement about your reading, story etc aloud. If they agree, they have to grab the pen. They get a point for grabbing the pen first, but they lose a point if they grab the pen when the statement is false. This game seems ridiculous but kids love it.
2. Who Am I Describing? Divide the class into 2-6 teams. Make a TL statement about anyone in the class, or any character in the story, or somebody famous, etc. EG: this girl rides a motorcyle or this boy really likesballet. The first person who puts up their hand sand says you aredescribing ____ gets a point for their team. You can make this simple– I have played this on Day One after our first story– or complex, by eg lying about people.
Some of my kids started drawing on the board between classes or when I was out grabbing coffee. Some of these pictures were awesome, and so one day I just started discussing these.
Phil is a guy. Phil eats apples in his orchard. One day Phil looks out the window and sees a giant angry apple named Alberto. The giant angry apple chases Phil, because Phil ate his son. Alberto eats Phil.
Today we had a cigarette-smoking penguin, and Dracula grabbing Phish. I asked questions such as what is Dracula thinking? and why does the penguin smoke? I wrote some answers down, and then circled— asked comprehension questions about— the kids’ answers.
I added personalised questions such as Bikram, do you smoke? and who likes to drink blood? We got some good weird answers and fun chat out of it.
Spanish teachers, note use of the subjunctive 😂😂. I don’t care if the kids can produce it but if they understand…
The next logical step would be, write these down and discuss them. I should upload the photos onto our class Team and get the kids to read these.
UPDATE: Inspired by Blaine Ray, I got a student to be the voice of the penguin. I asked the penguin questions and he asked me questions (like in a TPRS story). So if I narrate the penguin smokes, I will ask the kid speaking for the penguin do you smoke? and they will say yes I smoke, and ask me.
People do their PhDs— hell, their careers— on this topic. But since you are a busy teacher and you are just dying to get home and grab a drin— er, a stack of papers to mark— we’ll provide a short ‘n’ sweet four point one part answer, three parts of which were told to me by a guy who started his career as a substitute teacher and ended it as a Deputy Minister of Education.
Life isn’t fair, neither is work, there are no guarantees, bla bla bla…but here— beyond knowing your subject and the basics of how to teach it— here is what you must do if you want a chance.
ACYA: Always Cover Your Ass.
Steal anything worthwhile.
Get to appropriately know your students.
Do what it takes.
1. Always cover your ass. Worried there’s too many kids to safely supervise on the fieldtrip? Email your admins stating your concerns. Want to show a risqué film? Send a permission letter home first and cc the admin. Photocopying something you need but don’t have the $$ for? Notify your department head. Johnny failing French? Email his adults and lay out the facts and consequences before report cards. If push ever comes to shove, you need to have the receipts. The bottom line sadly needs to be, my boss(es) were notified about this.
2. If you see something, steal something 😉. If the basketball coach does something that works in your Spanish class, you do that. Find a great ____ in the photocopy/staff room, on Facebook/Insta etc? GRAB IT. Do not reinvent the wheel, acknowledge authorship, and definitely prize your non-teaching life.
3. Any psychologist will tell you something like the following: nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care. This goes doubly for kids. You mustget to appropriately know your kids, starting with their names properly pronounced, their pronouns, and progressing to basic facts about them, if you expect them to open up and to respect you. I recall reading somewhere that knowing name + two facts about someone = “trust baseline.”
For the language teacher, part of this is personalisation, which means making the subject matter reflect students’ interests. If people feel like they have input into ____, they are much more likely to care about it.
4. Any successful teacher will do what it takesto get kids to succeed, given who their students are, what the school & community are like, and where the students are in their learning.
This means some or all of the following:
ignoring stupid school/District/State mandates re: planning, texts, textbooks, activities, tests. One size almost never fits all, and if a publisher makes it, it serves an agenda which probably has very little to do with kids.
closing the door and focusing on what works even if your Defartment Head who has been teaching the same class as you for 30 years disagrees.
customising instruction for your students. If you have eg Black kids, you may want to avoid To Kill A Mockingbird or The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, even though white liberals looooove these. Language teachers will personalise input. As Blaine Ray says, any good teacher will “figure out what they don’t know, and start there.”
It is really important to note that we know very little about how learning actually works, as David Bowles notes. If I could summarise 22 years of teaching and observing kids, I would say that students want to feel like they learned something from a class, and that this learning leads to both freedom and community.
And finally, Peg Richel’s Ultimate Teacher Survival Dictum: You are not responsible for students’ learning. You are responsible for providing the optimum-possible learning environment (which includes materials, lessons and feedback etc). Students— and society, and the political system— make the rest of the choices.
t.p.r.s. q&a 