Is Circling/Asking Processing Questions Communicative?

This is a continuation in my series on purposeful communication.

So maybe you have been following my series about purposeful communication and are saying to yourself, "I implement Comprehensible Input (CI)/Acquisition Drive Instruction (ADI) in my classroom, so I am facilitating purposeful communication, right?" The answer is, "Well...it depends." CI/ADI in and of itself is not purposeful communication, nor is purposeful communication in and of itself CI/ADI. One can implement CI/ADI but not engage in purposeful communication, and one can facilitate purposeful communication but not implement CI/ADI.

What about circling/asking processing questions? Is that a form of purposeful communication? In circling/asking processing questions, am I not communicating with students?

As a backdrop, allow me again to quote Bill Van Patten's definition of communication and my previous explanation in an earlier blog post:

"Communication is the interpretation, expression, and/or negotiation of meaning for a purpose, in a given context." Based on that definition, Van Patten continues that our purpose should be that we wish to discover and learn information about each other, ourselves, and the world around us through communication, text, and input. In addition, in his book Van Patten adds that another purpose of communication is to entertain: "When we tell a joke or write a story...our purpose is to entertain in some way."

In his book, While We're On the Topic: BVP on Language, Acquisition, and Classroom Practice, Van Patten discusses that when we ask students questions, there are two types: display and context-embedded. Asking display questions IS NOT the same thing as being communicative. Here are examples of display questions:

• Circling/asking processing questions - The purpose of this is not to learn anything new about someone or something. When circling/asking processing questions, one is purely verifying information which has been presented or the answer is obvious. This is NOT to say that circling/asking processing questions does not have its place in the classroom - Circling/asking processing questions helps determine comprehension while also allowing for more exposure to targeted vocabulary, but in and of itself, circling/asking processing questions is not being communicative. 

• Asking questions for which one already knows the answer  - if I ask a student what color something is for which we can already see or know the answer, the very fact that it is obvious (such as the color of somebody's shirt, the color of something in a picture, the color of the sky), again asking that question is solely to verify information. As a class, we are not learning anything new about ourselves, each other, or the world. 

While display questions do have their place in a classroom, in general they do NOT equate to being communicative. Van Patten refers to this type of questioning simply as a way to "practice the language:"

Display questions are designed to elicit a specific response in order to demonstrate that the responder understands something and can respond with the (one and only one) correct answer.

I love this Bill Van Patten quote: "Just because mouths are moving does not mean a classroom event is communicative."

However, the opposite type of questions is context-embedded questions, those which are "designed to get information about a topic." Any time when you are asking students a question where you yourself do not know the answer by nature is a truly communicative event, since as a result, that response is teaching us "about ourselves, each other, or the world." In addition, a question where you need student response and input to help "create and to entertain in the language" is a communicative question. Examples of these types of questions are Personalized Questions and Answers (PQAs), StoryAsking questions, One Word Image questions, and opinion questions. 

The skill then lies in knowing how to incorporate both display questions and context-embedded questions, since they are both necessary and important in their own ways for language acquisition and communication. Here are some ways which I am learning to do this (emphasis on "learning"):

• Circling/asking processing questions leading into a PQA - when circling/asking processing questions, can it seamlessly lead into a PQA? Example from a Clip Chat:
• "The woman is eating dinner. What is the woman eating? (dinner). Yes, the woman is eating dinner. Is the woman making dinner or eating dinner? (eating dinner). Carol, what did you eat for dinner yesterday? Manny, what did you eat for dinner?"

• Circling/asking processing questions leading into an opinion question - when circling/asking processing questions, can it seamlessly lead into an opinion question? Example from a Clip Chat (same scenario from above):

•  "The woman is eating dinner. What is the woman eating? (dinner). Yes, the woman is eating dinner. Is the woman making dinner or eating dinner? (eating dinner). Class, in your opinion, is it a good dinner? (NOTE - she is eating pasta). Carol, in your opinion, is pasta a good dinner? Carol, in your opinion, what is a good dinner? In my opinion, a good dinner is _________." 

• Circling/asking processing questions leading into a world fact of some kind - when circling/asking processing questions, can it seamlessly lead into a world fact which you can tie into the discussion? Example from a Clip Chat (same scenario from above):
• "The woman is eating dinner. What is the woman eating? (dinner). Yes, the woman is eating dinner. Is the woman making dinner or eating dinner? (eating dinner). 80% of the world have rice or beans for dinner. Therefore, class, 80% of you should have eaten rice or beans for dinner yesterday. How many of you ate rice or beans for dinner yesterday?"

Again, I am stil learning how to do this. What has your experience been in springboarding into communicative-type questions from circling/asking processing questions?

Teaching Culture in a Purposefully Communicative Manner

This is part of a series on purposeful communication.

This past summer, I had the wonderful experience of observing Skip Crosby teach a middle school Spanish language lab at the CI Summit in Philadelphia. I ALWAYS enjoy observing Skip, because he is a master CI/ADI teacher with middle school students, plus I know little-to-no Spanish, so I love how he makes the language comprehensible. However, more importantly, I got to see Skip present a cultural lesson on vitilla (a sport in the Dominican Republic which is similar to baseball to a degree) in the Spanish language - what I loved most about it (other than just learning about this sport which I had never heard about before, its cultural connection to life in the Dominican Republic, and its possible correlation to why the Dominican Republic has the second largest representation of players in the MLB after America) was that although it was presented in Spanish (and I know very little Spanish), it was 100% comprehensible to me!

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post about my purposeful communicative goals for the school year. This goal was based on Bill Van Patten's definition of communication - here is my explanation of it from that earlier blog post:

"Communication is the interpretation, expression, and/or negotiation of meaning for a purpose, in a given context." Based on that definition, Van Patten continues that our purpose should be that we wish to discover and learn information about each other, ourselves, and the world around us through communication, text, and input. In addition, in his book Van Patten adds that another purpose of communication is to entertain: "When we tell a joke or write a story...our purpose is to entertain in some way."

In that same blog post where I listed ways in which I aim to embrace this in my classroom, I wrote: [here is how I will use purposeful communication] "to learn about the world around us: 

1. teaching cultural topics and other content in understandable target language through readings and presentations."

Therefore, as part of my effort to engage in more purposeful communication, I have indeed begun to teach cultural topics in understandable Latin.

HOWEVER, this is NOT as easy as it sounds though: Teaching a target-language-based presentation is still INPUT, and crafting a cultural presentation in the target language means that it still has to be 98%-100% comprehensible. So often, culture has very specific non-high-frequency words, which means that while I can gloss those particular cultural vocabulary words in the presentation, the remaining words must be known/acquired words and cognates. If there are more glossed words than actual known/acquired words, then the input is not comprehensible and can become overwhelming for students.

My goal for the actual presentation was just student understanding and demonstration of comprehension in English - VERY low level on Bloom's Taxonomy. If I were to want to have a further discussion or application in L2, that would require much more specialized output - I just wanted students to show me in L1 their understanding of that L2 communication. Because my goal was comprehension and understanding, to ask questions in L2 and for them to respond in L2 would not let me know what they initially understood.

In my Latin 2 Honors classes, we are starting Andrew Olimpi's novella Clodia. The first chapter takes place at a Roman dinner party, so I decided to do a short presentation about the Roman cena in Latin. There are a lot of cultural nuances surrounding the cena embedded in that chapter which one will not catch without this knowledge. First off, the Roman cena can be a BIG topic in English, and if my goal is being 98%-100% comprehensible in Latin, I big time needed to "shelter vocabulary" and create lots of exposure of cognates/known words to balance out any glossed words. Below is what I crafted (this is part 1 - the cena is a BIG topic):

NOTE - I know that recumbebant is the better word to use than reclinabant, but my goal was to be comprehensible, so I used the cognate instead.

I presented the above using Google Slides and had students answer the following questions in English during the presentation:

1. Explain the dining seating arrangement in a Roman cena and how it differs from a traditional Western meal seating.
2. Nine people could recline on couches in a Roman cena. Explain what happens if there were more than nine.
3. Explain how social rank could affect one’s seating and food offerings.
4. The triclinium was the most decorated room in a Roman house - explain what different things a Roman could see when dining in the triclinium.

Observations

1. I really like the idea of presenting cultural topics in Latin - this is a great example of purposeful communication! However, the key is that the presentation/reading must be 98%-100% comprehensible. I know that Oerberg presents cultural topics in Latin in his chapters, but many times, those readings are overly vocabulary-intensive and turns into a frustrating decoding activity.
2. If I want to get meaty with cultural topics, then I will have to use L1 for that due to complexity of language needed.
3. I am still learning how to teach culture in a purposeful communicative way, but I was very pleased with what I wrote. Again, my goal was to deliver a cultural topic in L2 using 98%-100% comprehensible language where students at the end could demonstrate understanding and comprehension of that L2 in English.
4. I did spend the next day having students interact with the presentation as a reading with some post-reading activities, but that was it. It was not necessary to spend more than a day on it as a reading, since the reading was quite comprehensible to them already.

I am going to continue to do this! My next cultural presentation will be on the Roman popina - wish me luck!

P.S. In the second week of school, I did a comprehensible Latin version of Skip's vitilla presentation, since the first week we had focused on PQAs involving sports. I do not know if my other Latin 2 colleagues understood why I did it or what vitilla had to do with Latin, but I LOVED that I was teaching students about the modern world IN THE LATIN LANGUAGE!

Using AI to Generate Graphics/Images

As I have posted earlier, this past summer at the American Classical League Summer Institute, I attended Stefanie Gigante's presentation "Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Latin Teachers." I have already addressed on this blog how she demonstrated using ChatGPT and Diffit to create texts but she also showed how Canva can be used to create AI-generated images and graphics.

I decided to try this out with a bellringer. Since it was the second week of school, I wanted to do some review of vocabulary words from last year with my Latin 2 students and to get them to write the words down with definitions, so in Magic Media, I typed in the following words in English as my parameters - I also set it to "graphics":

When I pushed "generate," after a few seconds, Magic Media gave me a number of possible graphics which included visual representations of the words. Not every graphic used every word, so I had it regenerate new graphics until I found one that I liked. Below is the image, along with how it was shown for that particular day's bellringer:

On the next day, I reused that graphic for a bellringer, but now the focus was on writing sentences in Latin about the picture. 

Observations

1. I love how I was able to use AI to create custom-made graphics. Instead of having to search for images/graphics which would fit what I want, I can have AI create them for me!
2. The more random the picture, the better I feel for an activity like this! 
3. Magic Media on Canva can create pictures and videos in addition to graphics.

What has been your experience in using AI to generate images/graphics?

Draw-Your-Own-Picture BINGO

This is a listening activity which I recently learned this summer from Donna Tatum-Johns at the Fluency Matters Conference in Denver. She demonstrated this as a post-reading activity after she had facilitated a Clip Chat (formerly known as "Movie Talk"), and I thought, "What a great communicative way to play BINGO!" It involves students drawing visual representations of vocabulary words from a reading in a 3x3 grid and then reading sentences with a missing word in the target language from a reading which you have been reviewing. Students then have to look at their BINGO grid to see if they have the missing word.

Pre-activity directions

1. Pick 18 words from the reading which students can illustrate. Preferably pick words which you have been targeting and words which are drawable, i.e., do not pick an abstract word like "dignity"
2. Put those words in pairs so that there are nine pairs of words. Try to pair them in similarities.
3. Write a script where you will read each pair as "____________ or ___________." If you want, create slides where you present each pair as " ____________ or _________." 
4. Pick 10-12 sentences from the reading which have one of the 18 words and leave it blank, and write out those sentences. You will be reading them.

Activity directions

1. On a whiteboard or piece of paper, have students draw a 3x3 grid.
2. Tell students that you will say aloud two vocabulary words in the target language. They are to choose one of them and to draw that word anywhere on their grid. If you wish to have a visual of the pair choices, project the slide.
3. Give students one minute at the most to draw. Do not allow too much time, because there are nine words which they will draw.
4. When students are done, tell them that you will now read a sentence from the story but there is a word missing. If they have the visual representation of the word, then they may cross out the picture (but not cross it out enough that it cannot be identified any longer). Say that sentence many times to get in meaningful exposure of that sentence.
5. Continue on with the next sentence until a student gets three in a row.
6. When a student gets three in a row, that student yells BINGO. Have student come up so that you can check their board. Continue to play until you have 5 winners (or how many you want. I allow winners to continue playing and win multiple times). This will allow for continued exposure to sentences from the reading.

Observations

1. Wow, what a great new way to play vocabulary BINGO!
2. I love this way of playing BINGO with a reading, because it addresses so many modalities and components of language:
1. listening comprehension - students having to listen to the sentence to determine what word is missing and to look on their board to find it.
2. vocabulary - students need to know what target language words each of their drawings represent
3. personalization of words - students are drawing their own representations of the vocabulary words
4. communicative nature - the missing words are coming from the original sentences from the reading
5. higher order thinking - students need to make the connection between knowing what target word is missing and if they have that visual representation on their grid
6. student choice - students choose which words of the pair that they want to illustrate, in addition to where they want to place those words on their grid
3. This activity does take quite awhile to facilitate, because students are taking time to illustrate their choice of words and there are 18 possible word choices (in addition to the randomness of where they place 9 of those words) so even though it is a 3x3 grid, it can take some time before someone has BINGO.

Thanks, Donna, for this great activity!

My Professional Learning Goal for the Year - Being Purposefully Communicative

I have been teaching students for over two weeks already, and I feel like I am back in the swing of things, i.e., I have accepted that my summer break is over and that this is my life now for the next ten months (haha). I am back to lesson planning, and honestly, I am very excited about my professional learning goal for this school year: being purposefully communicative.

I have written a few posts on this blog about purposeful communication, but I feel like this past summer, I had the chance to interact with this concept continuously and have gained a whole new and expanded perspective on the topic. Purposeful communication is based on Bill Van Patten's definition of communication (if you have ever heard him talk on this topic, this is the definition which he always gives). In this book, While We're On the Topic: BVP on Language, Acquisition, and Classroom Practice he writes: 

"Communication is the interpretation, expression, and/or negotiation of meaning for a purpose, in a given context." 

Based on that definition, Van Patten continues that our purpose should be that we wish to discover and learn information about each other, ourselves, and the world around us through communication, text, and input. In addition, in his book Van Patten adds that another purpose of communication is to entertain: "When we tell a joke or write a story...our purpose is to entertain in some way."

This summer at Comprehensible Iowa, I gave a presentation on this topic called "Communicating Purposefully," where I demonstrated many ways in which we can be purposefully communicative in our classroom activities. However, earlier in April, a Coaching Summit was held prior to Mitten CI, where the coaching/skills lab model was overhauled to reflect an emphasis on this topic. This summer at Acquisition Academy, Fluency Matters Conference, and CI Summit where I served as a coach/trainer, this new model was implemented in the each of the coaching/skills lab. As a result of facilitating and interacting with this new model in the coaching/skills labs, my understanding of purposeful communication was greatly deepened and expanded.

As language teachers, our goals should be to deliver and to engage in purposeful communication with our students. We need to be incredibly mindful though that purposeful communication does not necessarily equate to full immersion, because while I can create a full immersive environment in the target language, if it is not understandable, no matter how purposeful our intentions are, that communication is a waste of time and just noise to students. And in addition while I can be 100% comprehensible to students in the target language, I could be completely missing the mark if that communication is not purposeful in nature. Van Patten states, "Language use without purpose is not communication."

So based on the above definition of purposeful communication, here are ways in which I plan to address its various components in Latin (both spoken and in readings). In many ways, I was already implementing many of these, but they were random and never intentional in purpose. This will be my guide and lens in lesson planning for this school year:

• to learn about each other and ourselves: 

1. Personalized Questions and Answers (PQAs) 
2. polling students in the target language
3. connecting with students and their interests through questioning in the target language
4. completion of communicative tasks 
5. SEL partner reading (although this activity is not really done in the target language, it can still lead to learning about each other).

• to learn about the world around us: 

1. teaching cultural topics and other content in understandable target language through readings and presentations
2. purposefully embedding cultural topics and facts into circling.

• to entertain/create with language in fun, engaging ways: 

1. TPRS/StoryAsking
2. One Word Image
3. the use of rejoinders in class.

Now not every activity which I will implement in class is going to incorporate purposeful communication primarily due to the nature of the activity, but I can strive to "communicatify" existing activities:

• GimKit/Blooket - when using these for vocabulary review, instead of showing isolated words, put those words in their original context from a reading.
• Grudgeball/Word Chunk Game/Trashketball - before a student shoots a basket, ask class in the target language for their opinion if they think that the student will make the basket; teach students to use rejoinders as cheers during the game,
• BINGO - instead of playing the traditional vocabulary BINGO, facilitate a game of Quick Grid BINGO.
• Sex Game - instead of the traditional Sex Game, instead play Sex Game 2.0.

I am actually looking forward to lesson planning now that I have this goal in mind! What are some ways in which you plan to be deliver purposeful communication in your classroom?

PQA - Is This a Good or Bad Pizza Topping?

I am now in my 2nd week of school with students. Things are definitely moving along, and like it or not, I am back in work mode. With my Latin 2 students, we have been doing review with PQA-based story about a character who plays baseball well, but there is another character who is better than he is and is the best baseball player (this is based on a demo which I have seen Eric Richards conduct in German several times - really good stuff!). These readings have been used to preview a cultural lesson on the sport vitilla (a sport similar to baseball played primarily in the Dominican Republic). I saw Skip Crosby present this lesson in a middle school Spanish language lab class at CI Summit this year, and I thought, "This is a great cultural topic. I do not want to only teach about the ancient world using Latin - I want to teach about modern culture in other parts of the world too in the Latin language!" (What is vitilla? How is it similar to/differ from baseball? Is there a correlation between vitilla and the fact that the Dominican Republic has the 2nd highest national representation among MLB players?).

Anyhow, my colleague John Foulk, as we were reviewing the words good, bad, better than, and best in Latin 2 as part of the baseball reading, created a PQA bellringer using these words regarding various pizza toppings. Since I am also teaching Latin 1, today I decided to try it out for the words good and bad as a bellringer. Here is the Latin 1 bellringer slide which I projected and the directions:

Observations

1. What a great PQA! Everyone has an opinion about pizza toppings!
2. After students finished writing down their responses for this bellringer, I asked them to raise their hand to answer "estne X bonus in pitta?" and then counted aloud in Latin how many agreed. This is how I expose students to numbers - I count in a context, instead of having them memorize how to count from 1-10 in the target language. I learned this from Haiyun Le.
3. After writing down the number of people who said X is a good topping, I recast it by saying in Latin, "(Number) aestimant (corn) esse bonum in pitta!"
4. I suppose that I could have listed the Latin words for the food items and not the English, but primarily, this was the 2nd week of Latin 1 - no need to overwhelm them with food words and secondly, those food words are NOT high frequency! My focus was on the high frequency, necessary words bonus and malus.
5. I liked that students wanted to say if they thought a pizza topping was bad! I could ask a student, "Aestimasne (you think) X is malus in pitta?" Again, lots of opinions stated!
6. I can see using this idea for ice cream toppings (believe me, do a internet search and you will find many odd toppings), soft drinks (Pepsi vs. Coke, Dr. Pepper vs. Mr. Pibb), things you can put on hamburgers, etc. 
7. This is definitely an example of purposeful communication, because students are learning about each other, and the target language is solely serving as the means for that communication.

Thanks, John, for this great idea!

My Summer is Over

Tomorrow is the first day of school with students. My summer vacation is officially over - I will return back to the real world of teaching after a two month hiatus. I am certain that tomorrow morning before school begins, I will be an emotional and nervous mess on the inside. But 27 years of teaching has taught me that once the school bell rings for first period and I take attendance for the first time, my internal teacher "switch" will flip on, and I will be fine and back in teacher mode.

However, although I had this summer off, I had many opportunities both to train others and to learn at numerous CI/ADI Conferences: CI Iowa, Acquisition Academy in Denver, Fluency Matters Conference, and CI Summit. Yes, it was actually a very full summer, but when I take a step back and reflect on it all - wow, I learned SO much! For three of the conferences, I was serving as either a language teacher or as a coach/trainer; when one is serving in those capacities, one cannot help but relearn and gain a much deeper sense of CI/ADI, since one is teaching others about it. Throughout this summer, I was surrounded by so many CI/ADI folks over whom I still fanboy and hold up with such reverence; I know well enough that I must pay attention whenever I see them present and interact with them, because I am always going to glean some new piece of CI/ADI wisdom from them. I am now taking so much of what I learned this summer and am now turning them in my first few weeks of lesson plans.

Shout outs to:

• Eric Richards - For this opening week, I am Latinizing your PQA lessons on playing sports that I observed you do both in Iowa this summer and last year at CI Summit, because they are that good!
• Skip Crosby - I always have the pleasure of observing you teach a Spanish language lab to middle school students at CI Summit. I am planning on teaching about the Dominican Republic sport vitilla like you did but in Latin! It is a natural springboard from Eric's PQAs about sports (plus the Olympics are starting its second week now, so it is timely) - who says that Latin must be stuck to teaching only cultural topics from ancient Rome?!!).
• Eric Herman - I am still faithfully reading your Research Bites book (I know that it is called Research Talks, but I like the phonetics of Research Bites lol). I am now on Week 8 and reading one quote a day - much like Goldilocks, that is exactly the right size for me!

Thank you to all who played a role in my summer - my CI cup has now been refilled!