But They Can’t Conjugate Verbs!

(I looked for an image for upset Spanish teacher and this was all I got)

Here is a comment from the SPANISH TEACHERS IN THE US page on Facebook. Here, Dan brings up a classic argument between a more traditional language teacher and a C.I. practitioner

Here is a response to a discussion about whether or not C.I. delivers better results than does the textbook:

My first question to Dan’s interlocutor– the teacher who has inherited some C.I.-taught kids who can’t conjugate saber— is, what do you mean by “conjugate?”

If we mean, can we tell the kid “conjugate the verb saber in the present indicative yo a.k.a. first person form” and can they do it?, the answer might well be no. This is because consciously knowing

1. what an infinitive is
2. what conjugating is
3. what first person is
4. the rule

is what we would call conscious knowledge– Bill VanPatten calls it “explicit knowledge” and Krashen “Monitor awareness.” Neither of these have anything to do with the subconscious linguistic system where language is acquired, processed and stored. We can successfully use a variety of grammar “rules”– such as saying “I am” instead of “I are,“, or “I enjoy running” instead of “I enjoy to run“– without knowing (or even having been taught the rule).

As Bob Patrick says, conjugate the verb to run in the pluperfect passive third person progressive. Can you do this? Really?  You mean you can’t say the race had been being run on demand?

Knowing the “rules,” and how and when and where to apply them, does not guarantee successful production of language.

As Jason Rothman (2008) write, “Variation in language use is simply a fact of all output, native and non-native. As a result, any given linguistic performance does not always accurately represent underlying competence.”

My second question to Dan’s interlocutor is, can textbook-taught kids produce this– or any other verbform– on demand better than C.I. taught kids? Maybe. It’s possible that Johnny’s Spanish teacher has hammered away at verb tables bla bla bla and Johnny, that eager beaver, has spent countless hours studying, and can now say “right, —er verb, first person, irregular, lemme see, uh, sé.”

The real question, however, is do they do it without being asked to do it, ie in real-time, unrehearsed communication? If my experience of 12 years with the text is a guide, no, absolutely not, and the same goes true for writing. Kids taught with textbooks and a focus on grammar rules memorise dialogues, and they do not produce very much (nevermind very much good) written language spontaneously.  Here is an example of just how grammatically accurate kids taught with C.I. can be.

My third question to Dan’s interlocutor is, what cost does an obsession with perfect grammatical output carry? If Johnny’s Spanish teacher gets the kids to obsess over verb tables, that means they won’t be either “practising” other grammar, or– worse– getting input. There will also be a cost to students’ enjoyment of Spanish: reading/watching good stories is way more fun than doing tedious grammar stuff, correcting one’s writing, etc.  And this means that students who end up in grammar and textbook programs drop out more, as Grant Boulanger has thoroughly documented. It also means that, in the long run, students will not do as well in a textbook/grammar program as they will in a C.I. program (see Part Two of Boulanger’s work here).

My fourth question to Dan’s interlocutor is, if you put a C.I.-taught kid on the spot and get them to meaningfully communicate, can they do it well? My answer: generally– if the task is developmentally appropriate— yes, they can. We have to be realistic about what we can get done in a language class.  Babies get 4,000-5,000 hours of input before they start saying single words; at age 6 (after ~14,000 hrs of input), kids are still making errors with irregular past-tense verbs in English. They are, however, communicating just fine.

My fifth question to Dan’s interlocutor: when C.I.-taught kids use sabo instead of sé, how much of a problem is that? My answer: a Mexican or a Spaniard who hears a kid say “yo no sabo donde está el baño” is going to know exactly what the kid is trying to say. This is like a Chinese kid asking you “where bathroom?” Mandarin doesn’t have “to be” the way English does, and the Chinese kid obviously hasn’t “studied hard enough,” as a grammarian would say, but we get that the Chinese kid means “where is the bathroom?” When a Mexican asks, “did he went to the bathroom?,” we understand just fine and we don’t freak out that, OMG, he didn’t learn the rule for bla bla bla past tense.

My sixth question is this: on what State or ACTFL standard does “can conjugate isolated verb forms in _____ case” appear? Being able to do this in and of itself is not a communicative objective.

Finally, I’d point one thing out to Dan’s interlocutor: When Johnny gets to Spain or Bolivia, he is going to hear more– and better– Spanish in 6 days than he will in class in one year.  Input will ramp up so much that Johnny’s errors will inevitably get corrected by the epic amounts of Spanish he is hearing.

 

 

 

Frequency List Lessons

There was a recent discussion in which a teacher said, my department head insisted on teaching only the present tense in Level 1, the preterite in Level 2, etc.  This Head’s reasoning was, people must “master” one set of “vocabulary” at a time. Bad idea.

Anyway, let us look at which verbforms in Spanish are actually most frequently used.  Here, from Wiktionary.com’s Spanish Frequency List, are the most-used verbs in Spanish, then some ideas about what this means for teachers.

The verbform is as given, and the number refers to how close to most-used the verbform is.  The lower the number, the more often used the verb is. Reference point: in Spanish, the most-used word is que (“what” or “that”) whose number is therefore 1.  The second most-used word is de (“of” or “from”) whose number is 2, and the articles la and el (“the”) are the 6th and 7th most-frequently-used words.  OK, verbs:

8.             es 22           está 42           vamos 44           hay 47           estoy 48           tengo 53           ha 55           sé 56           estás 58           puedo 60           quiero 62           soy 63           tiene 68           fue 69           ser 70           hacer 71           son 73           era 74           eres 76           tienes 77           creo 79           he 81           voy 82           puede 83           sabes 91           quieres 100        estaba 102         están 103         va 109         siento 110         tenemos

111         puedes 115         ver 124         decir 128         ir 132         has 136         estar 137        estamos 141        quiere 146        trabajo 148        mira 149        vas 150        sea 154        hecho 156        dijo 157        pasa 162        hablar 169        espera 171        han 173        sabe 177        fuera 181        podemos 182        dije 184        necesito 185        estado 186        podría 187        acuerdo 189        tener 190        dice 192        crees 194        gusta 197        será 198        haciendo 202        había

First, the facts.

A.  The top 202 most-used Spanish words include

• verbs in seven verb tenses (present, preterite, imperfect, present perfect, present progressive, formal future, informal future e.g. va a hablar)
• verbs in two subjunctive moods (present and past)
• reflexive verbs

B. Verbs we think are oft-used such as gustar are less-used than for example fue. 

C. The traditional textbook order of teaching verb tenses (typically, present ⇒ preterite ⇒ imperfect ⇒ present perfect ⇒ subjunctive) is totally at odds with how frequently verb forms are actually used.

The implications (in no particular order):

1. Traditional textbook verb sequencing will not help students in real-world use. Most students will not take five years of Spanish– two is more typical– and so traditional sequencing will overplay less-used “categories” (e.g. stem-changing verbs) and underplay what actually gets used (everything, basically).  They will therefore understand less than they should/could.
   

   We know this:  according to Davies and others, the 1500 most-used words make up 85% of all spoken language (in any language).  A reasonable target for a five-year high-school language program would therefore be, 300 words per year, more or less.  What if students only take two?  Well then, they will get the most benefit from using the 600 most-used words.

2. Textbook sequencing does not properly “model” grammar “rules.”  It is pretty obvious that everything normally used is “mixed together.”  A four year old will say something like yesterday Daddy took me to a playdate.  I hurt myself playing with Jason. But it was fun.  I like playing with Jason.  He’s nice.  Here, there are three verb tenses and a reflexive verb.In Spanish, English speakers have a whack of verb subtleties to soak up.  For example, the term “I was” could be estaba, estuve, me sentí or fui. If we teach one tense as a time, as the textbook does, we play up the morphology (form) at the expense of contextual “rule” awareness.  E.g. a Colombian will say cuando estaba cansado ayer en la tarde, me tomé un tinto (“when I was tired yesterday afternoon, I grabbed a coffee”).  The Colombian has acquired the “rule” that the preterite tense “interrupts” the “background” that the imperfect tense establishes.In a traditional textbook, however (eg the ¡Juntos! books I used to use), students will spend quite a while on the preterite, and then on the imperfect.  Even if they acquire the specific forms (which they generally don’t, because nobody is on anybody else’s schedule in terms of acquisition), when a new form shows up, two things happen:

   a. they will start using the new form (verb endings) everywhere and apparently forget the older form’s endings.  Kids who knew to say ayer yo fui a la escuela now say ayer yo iba a la escuela intending to mean the same thing.

   b. when (if) they pick up the new form, they will have huge problems “knowing” which form to use where.  Why?  Because there are so many “rules” to remember that the only effective way to pick them up is from contextual input modeling.  Basically, we need to hear an ocean of meaningful Spanish sentences which use both these verb tenses together.  This is true in any language of any grammatical structure.

   An English speaker can do a thought experiment here:  what is the “rule” for using the very high-frequency English words some and any?  Why can’t I ask do you have some advice? or answer no I don’t have some advice for you?  Why can I say do you have some of those washers for my drum? but not do you have some ideas? 

Anyway.  There you go: some data and ideas about word frequency.  Comments as always welcome.

 

What Is My Daily Intro Routine?

I open every class with an intro routine.  I add one or two words per day, and by the end of the course, the kids have picked up about 90 expressions from just intro alone, and they have had loads of exposure to a huuuuge variety of grammar.  Here’s how I do it.

1.  I ask, class, what is the day? and class, what is the date? Then, I answer in the affirmative and ask a few questions:  class, is it Tuesday or Wednesday?  That’s right, it’s Wednesday.  Class, is it the 28th or the 29th?  That’s right:  it’s not the 28th– it’s the 29th. You can also start with the past tense on Day 1: Class, yesterday was the 3rd and it was Monday.  This will teach kids days and numbers 1-31 with zero effort.  Time: 1 minute.

    

2.  I ask class, what is the weather like today? That’s right, class: it’s snowing.  Class, was it snowing yesterday? That’s right:  yesterday, it wasn’t snowing: it was sunny! If the weather where you are never changes, talk about weather elsewhere. You can also start with the past tense here: Class, yesterday did it snow or did it rain?  That’s right, class: it snowed.  it did not rain. Spanish teachers are stoked: reps on hizo, llovió, estuvo etc.  Time:  1 minute.
   
   
   
   
3. The missing kid. This is great way for French and Spanish teachers to introduce the subjunctive.  If Zak is away, I say clase, Zak no está aquí.  ¿Dónde está?  [kids make suggestions] Clase, ¿es possible que Zak esté en casa? ¿Es possible que Zaka vaya al medico hoy? etc. Your pop-up is simply va means goes, and vaya means might be going or is maybe going.  Time: 1-5 minutes.If you’re a scene-spinner, you can turn this into a mini story:  Clase, Zak fue al médico porque tiene tres ojos.  No quiere tres ojos—quiere sólo dos.

    

4. We do what did you do last night?  First, I model it myself:  I tell the kids about my evening, thus: Class, last night I drove my  purple Ferrari home, and then I had a date with Angeline Jolie.  That’s right, class:  Ang is single so we had a date.  Our date was fun and romantic.  We went to McDonalds!  Ang was very happy but I threw up in my Ferrari. 

   I ask, Suzie, what did you do last night/yesterday?   Yes, I do this with Day 2 beginners.  I use the following “past tense PQA” chart.  Initially, the kids just read off it.  On Day 2, the question was what did you do last night? and they could only pick I went to…. and I played…

So I would ask a kid what did you do last night? and they would (in the first few days) read something like last night, I played GTA 5 or yesterday, I went to Wal Mart.  I would ask questions about their answers, re-state in 3rd person, and then do compare and contrast questions.  Here is a sample dialogue from today (we have had about 27 classes):

T:  Manpreet, what did you do last night?
S: Last night, I went to Wal-Mart.
T:  Class, did Manpreet go to Wal-Mart or to Safeway last night?
C: Wal-Mart.
T: Manpreet, did you go to 7-11 last night?
S: No, I went to Wal-Mart.

Here we are getting 1st, 2nd and 3rd person reps on the basic past tense.  I “allow” one new word per day, so after 8 days the kids at least recognise the basics (ie what is on the chart).  Yes, you can do this with total beginners and it’s a not-bad idea…because the longer people hear  _____, the more chances they have of picking it up.  After they recognise everything on the chart, I add a new word or two on the board per day. Time: 5-10 minutes.

5. The news. On Day 1, ask one news question: what happened in the news yesterday? Kids will say something like the Patriots played the Chargers. Write this on board, then S.L.O.W.L.Y. circle it. Introduce ONE verb form per day.

With that vocab, you can ask questions such as did the Patriots play the Broncos? (no) Did the Patriots play the Seahawks? More reps? Point to your question words and ask where did the Patriots play? and when did the Patriots play? You want to use where? and when? because these allow a lot of circling without adding any new vocab.

The next day, ask the same question what happened in the news? and circle the same item  briefly (if it happened again– eg if there was another football game, talk about that).  The talk about a different item eg Angelina Jolie dumped Brad Pitt!  Within 5 classes you will have a solid set of good vocab, kid centered, to discuss.  Only introduce one verb per day.  Time: 5 min.

6. On Friday, we do weekend plans, using this:

6. Soap operas grew organically out of  me blatantly lying about my evening activities.  Kids, were like, well if Sr can date Angelina Jolie, *I* can kiss Dave Franco.  For soap opera details, read this.  Soap operas have two parts:  creating the story, and (once enough has been created to fill a page) printing it out and reading it.  Time: 1-80 minutes, depending on class and energy.

7. Monday? Do selfies ‘n’ stuffies!  Time: 10-15 min. 

8. Birthdays. If you are organised, look ahead and– if it’s OK with the kid in question; know your audience– celebrate Birthday person’s special day.  I play on mando and sing “Cumpleaños Feliz” on the mando and ask questions like how old is Hafsa?  is she 14 or 15? Who is older: Hafsa or Señor Stolz? Hafsa, are you having a birthday party/dinner?

9. Read a story. With my 1s, after the first week, we daily read one of the short stories in the Spanish 1 FVR booklet. The Spanish-1-FVR-booklet Enid edit  is free!  I read one story aloud, and ask a few questions. This book has 30 + stories and works the Super 7 verbs hard. time: 5 min.
 

Note: we don’t do everything every day. Here is how you might organise it.  The missing kid gets done only when somebody is away.  Weather I do daily at the start of the course and less as time goes on.

Mon: weather, selfies ‘n’ stuffies or what did you do yesterday?
Tues: what did you do yesterday?, news.
Wed: weather, news.
Thurs: soap operas, what did you do yesterday?
Fri: news, weekend plans, assign selfies ‘n stuffies

If you like using class jobs, you can add “the newspaper reporter” and “soap opera writer” to the list.  This person’s job every class is to write (in the class notebook) the sentence or two you put on the board for the soap opera and for the news.  This will focus the kid(s) in question, and allow you to remember which block talked about what last class.

Anyway, the aims with the intro routine are to

• keep all language 100% comprehensible
• introduce a variety of grammar and vocab incrementally
• tailor language to student interests
• recycle things daily whilst avoiding themes or topics
• unshelter grammar
• build community indirectly

 

 

What Is Rule Overgeneralization, and What Can We Do About it?

So you are teaching with your text and in year one the kids “learn” first how to say “I like” in Spanish– me gusta– and then how to conjugate regular present-tense verbs.  And suddenly they are saying *yo gusto no trabajo. Then in Level 2 you “teach” them the past tense, like “she ran” is corrió.  And suddenly they are saying *los lunes corrió a la escuela.  These are a lot like how kids pick up L1:  they acquire Daddy went to the store and then later say Daddy goed yesterday.

This is “rule overgeneralisation:” a new “rule” shows up and suddenly it gets applied everywhere, inappropriately.

Kids pull out of this very quickly, mostly because of the masses of input they get from L1 parents and other adults.  But what can we do about this in the language classroom?

So some random notes:

1. Avoiding conscious learning is the first key.  If you have to consciously learn AND remember AND apply “rules” in real time– ie during oral production– you will naturally default to the most recently-learned rule.  So all that hard work on the present tense seems to go out the window when the passé composé gets introduced.  This is not cos kids are dumb, lazy etc, but it is a brain-structure and bandwidth problem: you have a limited amount of conscious brainpower, and forcing it to “learn” and then remember and apply “grammar rules” (and the brain, as Bill VanPatten reminds us, doesn’t even actually use what we teachers call “grammar rules” in the first place) is too much.  Too many mental balls to juggle. TPRS or AIM-style stories, Movietalk, Picturetalk, novels etc– i.e. interesting comprehensible input– will take care of a bunch of this.

2.  Unsequenced or “unsheltered” grammar is second. Blaine Ray and Susan Gross pioneered using “unsheltered” grammar– using all verb tenses, pronouns, verb #s etc — from Day 1.  If the input is “modeling” L2 in all its diversity, the brain won’t default to conscious or recently-“learned” rules.  Yes, beginners can cope with sentences like El chico quería un mono que bailara (the boy wanted a monkey who might dance) easily.  There you have inperfect, subordinate clause and past subjunctive all in one sentence.

This way, the brain has “everything” coming in at once, and it is getting the “mental spaces” for the different “rules” built, ground up, from Day 1.  The kids won’t substitute trabajaba for trabajó because they have been hearing and reading them– mixed together, naturally– from the beginning.

(There is, btw, another argument for the use of unsheltered grammar: frequency.  A glance at any word frequency list shows us that the 250 most-used words (i.e. what Level 1 of any language class should teach) includes verbs in five tenses and the subjunctive mood.  And it’s not like Mexican moms or French dads delay speaking the subjunctive (or whatever) till their kids are ten years old!)

3. Avoiding “grammar practice” is the third key. The problems any output activity where we “practice” grammar are numerous:

•  How do we expect people to do what they are trying to learn to do?  Are we not putting the cart before the horse here?
• If we acquire languages via input, what good does output do?  “Little or nothing” is Steve Krashen and Bill VanPatten’s answer.
• This will inevitably be accompanied by tons of English or other L1 discussion.  Even the eager beavers will be saying “is it the thingy, the subtunction?  Is that like you put an -a on it?  No wait that’s an -e. OMG this Snapchat. Shut up I don’t like her, OK it’s *ella trabajió.“
• It’s boring. Generating sentences such as “the girl wants her cousin to cook” or “I want my friend to run” is not fun.  I’ve tried everything–everything– and believe me, I can get kids to listen to a fun story that has [whatever grammar] in it, but I cannot get 90% of kids to “practice grammar” or “practice speaking” in any meaningful way.

4. Remember that “errors” do not exist, from the learner’s point of view.  If somebody “screws up” in writing or speech, they quite simply have not acquired what they need to produce the language properly.  They are being asked to do something they quite literally cannot do. There’s an entire Tea With BVP devoted to this question. So, rule overgeneralisation– like any error– has more to do with what teachers want than how “good” students are.

5. We have to remember that acquisition is non-linear.  We can minimise problems such as rule overgeneralisation, but we can’t get rid of them.  Check out this mama bear and her cub going rock climbing.

They test pawholds.  They back down.  They try the sequence differently.  They don’t get there in one fast line.

Teachers are mama bear and students the cubs, if you will. They’ll do the moves…when they are ready.

Finally, we need to up the input.  Students only acquire via input.  Yes, it may seem like they are learning from doing worksheets, or using the subjunctive chart above, or practicing dialogues.  But such “learning” is incidental, and as we see from research, much less effective than lots of good input.  If you keep hearing “j’allais à l’école hier” or “yo gusto hamburguesas,” the students need to hear (and read) more je suis allé and me gustan las hamburguesas.  In the long run, that’s the only thing that is going to work.

 

 

 

How Do I Get More 1st & 2nd Person Verb Practice?

There was a recent comment asking “how do I get more reps” (repetitions) on first and second person verb forms?”

This is one of my many weaknesses, but I am getting better.  I read somewhere that in language classrooms, the third person is overused while other forms are under-represented.  I can see why.  Here’s what I recommend based on what I have done.

FIRST, When we begin T.P.R.S., we start with first and second person questions, on the board if we must, and ask our actors.  It’s Sept 2015 and I just finished asking Los Gatos Azules.  I teach fully unsheltered grammar, so I narrate in the past (or whatever) tenses, and I talk to actors (and kids in class) in present tense.  The following questions go on the board:

¿Eres __ ? – Sí, (no, no) soy __ .  (Are you ___? — I am (not) ___.)

¿Quieres tener ____? – Sí, (no, no) quiero tener ____ . (Do you want to have ___?  — I (do not) want to have ___)

¿Te gustan ____? – Sí, (no, no) me gustan ____ (Do you like___?  — I (do not) like ___.)

¿Tienes ____?  –Sí, (no, no) tengo ___. (Do you have ___?  — I (do not) have __.)

¿Vas a ____?  — Sí, (no, no) voy a ____ (Are you going to ____?  — I (am not) going to ___.)

¿Estás en ___? Sí, (no, no) estoy en ____.  (Are you in/at ____?  — I am (not) in/at ___.)

¿Qué necesitas? – Necesito ____.  (What do you need?  — I need ___.)

This is a fair bit for first story so we go slowly.  I will narrate a sentence in the past — e.g. el chico estaba en Watts– and circle that a bit, then I’ll ask the actor one of the present tense questions, like “¿Estás en Watts?” and s/he answers “Sí, estoy en Watts.”  You go s.l.o.w.l.y., you point-and-pause, and you do a LOT of comprehension checks (in unsheltered, comp check focus with verbs is on meaning and tense).  I have two actors right now.  Miguel knows some Spanish from his Salvadorean Dad, and Shyla is just very enthusiastic.  If they can answer, great; if not, they read off board.

This is my beginner PQA chart which I also use for stories.

 

SECOND, we do P.Q.A.– personalised questions and answers.  For this, wejust ask the class members the same questions we ask our actors.  We can do this mid-story, or after.  We start with our “fast processor” kids and just ask one, say, ¿Te gustan los gatos? and have them answer Sí, me gustan los gatos or maybe No, no me gustan los gatos.  If they aren’t comfy saying the whole sentence, they can answer Y or N, and we rephrase: “Class, Baninder just said me gustan los gatos.  What did he just say?”

For PQA, it’s important to figure out your kids’ output skills and tailor questions to that.

• You ask everyone y/n questions.  E.g. ¿Te gustan los gatos? (Do you like cats?)– Sí/no.
• Faster processors can handle one-word answer questions, e.g. ¿Te gustan los gatos o los perros? Do you like cats or dogs?)– Los gatos.
• the fastest processors you can ask whole-sentence questions e.g. ¿Por qué te gustan los gatos? ¿Son cómicos? (Why do you like cats– because they’re funny?) — Me gustan los gatos porque son cómicos.

I have trained myself to always model answers– with a comp check– before moving ahead and asking the kids.  So if we’re working on, say, trabajo (I work/am working), I’ll say “yo trabajo en la escuela. Yo no trabajo en casa.”  (I work at school.  I don’t work at home).  Then I ask “what did I just say?” to make sure they get it.  Then I ask a fast processor ¿trabajas? (do you work?), get a y/n answer, comp check– “class, what did Johnny just say?”, and ask again, pointing to board.  I model for the FPs and everyone else, and the FPs model for the SPs.  I usually seem to end up with 1-3 kids in a class who immediately pick up how to say something so I just use them.

Third, do P.Q.A. with Movietalk and Picturetalk. Just throw the same questions at the kids– using vocab from your movie or picture– as you did in your story.  If there’s a girl in the movie who is happy, you ask a kid “are you happy?” or ask her and her friend “are you guys happy?”

Fourth, for plural verbforms (“you guys, they, we”), there are two strategies.  First, we have a “double parallel character” e.g. two girls or two guys.  Or have two protagonists doing the same thing.  All our questions to them will be “Do you guys….?” and all their answers “We…” and you will narrate in third person plural.  For example, we narrate “Class, the girls asked for 37 hamburgers” and after we circle that for a bit, we ask the girls “Are you guys asking for 37 hambugers?  Yes, we are asking for 37 hamburgers”). Second, we do P.Q.A. in plural.  So you ask a random fast-processor kid “Johnny, do you and Mike play Call of Duty?” and Johnny says “Yes, we play C.o.D.” or “No, we don’t play C.o.D.”  We then do a bit of circling– “Class, do Mike and Johnny play G.T.A. or C.o.D.?  That’s right, they play…”  

Of course, we must write the verbs on the board or overhead with translation.

I have a restaurant story for which I use two girls as protagonists (and they encounter a series of very handsome but very stupid celebrity servers), so the whole thing is “they” and “we” and “you guys.”

Fifth, reading is essential.  If you follow storyasking with embedded readings (a reading which uses the same vocab as your asked story to tell a different story, and which comes in three (or more) progressively more complex versions), make sure one version of the reading has plural verbforms.  Also do P.Q.A. during (or after) the reading process in both singular and plural verbforms.  If the embdded reading says “John went to the theatre at 6;30 A.M.,” you then ask a kid “do you go to the theatre at 6:30 AM?” and s/he says “Yes, I go…” or “no, I don’t go…” Or you ask a pair of kids “do you guys go to the theatre at 6:30 AM?” and they say “Yes, we go” or “No, we don’t go…”

Sixth, I loooves me some text messages like this one….you can build this in 2 min on any computer, using this free website, then print or project…

A few things to remember:

a) this takes time.  We cannot expect kids to pick this all up in one go.  A skilled T.P.R.S. practitioner will recycle this stuff in every story, and with time the kids will pick it up, first just understanding, and later spontaneously saying things.  My 2s I am expecting will be fully online with plural verbs (we, you guys, they) after about 2 months.

b) we must write what we want on board when introducing first and second person verbs

c) we must do comprehension checks.

Say you ask a girl ¿Te gustan los chico estúpidos? and she says No, no me gustan los chicos estúpidos.  When you ask “Class, what she just say?”, they will often answer with “She doesn’t like dumb guys.”  This is wrong– she said “I don’t like dumb guys.”  We have to stay on top of this because this is a classic easy way for kids to “acquire”  the wrong thing.

Anyway, that’s all I can think of right now for upping our first-and-second person input.