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. 

Novice Picture Writing Proficiency Assessment w/ Rubric

I am trying out something new with writing in my Latin 1 classes. In previous years when I taught Latin 1, I had students doing timed writes after the first week based on readings/clipchats, but big picture, I never felt comfortable with that, because I felt like all students were doing was spitting back to me memorized sentences from the story, not necessarily any true acquired language. Since they have only had 8.5 weeks of Latin so far this year, they are "babies" when it comes to writing in the target language.

As a result, this year in my Latin 1 classes, I have been holding back on writing in Latin per se (outside of copying sentences from readings in lots of various activities or doing very guided writing. NOTE - these types of writing in the target language still have MUCH value!) so that I am not forcing output too quickly and have chosen instead rather to focusing on bathing them with sheltered vocabulary input before any true output.

After 8.5 weeks of Latin, I gave students their first written proficiency assessment based on a series of pictures which created a story (AI created the pictures). Although students had never seen the pictures before, they did mirror many of the sentences which had been in readings and also in bellringers. The difference, however, was that they had never written this many sentences before in Latin at once in one sitting and never in a sequence for the creation of a story. 

I gave them six pictures, of which there were at least 3-4 sentences which they could write for each of them. HOWEVER, I only asked them for 1-2 sentences for each picture. I debated about this:

• I knew that there would be some students who could only write one short, choppy sentence per picture.
• I also knew that there were many students who were already writing compound sentences using "and" or "because," so in writing one compound sentence, they were already demonstrating proficiency beyond the expectation.
• I was grading this on a rubric, so the minimum number of sentences was not the sole criteria but rather were they also adding details, combining details, etc in the picture?

Below is an example of one of the pictures used (I made two others):

Observations

1. Wow, I was absolutely amazed at what students wrote and how much they wrote! It was like after bathing them in so much input for the past 8.5 weeks that it overflowed similar to turning on a faucet - it all finally came out!
2. Student examples from picture 1 (in Latin and English):
1. Puer Marcus. Puer Julius. (The boy Marcus. The boy Julius).
2. Puer est Marcus. Marcus est parvus. (The boy is Marcus. Marcus is small).
3. Marcus est parvus. Julius est magnus (Marcus is small. Julius is big).
4. Marcus est parvus puer, et Julius est magnus puer. (Marcus is a small boy, and Julius is a big boy).
5. Hic est puer. Ei nomen est Marcus. Marcus est parvus et laetus puer. Hic est magnus puer. Ei nomen est Julius, et is est laetus. (This is a boy. His name is Marcus. Marcus is a small and happy boy. This is a big boy. His name is Julius, and he is happy).
3. It was so weird to see the Theory of Ordered Development occurring in their output right before my eyes. A number of students left out the Latin word "is" when trying to write "the boy is big" and instead wrote "the boy big." Before, I would have been frustrated over this and would have blamed the students, but knowing now the Theory of Ordered Development, I was like "Yay, you're proceeding along EXACTLY as you should be!"
4. Grading on a novice-low writing rubric informed by ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines made it so much easier! Because I was not focusing on errors and performance but rather on "show me what you can do and where you fall on the proficiency continuum/spectrum," this freed me greatly!
5. Yes, there were spelling and grammar errors - LOTS of them! However, when grammar errors are the norm and expectation since these students are novice learners, I only marked those errors if they impeded my understanding of their messages (even me as the "sympathetic receptor") which lowered their placement on the rubric.
6. I was surprised by how many students used vocabulary which I had not been truly targeting yet or for which I had not yet held them accountable. However, I had been using these words but usually they were glossed for bellringers, reading passages, and listening. Somehow, these students had already acquired those words, and those words were inside of them ready to come out!

I plan to do more of these kinds of writings!

New Page on my Blog - Proficiency-Based Grading

There is a new page on my blog - Proficiency-Based Grading. It is now listed at the top in the navigation bar. I hope that you will find the information useful.

Proficiency-Based Grading