Structured Input Part 3: What's it look like in class?
In Part 1 of this series, I took a look at some factors that play into learners' processing of sentences, what they are most likely to pay attention to, and what might keep them from processing an utterance.
In Part 2, I took a look at some common pitfalls that prevent a structured input activity from being as effective as they can be, and gave some tips on what to think about when creating an activity.
In this post, I'm going to discuss how I've used SI in my classes, what I think has gone well, and what I think I will continue to work on. I also have some thoughts on how using some of the principles from earlier posts could help teachers who are tied to a textbook/common assessments but want to make their classroom more communicative.
What I tried
I knew this year that my Spanish 4 class needed a bit more accountability, and that my population of students has a very tight-knit bond with tests and studying. It felt that because my class didn't have traditional tests or anything to explicitly study, students didn't care about paying attention. Students were receiving good grades because, in my mind, I had reasonable and attainable goals for students. Too many of them, though, slid through the cracks by doing the bear minimum.
I wanted to find a way that would marry what I wanted students to do (pay attention, participate , read for meaning) while I also gave them something that would make them feel like they had some control over their learning (finding something for them to 'study').
My solution was to create multiple choice content tests for each unit. In my experience with my current population of students, they like answers to be black and white. They want something to be correct or incorrect. They don't like the ambiguity of language and performance/proficiency grading.
Going into this school year I knew in each unit we would have plenty of resources that I could make questions about. Originally all of my questions were pretty straight forward, multiple choice questions.
Then I started moving towards sentence halves as questions. Something that would make students have to understand vocabulary from our unit and make sure content was correct.
As I was writing my first test I started reading Structured Input: Grammar Instruction for the Acquisition Oriented Classroom (you can see the book is pretty expensive because it's out of print so I recommend going back to part 1 and part 2 to find out more about the book). In my reading of the book I found that they had a lot of options for multiple choice Structured Input activities.
If nothing else, I think that the principles of structured input allowed me to write MUCH better multiple choice questions. In the question below, I took into account a LOT of what I learned from the book. I put what I wanted students to focus on at the beginning of each potential answer. Each potential answer is grammatically possible, but not all have the correct content. The middle part of each sentence is the same (because we know students are less likely to process that part of the sentence).
Other questions asked students to decide between forms. This question asks students to know that whichever answer they choose has to be correct in form (has to have an -n because we're talking about multiple subjects) AND has to have the correct content (throwback, this is a referential activity because it refers to what we talked about in class, when we learned the schools in the Yucatán teach Mayan math, we didn't talk about Mayan writing).
What I want to change
While I am pretty happy with what I created for my first test (there were some questions that were NOT great SI questions but I've learned better since ;)), and while I think I did do a better job on the second test that I wrote, I still have some work to do. I think I did a lot of pop up grammar during instruction leading up to the test, and I think that was helpful to some. I also think that the tests have been pretty darn fair. That said, there are some activities that I did on these tests that I think would be best suited just as much lower stakes activity in class.
What I may move to is that tests are JUST on content and I don't include any grammaticality judgement to it, but rather after each time we read something, or watch a video, or listen to a podcast we do some of these activities with some of the salient grammatical forms that arise in the resource.
How this could help
If you are in a department that has to have common assessments on grammar I think this would be the way to do it. I do have to say that I am absolutely not a fan of fill in the blank with the correct form kind of tests but having students choose the correct form along with correct content could be a good compromise. I used the chart below when writing my potential answers. For each question I wrote 4 possible answers. The correct answer had correct grammar AND correct content. There were also answers that had correct grammar but incorrect grammar, out of context grammar but correct content, and finally out of context grammar and incorrect content. From a data perspective this gives me a pretty clear idea of what I may need to do a pop up on moving forward, or what content/vocab students didn't quite understand.
PS: If you want/have to do bell ringers in class these quick activities could be pretty good as a warm up.
Wrapping it up
I have really enjoyed learning more about structured input, and I hope these have been more or less informative for you as well. I'm not sure if I have any more full length posts to make about SI but be sure to follow me on threads for some more of my thoughts :) https://www.threads.net/@languageley