Top 5 of 2025

It is nearing the end of the year, and as always, I wish to thank all of you who read my blog and walk away having learned something or feel encouraged or even challenged. At the ACTFL Convention in New Orleans a few weeks ago, it was so nice to meet many of you in person - I definitely appreciate the kinds words which you passed along to me.

I was taking a look over what I have posted this year, and I see that there were two topics about which I seemed to address often: proficiency-based grading vs. performance-based grading, and literacy/the science of reading. These two subjects continue to intrigue me and what they look like in a CI/ADI classroom. I hope to learn more about these topics in 2026, so possibly expect more blog posts about them next year. I have been learning much about the science of reading and how to apply that to a CI/ADI curriculum - I am excited to share much of that with you all in 2026!

So as is tradition, I list here the top 5 viewed blog posts of 2025: 

1. The Necessity of Background Language Knowledge for Reading in the CI/ADI Classroom 
2. Translation Rubric 
3. Novellas - Balancing Comprehensibility and Compelling 
4. Left/Right PQAs - Purposeful Communication 
5. Spanish Confidence Readers by Adam Giedd 

I began this blog in December 2013, and 463 posts later (and over 1,450,000 page views - wow!!!), I am amazed that I still have not run out of things about which to write. I hope that your school year ends well, and I look forward to 2026!

Horizontal Declensions

Recently, a fellow Latin teacher, having read about horizontal conjugations here on my blog, asked me what I thought about horizontal declensions. FYI - Latin is an inflected language, so much like German and Russian, we have to deal with case endings on nouns which communicate the function of the word in the sentence. Hence, inflected languages can be tricky for learners since when they encounter a word, two things are going on in their minds: they must interpret the meaning and then its grammatical function. Therefore, Latin grammar encompasses both verb conjugations and noun/adjective declensions.

As i began to think about the question of doing a horizontal declension, I know that for many Latin teachers, here are the bigger questions: how can we Latin teachers teach declension endings in a non-grammar-translation way? Is there a CI/ADI way in which we can get students to acquire declension endings according to a traditional textbook timeline (such as "by week 3 of Latin 1, students will have acquired the nominative singular and accusative singular cases for the first three declensions")?

Let me first say this: there is absolutely NO fast track to getting all students to acquire declension endings or any grammatical construction by a certain deadline. We must remember the following:

1. Language acquisition is not linear in nature.
2. Language acquisition does not follow a prescribed timeline, nor does everyone acquire language at the same rate.
3. Language acquisition follows a prescribed order of what is acquired. One cannot alter that order, BUT we should not think that we should be teaching language in that order until students master it. This assumes that language acquisition is linear and that all students will be on the same timeline of acquisition.
4. Language acquisition is subconscious and implicit, hence NO DEGREE OF EXPLICIT instruction can alter that (this includes memorizing grammar charts).

So I began to look online for anything on horizontal declensions - I did not find anything. I even asked Eric Richards (a CI/ADI German teacher who deals with an inflected language) what he thought of the idea and if he did anything like this. My big concern was that teachers were wanting to take sentences like "the king sees the queen" and want to change the perspective so that the king and queen switch places ("the queen sees the king"). To me, that is a lot of Latin grammar for novice level students to wield at the same time (especially after 3 weeks of Latin 1!) - this may be better suited for upper level students. 

However, as I continued to think this through, I realized that a horizontal declension can have its place though if it is focused. Maybe just change one noun grammatically in a passage so that it is much tighter in focus (but not right away though in the opening weeks of Latin 1)? 

Observations

1. Doing a horizontal declension should be used as a supplement for a continuation of exposing students to case endings in a communicative context.
2. Were my students able to complete this correctly? The answer is yes. Do they truly understand case endings and understand the nominative and accusative cases now? Probably not. But after months of doing pop-up grammar about "the letter m ending indicating direct object," this at least gave students a chance to interact with declension endings in a communicative context and to reinforce the idea.
3. I just tried this out in my Latin 1 classes, and this is the last week of the semester before the final exam. In the future, I would like to see how this goes maybe after the first two months and after much exposure to Latin sentence patterns and pop-up grammar explanations about the accusative case.
4. If you notice in the explanation, I did not refer to the case names but rather to the grammatical functions. This is not to say that I do not think that the case names are important, but I am finding that students do not know grammar terms to begin with.
5. Now that I have introduced the idea of horizontal declension, I can see now doing this as a bellringer.

So I will continue to play around with this idea and to try it out - this is definitely still a work in progress. I am curious what you think of it. If there is information about out there about doing horizontal declensions, I would love to hear about it.

Some More CI/ADI Bellringers

(This post is a continuation of a previous post on bellringers)

Let me share some more bellringer ideas which I have been implementing in my classes. At my district's pre-planning World Language in-service this past summer, I gave a presentation on "CI/ADI Bellringers" as part of a choice session (this was the same presentation which I gave at CI Iowa in June), and it was so well-received that my district coordinator has asked me to present it again TWICE at an upcoming summer district in-service. In addition, at ACTFL a few weeks ago, a number of people came up to me, telling me that they were now using many of my bellringer ideas. Apparently, this particular topic is of interest to many!

A recap about bellringers:

• The primacy/recency effect suggests that the first several minutes of class and the final several minutes of class have the greatest effect on learning.
• As a result, the goal of a bellringer should be solely to activate prior knowledge. Nothing new should be introduced in a bellringer, outside of writing down new targeted vocabulary words.
• We should strive to "communicatify" them in a World Language classroom, i.e., do not focus on verb conjugating, declining nouns, noun/adjective agreement.
• We can achieve this by focusing on meaning and putting them in a context.
• Therefore, bellringers need to be 100% comprehensible.

Here are some examples which I hope you can use:

Hope you find these helpful!

ACTFL Dinner with Authors

At last week's ACTFL Convention in New Orleans, I had the opportunity to have dinner with a few CI novella authors. Erin Almeranti, the President of Teacher's Discovery, was hosting a dinner outing with them and invited me to join them. I know Erin from having worked with her at CI Summit (sponsored by Voces Digital) these past three summers, and the chance to have dinner with some CI authors (as well as to engage in CI fellowship) was not something I was going to miss!

In attendance were Erica Peplinski, Bryan Kandel, Esmerelda Mora, Grace Sotomayor-Mantri, and Andrea Caulfield. Since I was the only one there who had not written a novella (besides Erin), I asked what the catalyst was for each of them to write their first novella and then to continue writing them. Although this question was coming from a place of curiosity, I was also asking from a more personal place: I am thinking of writing a Latin novella but am not sure if I know what/how to do it.

I got a myriad of varied responses:

• "[This event in the novella] actually happened in my life, so I thought I'd write about it."
• "I wanted something for my students to read on X topic."
• "I did not like how X were portrayed in X novella."
• "I had to cover X theme in my school curriculum, so I wrote this novella to cover that topic."

Essentially, each saw a need/hole that needed to be filled. Many of their novellas were originally readings which they had written for their own students which then turned into novellas.

I currently feel the same way now as these authors once felt: I too see a need/hole in current Latin novellas. This is not to say that those novellas which are currently published do not have any value - I do not feel that way at all! Over ten years ago, there were NO Latin novellas out there, and now I see so many out there. However, the hole/gap which I see is that there are very few Latin novellas which are truly written for novice-low/novice mid readers. While many Latin novellas are marketed as being for Latin 1 or 2, the writing resembles textbook readings which tend to be heavy on vocabulary, sentences which are too long, or do not incorporate the repeated sentence patterns which novice low/mid readers so desperately need to gain reading confidence. 

So I do not know where I will go from here. I do have a number of writings which I have written over the past two years which have turned into rough drafts for possible novellas, but I have just never taken the next step. However, it is very encouraging to have heard from these authors that they felt a need to write their first novellas. At least, I am heading in the right direction!

ACTFL Presentation - Detoxing from the Textbook: Creating a Purposefully Communicative Classroom

This past weekend was the the annual ACTFL Convention, this year in New Orleans. I had the privilege of presenting this year, and I was deeply honored that my presentation was sponsored by the Comprehension-Based Communicative Language Teaching SIG (special interest group). My topic was Detoxing from the Textbook: Creating a Purposefully Communicative Classroom, and it was a updated (much needed) version of a presentation which I had given in 2016 but now focusing on purposeful communication. 

Below is a modified document of my presentation which I posted if you wish to check it out. 

Detoxing from the Textbook: Creating a Purposefully Communicative Classroom - PDF

Guided Choice Writing

As I have posted earlier, I am teaching Latin 1 again and am doing things much differently than I have in the past. So much of this is due to my own increased understanding of what is considered realistic language proficiency at this level (Novice Lowish) and that in many ways in the past, my own expectations of student proficiency for Latin 1 were wrong. I have focused on sheltering vocabulary BIG TIME, targeting high frequency words, with the intent of going "deep and simple" and not "shallow and complex."

As a result, when it has come to writing, I have been experimenting with students doing "guided writes" instead of doing timed writes. In a "guided write," like the name states, I am guiding students through what I want them to write for the creation of a story, since they are novice low writers. There is a degree of student choice where they can add their own details, but I tell them EXACTLY what they are to write for each sentence based on a word bank. I am also only focusing on words which we have been targeting. Below are some examples from throughout the semester:

Week 6

Week 10

Week 14

Observations

1. If you take a look at the three examples, you can see that I keep adding more details or focus on different aspects as the semester progresses. In the last example, you can see that the focus is on creating guided longer, compound sentences using and and because.
2. I like the guided aspect, because for these novice-low students, I do not think that they are ready to just "write" without very specific parameters
3. In many ways, the sentences are like those in Rotating Desks where I am telling students what to write and that they have choice in adding details.
4. This is a form of purposeful communication on a low level, since students are playing around with the language by choosing their own details to add. 
5. Will students' grammar be correct? Most likely, no! BUT I also have NO expectations of it to be, since they are novice low learners. I am only interested in "Are they communicating in a way which I as a sympathetic receptor can understand?" I cannot tell you HOW FREEING that perspective is as a teacher!
6. Even though I am telling students what to write, hopefully as they write these sentences, students are understanding those messages which they are writing. Thus, this is adding to/refining their mental representation of the language. 
7. This is a precursor to the 4-Word Story writing activity which I will introduce to them next semester. By then, these students should have a foundation where they can write more freely on their own.

Have you done something like this? If not, give it a try, and let me know how it goes!

Movie Talks/Clip Chats - Trying Something New

I LOVE clip chats (formerly known as "movie talks") - I love using them to introduce new vocabulary and could center my curriculum solely around doing these. However, if your students are like mine, they are not 100% on board when I do one:

• Many students hate the "jerkiness factor" of a clip chat when I play and then pause it to narrate. 
• When I turn off the lights to do the clip chat, many students use that as a time to "close their eyes"
• Even with PQAs and circling, many students do not participate.

So this year, instead of the play/pause narration of the clip, I start out with a dictation first (regular or listen/draw) of 7-8 sentences from the clip chat. When we finish the dictation, then I show the class the clip without interruption or narration - the clip is what the dictation was, just now in visual form. I do not know from whom I learned this, so kudos if it is you (I know that I certainly do not possess the ingenuity to have come up with something like this on my own). I then turn the dictation into a reading (much more expanded and fleshed out), and now I do reading/post-reading activities with it.

Observations

1. So yes - no more narration of the clip. However, compared to the traditional clip chat delivery, I like this much better, because since students are doing a dictation, they are paying more attention due to the nature of the activity.
2. The dictation previews the clip for students. They already have some kind of mental representation of the sentences in their mind (especially if they drew them), so showing the clip after the dictation is either confirming what they know or is filling in mental gaps.
3. Students are still receiving input - it is just coming in a different way.
4. I do miss the narration aspect of a traditional clip chat, but I also do not want students to tune out due to the pause/play factor or the temptation to fall asleep.
5. When students see the dictation-now-as-a-reading, it becomes a type of embedded reading. They have already interacted with the dictation sentences and are now adding new sentences (of they already have a picture due to seeing the clip. All I am doing is confirming their mental picture of the story with Latin sentences).

So give this a try and see what you think!

P.S. In my Latin 1 classes, I am solely focusing on introducing high-frequency vocabulary with lots of exposure and repetitions, so I have almost exclusively been using clip chats and using those as readings! Next semester, I will start introducing some short novellas. From a proficiency perspective, I do not think that novice-low students are ready to read a novella yet in their first semester unless the novella is short, incredibly-focused, and resembles something like Confidence Readers.