Being a Guest on Claudia Elliott's Podcast "Growing with Proficiency"

Recently, I had the opportunity to be a guest on Claudia Elliott's podcast "Growing with Proficiency," sharing about making dictations purposefully communicative (here is the original blog post). If you have not listened to Claudia's podcast, what a treasure trove of guests and topics related to proficiency-based, CI/ADI language instruction!

WOW, what a privilege and honor it was for me to be a guest on this podcast! Over the years on this podcast, I have listened to so many great teachers whom I so greatly admire and from whom I have learned a great deal - so to be invited to be a guest was something which I did not take lightly!

Although we had to record this episode twice due to technical issues the first time, I really enjoyed my time! Claudia has a great personality and is a wonderful communicator, so it felt more like an organic, spontaneous conversation between two teachers and not like an interview.

Check out this episode - Dictation + Communication: How to Make Dictation Purposefully Communicative (Ideas You Can Use Tomorrow)

Task Rotation

Are there classroom days where you need to leave something for a substitute or where you just need a break and you want students to work on something independently but you can still introduce some new material in a bite-size chunk way? Well, here is an activity which may work for you!

I am currently taking a gifted certification class, so I am required to implement a number of gifted strategies in my classes and to turn in lesson plans showing that I facilitated them with students. While these strategies work great for core subject areas, unfortunately most of them are not aligned with the second language acquisition process, so I end up having to tweak them to fit my situation (which ends up not really resembling the original but rather the "spirit" of it). Here is a "gifted" strategy which I tweaked and tried with students on a day where I just needed a break.

The strategy is called "Task Rotation," and the concept is for students to work with a concept through completion of tasks which address different learning domains: 

• mastery - ask students to remember and describe.
• understanding - ask students to reason and explain.
• interpersonal - ask students to explore feelings and relate personally.
• self-expression - ask students to imagine and create.

So on this day where I needed a break, I created a Task Rotation for my Latin 2 students where the goal was to introduce four new vocabulary words and then have students do different, short learning domain tasks with them - again, this activity in many ways just reflects the "spirit" of the original strategy. NOTE - I had to label the domains as part of my gifted assignment. When I do this again, I will leave out the domain titles. 

As a class, I first defined the four vocabulary words so that everyone had a common meaning for these words. After that I explained what the three other tasks were but that they could do them in any order.

Observations

1. Because I was using this to introduce some new vocabulary, obviously me defining the words for the class for the "mastery domain" is not true mastery. 
2. The interpersonal examples which were given in my gifted class were "Write a personal letter to a close family relative explaining your feelings about X topic" or "Describe the feelings you have when you must use the quadratic equation. How do you deal with those feelings?" These were level 2 students, and asking students to describe their feelings in the target language through writing a letter or a diary entry seemed WAY BEYOND their proficiency ability, so I just had them write a 3-4 sentence story in Latin which used three of the new words. This was not difficult for students to do, because they were already familiar with doing a 4-Word Story. In addition, it involved higher-order thinking, since students were creating their own meaning using the target language.
3. Afterwards, students told me that they liked doing different things with the new words and that it was not just "only write a story in Latin" or "only illustrate the following story" - they enjoyed the variety and that it was short but effective.
4. Did students acquire these new words as a result? By no means, but they were definitely more familiar with them because of the interaction with them and usage.

So consider this as an independent work day activity or when you have a sub. Also, if you do actually use the four domains as prescribed, I would like to see how you had students do it in the target language.

Voces Digital Blog Post - My Experience at CI Summit

Recently I had the privilege of writing up a blog post for Voces Digital about my experience at CI Summit, and yesterday it was released on the Voces Digital website. I hope that you will take time to read it and that it will inspire you to consider attending CI Summit this summer. I hope to see you there!

Voces Digital blog

Freeze Frame as a Listening Proficiency Assessment

Want a quick summative way for students to demonstrate proficiency in their listening comprehension? Consider doing a take on the Freeze Frame activity! Because proficiency-based assessments test language modalities in an unrehearsed scenario, Freeze Frame is a great way to determine if students have aurally acquired language. I wrote about this activity in 2014, but I know that there are many others who use this activity too (if you have ever seen Eric Richards' presentation on whiteboard activities, he demonstrates this).

Freeze Frame is simply having students illustrate one giant picture which they hear you narrate in the target language. Students are not illustrating individual cartoon frames but drawing one picture, to which they add more details which they hear you narrate. (see blog post for an example of the picture and paragraph to read). 

Directions

1. Using known vocabulary words and language structures, write a description in the target language of a single picture which you wish for them to draw. The more random the picture, the better! The description should be about 10-12 sentences.
2. The paragraph needs to be something with which students are unfamiliar so that what they are hearing is unrehearsed - this preserves the proficiency and summative aspect of the assessment. Also, keep in mind that the paragraph must be 100% comprehensible to students, hence you are definitely recycling known vocabulary and structures but just not identical to a known passage. Having students work with a passage with which they are already familiar is performance in nature and reflects a formative assessment. 
3. You can print up a sheet on which for students to draw or you can have them do it on their own sheets of paper.
4. Explain to students that you are going to read a description to them, and their task is to draw a picture of what you read to them.
5. Read the paragraph in "chunks," i.e., parts of the picture at a time. 
6. As students hear you read the "chunks," they are to illustrate what you say. Repeat the sentences MANY times!
7. Since this is a proficiency-based listening assessment, grade according to a rubric. Below is an example of one which I modified/adapted. I found this on Elicia Cardenas' blog The Deskless Classroom.

Observations

1. Wow, this was a fast assessment. It took about 10 minutes to administer!
2. Grading according to a proficiency-based rubric like the one above made it so easy and quick to grade. 
3. I would advise doing some practice with this kind of activity first before using it as an assessment so that students understand that they are drawing one giant picture and that you are giving them parts of the picture to draw a few sentences at a time.
4. The repetition of the sentences as they draw allows students to hear continued exposure of understandable messages.

Give this a try as a summative listening comprehension assessment!

My Experiment with Sheltering Vocabulary

As I have stated many times here, this year I have been focusing on sheltering vocabulary with my Latin 1 classes. If you are not familiar with the concept (one can always use a refresher), Kristy Placido recently made a short video about the idea - in it, she addresses the four types of vocabulary words.

I really like how Kristy puts it, because I feel that many of us have a wrong idea about what "sheltering vocabulary" is. I feel that so many teachers think sheltering vocabulary at the lower levels is keeping vocabulary limited to a set limit for a unit/reading, but then move onto a new unit/reading where that previous high frequency vocabulary is not recycled and instead shelter a whole new limited set of vocabulary, which again is hardly reused in the following unit/reading. This is incredibly confusing for students, because they do not know what words they really should know, and it is frustrating for us teachers, because we feel like "students should still know these words, because we introduced them, but they do not." I have been SO guilty of this!

So last semester, I truly began to shelter vocabulary, trying to focusing on high frequency vocabulary and constantly recycling/providing lots of exposure. Here is the cumulative list of words/phrases which I targeted last semester. 

Let me say a few things:

• I had NO idea where I was going with this. I was embarking on this blindly. My goal was to introduce 5 new words a week, while constantly recycling previous targeted vocabulary. 
• I based my curriculum solely on clip chats. This allowed me to find animated shorts in which I could target these words.
• In the beginning weeks of the semester, my focus was on verbs. In order for sentences solely to focus on the Latin verb, the sentences usually had a name and the brand name of an object, such as Elmo wants Takis, Dora has a Playstation, Carlita is bringing a BigMac. This way students could focus solely on the Latin word which was the verb.
• On the one hand, I wanted to focus on Super 7/Sweet 16 words, but at the same time, I did see some necessity to cover words which are on the Dickinson Latin high frequency list. Let me say, I do not fully agree with many of the words on this list, since it comes from those words found in classical literature, which is Advanced High/Superior level readings - maybe 15% of my students will go onto AP Latin, so why am I subjugating the other 85% who are not?! Often I will look at the words listed and say, "That is a Cicero word" or "That is a Vergil word" but were they actually high frequency among the everyday Romans?
• I only introduced ONE Latin verb for movement - ad...petit (heads for) - anytime a character in a story went somewhere, I used that phrase. This was absolutely deliberate, since petit is a high frequency Latin word. While many Latin textbooks will introduce ambulat (is walking) and currit (is running) quite early, those are not high frequency words and instead are rather "decorative" to me - they explain in what manner one is going. I can introduce those later on for descriptive purposes. I'd rather have students burn memory bandwidth on acquiring other words for first semester.
• I sheltered vocabulary like crazy and recycled these words OVER AND OVER. In other words, I was absolutely deliberate that these words appeared as much as possible in clip chats and readings throughout the semester so that they eventually became sight words for them when reading due to the rampant exposure.

Observations

1. While my goal was to introduce 5 new words a week (so that there would be around 90 words at the end of the semester), I found that there were weeks where I needed to "circle the plane" some to revisit words and give students a chance to "plateau" in their learning. As a result, I did not reach my goal of 90 words by semester's end.
2. In addition, there were weeks where I wanted to focus on introducing a new grammatical structure such as 1st person singular. Here is where I was truly able to shelter vocabulary, not grammar.  
3. Because my Latin 1 students are emergent Latin readers, sheltering vocabulary and recycling these words in their readings greatly aided their reading development. In addition, I patterned my stories after emergent novellas which contain predictable sentence structures/patterns and focus on 1-2 ideas presented in a sentence. 
4. Where I saw the benefits of sheltering vocabulary was in student writing! Refer to my blog post on Novice Writing Proficiency Assessments with Pictures
5. I found that I could introduce a lot of new adjectives once students were familiar with "sum (I am)," because it seemed to flow naturally and I could incorporate it into dialogues.
6. In the beginning, 5 words a week worked well, but I can see making it 6-8 words as the semester progresses, but this requires paying closer attention to actively recycling those words.

As I said, I was doing this blindly. This was a work in progress and still is. However, I have a MUCH better idea of how sheltering vocabulary works and am looking forward to improving how I implement this. 

2026 CI/ADI Conferences

With it now being the new year, it is never too early to consider attending a CI/ADI conference in 2026, whether it be in-person or online. Here is a list of conferences for this year:

• Mitten CI (in-person) - April 17-18 in Saline, Michigan

• Comprehensible Iowa (in person) - June 12-13 in Des Moines, Iowa (I will be there!)
• Strasbourg ADI Institute (in-person - France) - June 27-July 5
• TCI Oregon (in-person) - June 29-July 1 in Bend, Oregon 

• CI Reboot (online) - dates yet to be released
• NTPRS (in-person) - July 13-16 in Port Orange, Florida
• CI Summit (in person) - July 15-17 in Cincinnati, Ohio (I will be there!)
• Agen Workshop (in-person - France) - July 20-25 in Agen, France

Did I miss any? Let me know in the comments. Hope that you will consider attending one or more!

Revisiting Dictations - Embedding Purposeful Communication

I am not a fan of dictations. I find them boring, and while I understand how they can aid in both the acquisition of language and the creation of orthographic mapping in students' minds, my students really do not like them. One student told me, "This is like taking notes!"

I am currently reading Common Ground: Second Language Acquisition Theory Goes to the Classroom by Maris Hawkins and Florencia Henshaw. In the first chapter, Hawkins and Henshaw discuss how to transform traditional activities into ones which reflect a communicative aspect; among these, they discuss a dictation. This can be found on pages 17-18 (according to my Kindle, so the pages may be different in a hard copy).

I tried out this modified dictation today in my Latin 1 classes, and I really like how it went. I did make some changes to how they present it in their book, but the spirit is still the same. I TAKE NO CREDIT FOR THE FOLLOWING - THIS IS ALL HAWKINS AND HENSHAW!

As is the example in the book, the focus of my dictation was on introducing the phrase "I like" (in Latin, mihi placet - literally "it pleases me").

1. I looked online to find the top six ranked activities which American teenagers like to do. I used Gemini AI to help find the ranked activities (so take with a grain of salt the accuracy), but according to a 2025 Pew Report as found by AI, the top six activities in order are:
1. watching digital content (Disney +, Hulu, Netflix, etc)
2. being on social media (Tik Tok, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, etc)
3. listening to music
4. playing video games
5. sleeping
6. playing sports
2. I then scrambled the order and wrote them up as dictation sentences in Latin with the phrase "mihi placet....". There were a number of words and phrases for which I had to establish meaning in English and Latin: social media, video games, to watch digital content. 
3. From here, I treated this as a regular dictation activity.
4. Once the dictation activity was done, I then asked students to rank these activities from 1-6 according to THEIR preference.
5. Then I asked them to rank these activities according to how they thought AMERICAN TEENAGERS had answered.
6. I then projected a slide, revealing the Pew Report answers in Latin one at a time, starting with #6. 

Observations

1. While it still was a traditional dictation in a way, I loved the purposeful communication aspect of it at the end. Students were learning about themselves and their interests compared to how they "ranked" on a national poll.
2. I felt that having students rank their interests at the end according to their preferences and then predict what American teenagers said gave a sense of anticipation when I revealed the rankings - it felt like a game show! 
3. As a teacher, I definitely felt more engaged in the activity, since I knew where the dictation was heading. Most times, I end up zoning out... 
4. In Latin, much like Spanish, the phrase "I like" is usually followed by an infinitive. I had not yet introduced the infinitive form, but because I had sheltered vocabulary last semester, students already knew the verb forms for hear/listen to, play, and sleep. So while I still established meaning for the infinitive forms during the dictation, I was able to do lots of quick pop-up grammar during it by saying, "You already know that ludit means 'plays' - ludere means 'to play' - the -re is where I am getting the 'to __________." Using the phrase "I like" seems like a natural way to introduce the infinitive of known verbs.

I would love to do more purposefully communicative dictations in the future - what are some suggestions which you all have?

Thank you, Maris Hawkins and Florencia Henshaw!