Voces Digital Spring Conference 2024

I want to encourage you to register for Voces Digital virtual Spring Conference, which will be next week March 5-7, 2024. It will be held via Zoom and will run 5:15pm ET to around 7:00pm ET each evening, with a variety of sessions and speakers (many over whom I still fanboy!) each evening and is dedicated to "deepen(ing) your understanding of Comprehensible Input and Acquisition-Driven Instruction, learn(ing) new techniques and tools, and be(ing) inspired to engage your students in new ways." Best part - it is FREE!

I attended Voces Digital Spring Conference last year, but since I really did not know much about it, I did not have much in terms of expectations. I will definitely say that I got SO much from it, and I loved the fact that it was online so I could attend from my kitchen table! Here is my write up about last year's conference. 

This is the time of the year where we all need our CI/ADI cups refilled. All of us teachers and students are dragging along trying to get through - the name of the game right now is survival! Last year, after attending the Voces Digital Spring Conference I walked away with a renewed spirit which got me through Spring Break. Plus, so many of the presenters at that virtual conference were also at last summer's Voces Digital CI Summit, so it was a great preview!

Here is the link to information and registration for the Voces Digital Spring Conference - I hope that you will be joining me online!

Monsterbox - Movie Talk

While cleaning out my Google Docs files, I came across this Movie Talk which I had done YEARS ago and had completely forgotten about - I had facilitated this Movie Talk pre-Covid, and my sense of time and memories of that time are very fuzzy! The animated short is called Monsterbox and in looking over the script, I see that I was focusing on some very specific target words: craftsman, makes (various forms of the word), house, big, small, medium-sized (and it also looks like I was using future infinitives in indirect statements as part of prediction questions).

Latin script

English script

Observations

1. Like most animated shorts, there is a ton of repeated action which allows for continued exposure to the language. In this animated short, I like that with each repeated action, there is a slight difference. This allows for the repetition of language but also for the introduction of a new target word in that repeated context.
2. Honestly, I have little memory of doing this Movie Talk (blame the Covid years), but apparently, I centered a whole week's lesson plans around it lol. However, now that I have discovered this, I think that I will use it again.

Guided Written Translation

When it comes to our language classrooms, we tend to rush into the 90% target language usage "rule" (and I use that word "rule" loosely, because no one seems to be able to find anything official which states that it must be 90% or why 90% was even picked as the number). As a result, we think that L1 has no place in our language classrooms. I wholeheartedly disagree with this, because L1 translation does play a part in the language acquisition process:

1. Translation into L1 is a necessary part of the language acquisition process. When the brain is confronted with new L2, it will do everything it can to make some type of meaning into L1. That L2 which the brain understands, it latches onto and adds/creates to its existing mental representation of that L2. That L2 which the brain cannot understand, it throws out.
2. Translation into L1 in and of itself is not wrong, because it establishes meaning for learners. However, translation is at the lowest level of Bloom's taxonomy, so where the issue is when we stay there in L1, only focus on L1, and do not progress towards the eventual understanding and creation of new meaning in L2.

Choral reading/translation is one way to establish meaning into L1. Another way to help establish meaning is through a guided written translation. Students will receive a two-column worksheet with L2 in the first column, and their task is to translate it into L1 in the other column by filling in the blank with the correct meaning. I learned this from a Cambridge Latin Course workshop years ago, and I have found that this is a good tool to aid in translating an inflected language like Latin where the word order does not resemble English.

Example:

Observations

1. This can be done either on a Word document or a spreadsheet. It does involve creating tables or cells, so use the web app resource with which you are most familiar.
2. I would scaffold this very early in a unit lesson (possibly after a choral reading), since this focuses on establishing meaning into L1, i.e., by no means is this a culminating activity.
3. I like that this allows for the establishing of meaning in a different modality (writing), thus reinforcing the L1 meaning in a different way.
4. I do not do this too often, but when I do, it is to focus on meaning of words and not necessarily grammar per se, although I suppose it could be adapted to a specific focus on correct translation of tenses.