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!