Cloze Sentences

Although this cloze sentence activity is a staple of a CI/TPRS classroom, I did not begin to use it until this semester (and quite honestly, I did not learn of it until this past summer at NTPRS). It is a great post-reading activity, but it needs to be done only after students have reviewed/gone over the story many times, because it is a limited output activity and will require them to recall vocabulary in the story (and possibly language structures, depending on how you use this).

The set up is basic: 

1. Using a story which you have been reading and reviewing with students, project the story onto the board with words missing (like you would see in any cloze sentence exercise)
2. Read each sentence aloud, and ask students to give you the missing word aloud.
3. Write in the missing word.

Latin 1 example:

Story

Ian puellam videt. puella est pulchra. Ian puellam amat. Ian dicit, “O puella, salve! mihi nomen est Ian. quid nomen tibi est?” puella dicit, “salve, Ian. mihi nomen est Go Away!”

Ian est tristis. Ian aliam (another) puellam videt. puella est pulchra. Ian puellam amat. Ian dicit, “O puella, salve! mihi nomen est Ian. quid nomen tibi est?”puella dicit, “salve, Ian. mihi nomen est You Are Annoying!” Ian est tristis.

Cloze
Ian puellam _________. puella est _________. Ian puellam ________. Ian dicit, "O ______, salve! mihi ________ est Ian. _____ nomen tibi est? ______ dicit, "salve, Ian. mihi _______ est Go Away!" Ian _____ tristis. Ian aliam ________ videt. _____ est pulchra. Ian _______ amat. Ian ______, "O puella, salve! mihi nomen _____ Ian. quid ________ tibi est?" puella ______, "Salve, Ian. mihi nomen ______ You Are Annoying!" Ian est ________.

Observations

1. By the time I do this activity, the class has gone through this story in 5-6 different ways over 3 days, so they are very familiar with it.
2. Because the story uses limited amount of vocabulary, is comprehensible and has lots repetition of words/sentences, it is a very easy story for students to read and to internalize.
3. I also project a picture illustrating the sentence to give another visual cue for students
4. This is a very guided limited output activity, but due to the massive amounts of input and repetition through different activities, the output seems natural for students, i.e. internalization of the story occurrs, so this limited output is a natural overflow.
5. I project one sentence at a time, so students do not feel overwhelmed by the length when they see it (even though we had gone over the story MANY times).
6. I did this activity while I was being observed by a college student in a Latin teacher prepatory program. She was shocked at how easily my Latin 1 students were able to provide me with the missing Latin word aloud (and in the correct form), because having come from a more tradtional Latin program, she had never done/seen something like this before. I told her that this output was occurring not because I was using oral Latin in the classroom per se but because I was using CI.
7. This is another great way to get in repetitions for all students. Even if a student is not able to respond, he/she is hearing and seeing the words used in a familiar (hopefully) context.
8. If you try it and it does not work, a few things to consider:  

• Problem: maybe you exposed them too early to this kind of output so internalization has not happened yet? Solution: go back and get in more repetitions of the story through various CI methods so that internalization can occur. Try it again and see if you get better results.
• Problem: maybe the story itself is too difficult due to the amount of vocabulary, types of language structures, etc for this type of output? Solution: create an embedded reading of the story and scaffold it in a way that students can internalize the language slowly without having to make a big jump to output. 

Parent Meetings Reflections: A Justification for CI/TPRS

These past two weeks, I have attended five parent meetings regarding students in my Laitn 1 classes  - a combination of SSTs, IEPs and referrals. Because we have passed the midpoint of the semester, suddenly, there is much parental concern regarding grades. Each of the meetings, however, seemed to have the same scenario: the student was failing or close to failing the majority of his/her claseses but yet was flourishing in my Latin 1 class with at least a 95. 

In each meeting, as we teachers, the parents, the counselor, the curriculum administrator and special ed case manager all discussed the student's overall academic performance, it became obvious that something was going on in my Latin 1 class which was making these students succeed. At some of the meetings, I could tell that the core subject area teachers were dismissing the student's high grade in my class with an "But it's just Latin 1 - you really do not do anything in that class" attitude (these teachers really need to come to my classes if they think that!). One parent even commented, "My daughter says that she never has to study for your class. I'm concerned. I see her making vocabulary flashcards for Language Arts all the time - shouldn't she be doing that for Latin too?"

At each of these meetings, when it came my turn to talk about the student's performance, my first instinct was to defend everything about my methodology and why I have adopted a CI-based classroom, but I also knew that this was the last thing which parents wanted to hear, nor was that my purpose for being there. I instead decided to let the student's performance do the talking for me. In a nutshell, here is what i said at each of the five meetings:

• Even though it is Latin 1, it is still a "rigorous" course, but my job as the teacher is not to make it feel like it is for students
• My job is to teach the language by delivering understandable messages to students in Latin. I choose to do this through comprehensible, compelling stories.
• All I ask is that your child pay attention in class and to interact with the stories/readings in various ways
• Acquiring a language happens subconsciously - here is proof that your child is acquiring Latin
• Your child is not having to make flashcards, because he/she does not feel the need to; unbeknownst to your child, he/she is internalizing the target vocabulary subconsciously
• All of my vocabulary/comprehension quizzes are unannounced, but yet your child has at least a 95% quiz average, i.e. even though I give no prior notice of a quiz, your child still feels prepared and never feels "put on the spot" when I announce one. The vocabulary quizzes are cumulative, so the amount of words increases on each quiz - in fact, we are up to 40 words now. If your child were not acquiring the language, the proof would be a much lower quiz average. 
• Your child's processing skills in the language are improving due to constant and repeated (but not repetitive) interaction with the Latin. Your child's word count output on his/her biweekly 5-minute timed writes has increased each time
• On tests, your child is able to read a comprehensible story at sight in Latin and then to answer a mix of multiple choice and of true/false questions about the story in the language, thereby demonstrating comprehension. If your child were not understanding what he/she was reading, his/her test average would be much lower. 

At one of the meetings, the special ed case manager said to me, "Will you be teaching Latin 1 again next year? Because I want to send more of my cases to you!"

Each of these meetings confirmed for me that CI is the way to go when teaching Latin. Definitely under a grammar-translation methodology and even under a reading method with extensive vocabulary, these particular students would be failing, but under CI, they are flourishing. Even though all of this evidence is just anecdotal, I need no other proof that CI works for all students.

At the end of one meeting, a parent said to me in front of everyone, "I may not understand everything that you are doing, but keep doing it, because _________ is succeeding in your class." With results like this, I definitely will.

No More Vocab Lists

One of my goals for this school year is to limit vocabulary and to hit the high frequency words first - this also coincides with my goal of leaving behind the textbook (which I will write about in a later post). These two goals have been my focus for my Latin 1 classroom and after nine weeks of implementing them, I can see a HUGE difference in my students' acquisition of the language. 

The best thing about it though: no more vocabulary lists for students to study. 

The old way of giving students a list of 20-25 vocabulary words to learn by the end of the chapter never lead to retention but rather students "cramming and flushing" the words for a quiz. Plus, of those 20-25 words which textbooks gave students to learn, almost half of them were hardly used again following that chapter. I have found that in limiting vocabulary in a CI manner, there is no need to make lists, because students do not need them! 

So what am I doing? Each week, I am focusing on just five new vocabulary words and for now, they are high frequency words or words which I feel are important for them to know. These five target words are repeated constantly in a very comprehehsible 18-sentence story which I have written for them. Because during the week we cover that one story 5-6 different ways with a different focus each time, due to the massive repetitions, it is almost difficult for students not to acquire the words! At the end of the week, students read version #2 of the story, an embedded, more fuller version of the story. And students anticipate reading the "real" version of the story. I also add these words on my word wall so students can see what words they should "know".

What words am I picking? First, I am choosing those high frequency words in language in general and not just in Latin. Then I am taking a look at the CLC textbook to see which words I should also incorporate. 

How do I know students have acquired these words? During partner reads, I am amazed at how quickly they are processing these words. These words are also appearing in students' timed writes. I also give vocabulary assessments each week - I will address this in a later posting.

Here are the words which I have taught so far:

Week 1-2 (these were presented purely using TPR)

1. ita
2. minime
3. salve
4. sella
5. mensa
6. it
7. considit
8. surgit
9. sumit
10. deponit
11. est
12. in
13. ad
14. leo
15. infans

Week 3-4

1. dulciolum
2. crustulum
3. habet
4. amat
5. dat
6. non

Week 5

1. vult
2. videt
3. capit
4. sed

Week 6

1. pater
2. mater
3. filius
4. filia
5. et

Week 7

1. puella
2. pulchra
3. tristis
4. dicit
5. "quid nomen tibi est?
6. "mihi nomen est ____"

Week 8

1. clamat
2. iratus
3. ego
4. volo
5. vendit

Observations

1. In limiting vocabulary, students are able to acquire language in bite-sized chunks.
2. Because students are just learning 5 new words a week and as those words are high-frequency words, students are not burning unncessary "memory bandwidth" in learning "random" words.
3. Students are not overwhelmed with vocabulary like they were before when I used to give them a list of 20-25 words.
4. Because these are high frequency words, I can use them and re-use them in stories, hence, if students do not acquire them the "first round," hopefully they will due to repetitions in later stories.
5. In limiting vocabulary, I can actually introduce language naturally and not by when the textbook says that I should. For example, since I have introduced vult/volo already, it just seems natural to use infinitives now. If I were to wait until they appeared in the textbook, it would be not until February/March. 

Try giving limiting vocabulary a try - your students will thank you for it!

Scrambled Eggs

This is a great activity which I just learned from Lauren Watson, a French teacher in my district. She is a fellow user of CI and has been using it for years in her classroom, long before I ever had even heard of CI. Along with Bob Patrick and me, Lauren co-facilitates our districtwide CI inservices.

Scrambled Eggs is a much like a running dictation but with a twist. For this activity, you wil need plastic Easter eggs. Here are her directions, as she explained it to me:

1. Write a 10 sentence story with words which students have acquired; then scramble the sentences so that the story is out of order. 
2. Number each sentence, cut the story into 10 sentence strips and put one strip into a plastic Easter egg. 
3. Put the eggs into a basket in the center of the room.
4. Students worked in partners (partner A and partner B)
5. Partner B has a sheet of paper numbered 1-10 (because there are 10 sentences).
6. Partner A is responsible for going to the basket and bringing an egg back to Partner B.  They are NOT ALLOWED to open the egg until they are at their seats!  
7. Partner A opens the egg, gives Partner B the sentence number and reads the sentence slowly.  Partner B writes down what he/she hears.
8. After 5 sentences, they switch roles.
9. When finished, show them the correct sentences, and they make corrections.
10. At the end, they have to unscramble the story so that it makes sense.  
11. As a bonus, I added 2 extra eggs with "Brain Breaks" in them.  Every time they got an egg with a Brain Break, they had to do what the paper inside said.  EX:  Touche le singe! (Touch the monkey!- I have a stuffed monkey hanging in my classroom) or a list of TPR commands for them to do.  Just silly, but they liked it.  

Okay, back to me now. Yesterday, we had the GA Graduation Writing Test, so I had a number of students out so this was a nice extension activity to do in class. Scrambled Eggs is a high energy activity, because there will be students constantly running back and forth to put back eggs and to retrieve new ones. 

As I have 34 students in a few of my Latin I classes, I added the following to the activity:

1. In addition to the 10 sentences and 2 brain breaks, I added 2 more brain break strips and 2 strips which had "XXXXXXs", meaning that students had gotten a "dead" egg without a sentence so they would have to go back to get a new egg
2. I added the task of translating the sentence into English after writing down the sentence in Latin. This was just to add another task to the activity in order to make it last longer.

Observations

1. Because you are solely working with words which students have acquired and as the sentences are comprehensible, the actual reading, listening, writing and translating is not difficult at all for students.
2. The activity does take prep time but during the activity, you the teacher are simply faciilitating.
3. It is a different way to do a dictation. In having students read to each other, they are hearing the language spoken by someone other than you the teacher.
4. It is a different way to do a running dictation, especially since students are just running to the center of the room as opposed to across a gym or hallway.
5. Because students switch off every 5th sentence, they each get a turn having to read the Latin aloud and to write it down as a dictation
6. To quote Lauren, "it is a chaotic activity but a good kind of chaos."
7. It was fun watching students get an egg, go back to their partners and open it, only to find that they already had that sentence so they had to go put it back and then grab a new egg (which hopefully had a new sentence) 

Thanks, Lauren, for a great activity

Listening Flow

To dovetail off of my post from last week on reading flow, just recently in one of my Latin 1 classes, I was telling a story in Latin. It was not an Ask a Story a'la TPRS style, but rather it was a story which I had written to introduce some new vocabulary and structures. In addition to telling the story and "pointing and pausing" to the target words on the board whenever they came up, I also was circling questions. After about 10 minutes, one of my students said, "Why do you keep asking us questions?! Can't we just listen to you tell the story?!"

At first, I was taken aback by this student's effrontery - how dare he question what I was doing, considering that the purpose of circling was to get students like him to interact with the language? But then I realized what he was saying: he simply wanted to hear the story and to enjoy it without any interruptions. I was the one getting in the way of that with my circling and asking questions. My series of questions was disrupting the picture forming in his mind. Essentially, I was interrupting his listening flow.

This is not to say that circling and PQAs do not have their place - they do. At the same time though, I realize now that it is also important to give students a chance to simply enjoy the language and to experience it without any disuruptions. As Carol Gaab says, "Circling can get REALLY OLD, REALLY FAST for students." If I am delivering the language in an understandable way, then it should be quite easy for students to enjoy the language without much difficulty.

Reading Flow in the CI/TPRS Classroom

I'm currently reading Kelly Gallagher's book Readicide: How Schools are Killing Reading and What You Can Do. At NTPRS this summer, at his presentation, Bryce Hedestrom suggested that we as CI/TPRS teachers read this book, and I am certainly glad that I am. In this book, Gallagher argues that the reason why students are no longer reading for pleasure is because schools are committing readicide, which he defines as

the systematic killing of the love of reading, often exacerbated by the inane, mind-numbing practices found in school.

One of the biggest problems which Gallagher sees is that when reading, students are no longer able to experience reading flow:

Nancy Atwell, in The Reading Zone, describes [reading flow] “as that place where young readers have to come up for air"...many of my students have no idea what it means to come up for air when reading...[compared to viewing a movie] many have never experienced the utter thrill of becoming lost in a book. They have never experienced reading flow.

In his opening chapters, Gallagher lists several reasons which contribute to the obstruction of reading flow:

• an over-dissection of a text by trying to cover too many standards in one text. Rather, he argues that a teacher should spread the standards over a number of texts, as some standards align better with certain texts than others.
• schools valuing the development of test-taking more than the development of reading itself
• trying to cover too much material, which results in shallow coverage of texts (wow, it is almost as if Gallagher saw the AP Latin syllabus when he wrote this book!)
• little attention paid to pleasure reading, regardless of what it is
• annotating a text to death with sticky notes and journals

As I read this book, I can see all of this unfolding before my own eyes with my students in their language arts classes.

The same principles can be applied to the world language class. Now while I do not expect to see my Latin 1 students so caught up in a reading that they forget where they are nor will I ever have them sticky-note a story to death, there are many obstacles which can disrupt a student's reading flow in a world language classroom:

• too much unfamiliar/un-acquired vocabulary in a reading. Instead of simply reading, the task ends up being a dictionary hunt. More time is spent in looking up words than actually reading. The reading ends up being a stop-and-go process. I have heard it said that if there are more than five unknown words to a student in a reading, then the reading is too difficult. 
• the reading itself is not comprehensible enough, i.e. the reading is too difficult and is beyond students' ability. As a result, frustration ensues.
• the reading itself is not compelling. While the reading may be comprehensible, the subject matter itself is uninteresting. Though students may be able to read and to understand a reading about Liechtenstein, most students may not find a connection to the reading. Noted CI/TPRS presenter Carol Gaab says, "Compelling Input is just as important as Comprehensible Input."
• the reading is too long. Just the length itself can cause students to have a pre-meditated conception that they are not going to enjoy the reading. 

Laurie Clarcq, one of the developers of Embedded Readings, says it best in her opening quote of her presentations (Laurie, thanks for giving me permission to use this quote!):

The purpose of language used in communication is to put a picture in the heart and/or mind of another person.

When reading flow is disrupted, that picture formation in the minds of students is also disrupted. When having students read, our goal as CI teachers should be an uninterrupted picture forming and constantly re-forming in their minds as more details from the reading are added.

How guilty I am of disrupting reading flow in my classroom over the years. Quite honestly, I do not think I ever thought of reading as something distinct from translating/decoding. In my opinion, they were the same concept; they are in fact two different skills.

So how can we CI/TPRS teachers produce reading flow for our students when they read? Here are a few strategies:

• do not jump into a reading right away. Students need to be prepped before they begin a reading, so do some pre-reading activities first. Do not use the first reading of a text as a way to teach new vocabulary and structures. Too much is going on for students at the same time if you do that.
• preview unfamiliar vocabulary/language structures first before reading. This can be achieved through TPR, asking a TPRS story, telling the actual story aloud first and acting it out, while having the new forms/vocabulary on the board so that students see/hear them first, a dication, etc. 
• create some embedded readings of the text for students. If a text seems rather long and complex, give it to students in bite-sized chunks. In reading and re-reading scaffolded embedded versions of the text, reading flow is achieved, because students are already familiar with the vocabulary and can activate background knowledge in anticipating the plot.
• create your own readings for students. Just because the textbook has readings/stories does not mean that they are good for students. Many textbook readings are overloaded with way too much vocabulary/structures too quickly. If you limit vocabulary/structures and you use the right words, you can create both a comprehensible and compelling story with just 15 distinct words. 
• do post-reading activities - I think that post-reading activities of a text is where the "magic" happens, as students interact with the reading in different ways and are "forced" to re-read it again multiple times. Examples of post-reading activities are read and draw, Readers Theater, cloze sentences, parallel universe, Mindreader, possible/probable questions and embedded writings. Post-reading activities are great ways to transition to a more complex embedded reading. Many of these activities I will discuss in later postings.
• have students re-read the story/text on their own - I will address this in a later posting.

I hate the fact that we as a Latin community do not have the CI/TPRS novels which the other languages have. Hopefully, that will change soon as the CI/TPRS Latin community grows! 

Parallel Universe

I got this idea from Cynthia Hitz's presentation at ACTFL last November (although I do not think that she called it "Parallel Universe" - that is my addition. Mea culpa, Cynthia, if you indeed did call it this). This is a great post-reading activity, but it needs to be done only after students have reviewed a particular story/reading MANY times, because it is going to require them to know a number of facts from the original story.

The idea is quite basic: tell another story aloud in Latin using sentences from the original story but alter some of them to create a new story. After each sentence in the altered version, ask students if that sentence is from the original story or is from the Parallel Universe.

Here is one which I did with my Latin 1 students during the second week of school.

Original story
Leonard ad Walmart it. infans ad Walmart it. elephantus est in Walmart. infans elephantum sumit. Leonard clamat, "O infans, depone elephantum." infans elephantum deponit. lightsaber est in Walmart. infans lightsabrem sumit. Leonard clamat, "O infans, depone lightsabrem!" infans lightsabrem non deponit. infans ad Leonard it. Leonard in infante considit.

Parallel Universe

Leonard ad Walmart it. elephantus est in Walmart. elephantus Leonardem sumit. Leonard

clamat (shouts), “O elephante, depone me!” elephantus Leonardem non deponit. infans ad 

Walmart it. infans elephantum sumit. Leonard clamat, "O infans, depone elephantum!" 
infans elephantum deponit. elephantus in infante considit. 

Observation
- A fun, quick way to review a story! Students pay attention to see where the differences are.
- A great way to get in repetitions of the parts of the original story.
- If it is kept simple, it is a great listening comprehension activity
- A degree of critical thinking does take place. In my example, there were some sentences 
which were identical from the original story. Some students noted, however, that the 
sentences took place in a different time in original story - wow, they were really paying 
attention!