Languageley

If you aren’t familiar with Embedded Readings, a term coined by Michele Waley and Laurie Clarq, the gist is that the teacher creates a series of readings that build on each other to help build reading fluency and support comprehension.

A very brief example:

Base reading
Bill is a teacher.

Version 1
Bill is a Spanish teacher. He teaches Spanish.

Version 2
Bill is a Spanish teacher in Indiana. He teaches Spanish by using comprehensible input.

As you can see, each version gets longer, and more detailed.

There are two ways to create an embedded reading: Top down, and Bottom Up.
Top down takes an existing text and simplifies it. This is a great way to scaffold authentic resources.
Bottom up builds the reading from a base version and adds details and makes sentences more complex.

Now, how about turning that into a reading assessment?

The suggested goal for level 1 of a language is Novice Mid, so I want to build an assessment that asks students to keep pushing themselves as they read.

A great place to start for planning reading tasks is the IPA comprehension guide template from ACTFL.

I put one activity (you know your students though, put as many in as you want) after each version of the text. The base version is VERY simple so I do a novice low task, then the second version is still pretty basic, but adds some details so I keep that novice low as well. The third version I move up to novice mid, and the task I give with the last version of the text is novice mid OR high.

For novice low, I’m looking for students to be able to identify key words and some phrases.
I might have students do a “Who would say it” task if there was only one character. I might do it for multiple characters, but I think I wouldn’t do it as a novice low task.

Another Novice Low task (Still focusing on word/phrases) could be an “Interview” matching activity. A little more rationale on this activity is that they don’t have to understand EVERYTHING in the questions and answers to complete it, they can find similar words from the question to the answer, even though they are reading phrases/simple sentences.

For a Novice Mid task, I had students translate some sentences from the reading, they have to demonstrate understanding of all the words in the selected sentence.

For novice mid/high I love just giving students a Wh-? organizer.

I think giving students a ‘simple’ organizer like this to fill out gives them an opportunity to show me as MUCH as they can. If they can show me basic details from the text, I might rate them NM, if they are able to show a LOT of details then I can rate them NH.

Going even further, referring back to the IPA planning guide, I might want to give students a question that makes them infer something about the characters, and then have them underline the text that supports their inference.

Rating: I simply give students credit for the highest level task they complete successfully.

Last year I wrote about how adding a simple question at the end of class “What did you become more comfortable with today?” helped show students that even though class might not FEEL like learning sometimes, learning is happening.

When learning feels passive (all I have to do is listen and read, I don’t do anything) I think students can get discouraged because they can’t explicitly see that their vocabulary, and their communicative competence is growing.

I took a class with the wonderful Adriana Ramirez and she did something at the end of lesson segments that I immediately started to think of how could I incorporate it. We created a class dictionary.

What a wonderful way to show students that our vocabulary is getting better, and with Adriana pushing us to circumlocute it was still advanced input.

I created a personal dictionary for students to use to limit paper usage this year, but then one day I remembered what Adriana had been doing. “I can do this together with students to wrap up class” I thought.

During my lesson on Friday last week I had students working through some lessons on Garbanzo and while they were working independently I asked them to use their copy of the personal dictionary to add new words that they understood. (I did this by using the Google Assignments tool on Canvas, so every student has their own copy, and all of the student dictionaries are saved to my drive as well.)

After most students completed the Garbanzo lessons we took a song break then we brought everyone together to add words to our class dictionary (which is saved to a folder I share to students that includes our Write and Discuss documents, recordings of class, and our dictionary).

I think having students add words while they were reading was helpful for this last together activity of adding words, but I don’t know how I would feel about students having computers open adding words to their documents WHILE giving whole class input because it’s so easy and so tempting to do something else on a computer when you should be doing your best to attend to input.

So all this is to say, as a class we get to see a growing list of words and phrases that we’ve used and are beginning to learn and I hope this will be motivating for students as we go through the semester/year.

Also, students can self assess their vocabulary knowledge with the check boxes on the dictionary form and I can take a quick look in the shared folder to see what words students are feeling confident with, and which ones need more input.

I was SO hesitant about what writing in class would look like this year. I thought about students writing on paper and then taking a picture and uploading it to our LMS for grading. But that might’ve become too much work for students and myself.

I mean, what are my worries about having students write online? I can’t see what’s on their screen to make sure they’re staying in the same place, I can’t see if they are using a phone to translate something.

The point for me, of writing as assessment, is to know WHAT students CAN do without help. If students are using a translator for more than just singular words I don’t know anymore information other than students don’t have all the vocab they need. So enter Flipgrid!

Flipgrid has a new feature that records the student’s screen AND their webcam. You can view what students have written on their screen and watch that they aren’t using any outside tools.

I may change my translator on writing tests policy… if I can SEE that they only look up an individual word, that shows me what vocab students want to know.

Check out a video tutorial: https://www.loom.com/share/00888d64012349c19865a2cff9617b2c

I’m still not sure exactly what this year is going to look like, but I don’t think anyone else knows either.

I do know that, as always, I want to focus on making opportunities for students to receive comprehensible input. One way I try to ensure comprehension throughout the year is to establish gestures for high frequency words when possible.

The HIGH frequency verbs that I’m working with this year, based on Super 7, Sweet 16, and Frequency dictionaries, and what words *I* most use in class, are: looks at, leaves/goes out, sees, likes, gives, puts, thinks, says, there is/are, knows, stays, wants, can, does/makes, arrives, has, goes, should. I don’t have ‘is’ in there because it’s really hard to gesture, and it is the highest frequency verb so it will naturally be used a lot, and students sometimes hear ‘es’ as ‘is’ which… sometimes helps… they guess the meaning pretty quickly in context.

Theoretically this should be pretty easy to do via video: Establish meaning, show a gesture, model the gestures, mix them up to start processing the meaning, repeat. Do in sets of three, randomize, repeat.

If you’re like me, you’ve had a hard time thinking on your feet to randomize commands, so I introduce to you…. The TPR randomizer! Feel free to make a copy 🙂 Put your list of words/phrases in the first column and everything else will automatically populate.

Admittedly, TPR is great for learning vocabulary, but it doesn’t often give a lot of context. I do highly suggest looking at TPR Materials from CPLI to learn more about the research of TPR as a language learning approach. I LOVE “TPR is More than Commands” by Seely and Romijn, and Berty Segal’s book “Enseñando y aprendiendo el español por medio de la acción”

What I HAVE seen in my classrooms in the past is that when I don’t start off with a solid base of TPR I notice instructional gaps “Why don’t students already know this word/gesture” right, because I didn’t teach it. I think TPR can be a great way to set a foundation of high frequency words that you’re going to use all through student’s learning. And the thing I love MOST about TPR is that when I teach verbs with it, I teach 3rd person singular, but as long as we have had the gesture established, I can use any form of the verb and still remain comprehensible.

So, what’s my plan with TPR as a virtual learning tool?

I have created some loom lessons to introduce the gestures and meanings, which also include screen grabs of me spelling the words to ‘teach’ the alphabet. Click the image below to look at the videos, and in the 3rd video… don’t mind my sunburn.

So after EACH spelling video (they watch the gesture introduction, and the spelling video) I am going to use my schools LMS, Canvas, and our G Suite for Education to create activities that put words into context.

Some ideas are: read a sentence and match the meaning of the TPR word. The sentence might be “Bob tiene chocolate” and students would need to choose ‘has’ from a list to show comprehension of ‘tiene’

I might use Charlala to give drawing prompts “Bob tiene chocolate” and students draw a person with chocolate.

I might give sentences and students try to translate, sentences will probably be recorded on video so I can do the gestures.

I might do a little story (Like video 6) but much shorter, essentially, storylistening with very simple sentences to start, adding in words naturally to make it more compelling.

So there are some of my ideas right now. I’m going to play around with our LMS and see what other kinds of activities I can do and I’ll post them on twitter @welangley and try to remember to update this entry.

First off, let me say that I LOVE Indiana’s World Language standards. They are SO easy to navigate not only for teachers but for students. If you are not a world language teacher, the National Standards from ACTFL and most state standards are comprised of the 5 C’s.

Communication
Culture
Connections
Comparisons
Communities.

I’d take a leap and say most language teachers, even those who do Standards based grading probably only focus on Communication, and perhaps Culture (Especially since we have intercultural can-do statements from ACTFL-NCSSFL). But assessing and grading the culture standard can still be messy.

The other three, Connections, Comparisons, and Communities are REALLY hard to assess, at least formally. The question still exists though, how do we assess all the standards, and should we ‘grade them’? I don’t think they need to be graded.

In my opinion, these standards do help us push students to grow as learners and global citizens, but most of them are behaviors and grading behavior is well… meh.

So in comes SELF REFLECTION.

I use Canvas, so I set up some outcomes based on each of the hard to assess C’s (excluding Communication). And like I said, I LOVE the Indiana Standards they’re very easy to use!

Then I copy and pasted the outcomes into a google doc with a few simple reflection questions.

So students can go in to the Google Cloud assignment and write about where they feel they are with each of the standards.

Then in SpeedGrader, I mark the level the student thinks they are reaching.

Important to note that these assignments are set at 0. No points are awarded, but perhaps we can have a celebration of achievement around these.

In outcomes, I set it up so Advanced is 3, Intermediate is 2, and Novice is 1 so when I look at student mastery gradebook I can get a pretty, color coded overview of where we think we are with the standards.

These are just test students so I went in and played around with the scoring just to see how this would all look.

I’m excited to pay a little closer attention to the standards this year. However I’ll have to see where we can fit it in, because we want to keep the majority of class, even if it is online, providing input to lead students to language acquisition.

One of the things I LOVE about teaching with comprehensible input (TCI) is that I can start each class with the same prompt (a question, a story script, etc.) and no two classes are the same. We focus on similar language but the additional language we add is unique to each class depending on their interests.

For me, a problem that arises is that then not all classes have the same vocabulary, so creating a reading assessment based on what we’ve done in class can be cumbersome. Do I create something unique for each class, or do I try to create something that all classes can use?

I’m a big believer in work smarter not harder. I can do an assessment for each class based on what the class has come up with during write and discuss. In the past, I have even used first period’s class reading as an assessment for second period, and so on. But I’m not sure if that was completely fair, even with glossing words that were unique to each class.

So last night I was thinking about this and came up with a solution, I think.

I usually type (and this year will DEFINITELY type) write and discusses. Which makes it easier for me to do what I’m about to explain.

The first step is do copy your class text and put it into a word list maker: https://design215.com/toolbox/wordlist.php

Do this with each text you create so you have a list of items that appear in your texts.

Then, take two of your lists and shoot them through a list comparison.

http://www.molbiotools.com/listcompare.html

When you put your lists in the list comparison tool it creates a new list of common words from the lists.

Then we’re going to use the NEW list generated by the comparison tool and one of the remaining lists from the other texts, and repeat until you get a list of common words from all of your texts.

We compare:

List A/List B=List AB

List C/List AB= List ABC

List ABC/List D= List ABCD

and so on.

So now you have a list of words that were common in all of your classes write and discuss writings. From that we can now create a new reading that uses the common words that EVERYONE has seen, and we should be able to create a fair assessment for all students.

I created another set of lessons that you can use if you’re on Canvas! Simply add an audio/video story and a text.

Story Based Remote Learning Module

If you don’t have CANVAS here are the activities that students do in this module:

Behind the scenes: Find a story. Record video/audio, prepare a parallel story for assessment.

Step 1: Introduce key vocabulary with your favorite online tool.

Step 2: Students listen to the story and draw a picture to demonstrate understanding.

Step 3: Students listen to the story again and answer true/false questions

Step 4: Students listen to the story and put sentences in order, I wouldn’t use the ENTIRE story so that they have to listen to the ENTIRE story.

Step 5: Students read the text, and annotate the text by highlighting/underlining the text for a given guideline (verbs, adjectives, etc.) This is to get students to read the text CLOSELY.

Step 6: Jeopardy, students write questions about key words/phrases from the story.

Step 7: Students summarize the text by copying sentences directly from the text.

Step 8: ADDjectives/ADDverbs students use their summary and add adjectives or adverbs to make the story more interesting.

Step 9: Students change the perspective a lá horizontal conjugation.

Step 10: Back At’Cha: students type a sentence they remember from the text into a discussion, but they cannot post something someone else has already posted. They should be reading everyone’s responses so that they know what has already been posted. Tricky re-reading 🙂

Step 11: Listening/Reading quiz. Students read/listen to an alternate version of the story and give a summary in English.