How Can I Transition My Students to Speaking in Spanish? in French? in Italian? in English? in Mandarin? in German?
“How can I transition my Spanish class from listening to me speak in Spanish, but almost always responding/suggesting/asking in English to the students speaking in Spanish as well?”
A teacher asked this eternal question on Facebook today.
Based on my level one students, my response is that 10 – 15 daily doses of thirty- second meaningful and engaging music and voiceovers sprinkled through out the class period will have the appropriate phrases dropping out of students mouths!
My students have a constant stream of transition videos that release relaxing endorphins and teach them useful phrases for the classroom. I understand the input/output theories but in my experience this year, music creates a direct shortcut to output! No research on this, just what happens in my classroom every period every day!
Scroll to the end for videos in English, French, German, Italian, Latin and Mandarin.
As my students walk in each day they hear “the day song” and soon they are using the words to express their feelings.
1. When I am ready to start, I play the class count down video – students know to be seated and quiet as they count down the 3 -2 – 1 ya! French version below!
Students use this expression spontaneously before beginning anything.
2. I wrote two blogs about cell phones.
3 I greet them, ask how they are, and tell them the objective of the day and the class activities of the day – all on 3 slides. I play the “Take out the Homework” video and show the answers on the board while I quickly check for completion. Since day two of the school year when I first played it, my students spontaneously tell me ‘la tengo’ or ‘no la tengo’ and if someone doesn’t have it everyone else asks, “¿en serio?”
4. Check for questions and play the musical slide to take attendance – we get nasty emails if we miss attendance for any class! My students tell me” X está ausente” or “no está ausente, en el baño.”
5. Play “The Daily Review”song and complete five minutes of review. My Spanish 1 students can fluently say “cuando necesito gramática perfecta” and “¿Qué hago – repaso, repaso, repaso”
6. Play “Take Out the Vocab List video and they can all mimic “Favor de sacar la lista del vocabulario.”
I also play the self- talk musical slide that reminds students if they don’t get it right to tell them selves – I don’t have it yet! I introduce a chunk of vocabulary, practice comprehension with gestures and then show slides with visuals. My Spanish 1 students use “lo acerté spontaneously in many situations” and even “no lo acerté – todavía.”
7. Play the video about finding a random partner of the week or if we already did it play the musical slide to find this week’s partner.
My students can say ¿Quién sera? even though they won’t be taught this tense for three more years.
8. Practice with partner(s) usually some kind of spontaneous speech activity – there are videos that show the students how to play guessing games. If we have the computers then they will watch “The Take Out the Computer” video, “Practice QuizletLive” video, students practice on their own, play the quizlet live video and finally I play the “Put Away the Computers” video and rearrange the chairs slide. My students quickly learn the games that have songs to teach the vocabulary and create spontaneous dialogues – month two of Spanish One! They can all do “más alto, más bajo” and many others.
9. Slide leading into next activity – could be a listening activity or a reading activity or Simon says. My students all know “vamos a jugar” and can follow it with many games.
10. Tidy up the room.
_13 Que desorden Pls no posting – trimmed from ellen shrager on Vimeo.
11.Take out the Agenda video and students write down the homework. My students can say any line from this song at appropriate times.
“ay no me gusta, pero es importante” “Saco mi agenda, escribo la tarea.”
_20 Saco Mi Agenda Pls no posting – trimmed from ellen shrager on Vimeo.
12. Closure – students sing and then tell me something new they learned. My students can spontaneously say “Hoy, hoy aprendi ” and complete the thought.
My public school seventh, eighth, and ninth graders in Spanish One produce spontaneous speech even if they don’t want to – they can’t help themselves because music enters their brains and remains like nothing else that I have tried in these past 30 years. You can make your own songs or use mine.
If you want to create the same kind of slide structure with musical transition videos, start with the Just Prep during Your Prep blog here.
Or go straight to it here.
You can even use my videos, created by native speakers, and offered here on TeacherspayTeachers. Or click here for the starter kit! They help support several Venezuelan families. We are making them in French, Mandarin, German, and Latin, and English. What I love about TeacherspayTeachers is that it helps new teachers to quickly climb the learning curve by selecting tried and true activities from veteran teachers still in the classroom, like me! If you need something new to get your students spontaneously speaking in the target language – this is it!
All net proceeds benefit three Venezuelan families.
Spanish 1 Day 1
Latest Version of Day 7.
Here is my latest version of Day One – Google Slides – using the target language, vibrant slides, and musical transition videos to engage Spanish One students.
It is part of a collection of 25 lessons for the first five weeks of school.
The first two videos are long as we set up routines, the others are short.
Here is the link to the free traditional one on PowerPoint.
Here is the link to the traditional PPT explanation.
This is my latest version of Day 2.
This is my latest version of Day 3.
This is my latest version of Day 4.
This is my latest version of Day 5.
This is my latest version of Day 6.
This is my latest version of Day 7.
If you are interested in your own daily tech guide with a few basic videos, click here.
If you are interested in creating your own custom video collection, click here.
If you are interested in the full lessons for $8 a day, click here.
This is my latest version of Day 8.
This is my latest version of Day 9.
This is my latest version of Day 10.
This is my latest version of Day 11.
This is my latest version of Day 12.
This is my latest version of Day 13.
These 25 lessons with all videos are available for sale here.
Videos 7 – 25 are work in progress – will be posted as they come available this week.
Please contact me via email if you have any questions about how to use these.
ellen@minutebyminutespanish.com
HOW TARGET LANGUAGE AND CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT WORK TOGETHER – MY GUEST BLOG
The talented Devon Gunning invited me to write my first guest blog (below) for her Target Language Expert Interview Series.
She interviewed me and a video of that interview is at the end of this blog.
Have you ever had a class that made you feel like a first-year teacher all over again?
The behavior is so challenging that even your disciplinarian agrees that the roster is a combination of characters that should never be scheduled together.
Your colleagues offer you chocolate and coffee gift cards as tokens of sympathy and to make sure you don’t send any students to their classes.
The last time I had such a stomach-clenching low-ability Spanish One class, my newly hired, inexperienced supervisor * interpreted “the 90% Target Language for all levels goal” to mean that during observations, teachers earned ‘needs improvement’ scores for every student’s English utterance!
I earned five times more ‘needs improvements’ in one observation than I had cumulatively in the past twenty-five years in the classroom.
*This supervisor is no longer in the educational field. My current supervisor is a dream – hold on if you are in a similar situation – I would never have predicted how quickly things could change for the better, but they can and do!
HOW TO ACCELERATE TARGET LANGUAGE USE IN YOUR CLASSROOM
Until then, I believed the Comprehensible Input theorists when they said to not force output. However, I needed to accelerate target language output to avoid being put on an improvement plan. These students were talkers! During the post-observation I asked the supervisor how to stop this challenging class from blurting out in English, and was told that was my problem to solve.
At that point, I had a daily PowerPoint presentation with my daily routines, a slide for each transition, and a few slides for each activity. I called it my “daily tech guide” or “DTG” for short. I did a different song of the week and a daily headline from BBC Mundo. I used my remote presentation device so that I could move around the room and stand behind the students who created the most problems.
CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT TIP: WORK WITH YOUR CLASS PERSONALITY
I knew enough to not try to get these students to be quiet but to be engaged. Rather than telling them “silencio” I would always have the next activity on hand and say “listos” and they would answer ‘listos’ and quickly move to the next activity.
Once I started to analyze when they would act out and blurt out, I realized that transitions were an invitation to go off task.
CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT TIP: THE POWER OF TRANSITIONS
I also realized that while I taught the usual classroom phrases of commands and requests, I wasn’t teaching them the phrases they need to talk to one another, nor was I teaching them the important self-talk phrases. So I created The 50 Classroom Survival Expressions
TARGET LANGUAGE USE TIP: PUT IT TO MUSIC!
I also observed that anything set to music seemed to drop out of their mouths with very little effort, faster than the CI experts would have you believe. The 50 Classroom Survival Expressions were put to music.
Around this time, my friends in Venezuela were suffering financially. I started to send songs for transitions and class routines to the unemployed music teacher to record, transition videos to the videographer, and multi-cultural clipart requests to the graphic designer. I started to sell their creations on TpT and send them all net proceeds.
GETTING STUDENTS TO USE MORE TARGET LANGUAGE WITH VIDEO
As I started to add musical class routines and transition videos to my DTG, I added more slides with options for students’ responses. The videos are so engaging that after hearing the “Saquen la tarea” video just once, students are able to tell me “la tengo” or “no la tengo” – after two weeks it just flows out of their mouth more easily than the English.
As my students were drenched in Spanish from minute to minute of class time, they grew to handle spontaneous speech activities after a month of instruction. My DTG also grew and sometimes has as many as 100 slides.
I have a template for my daily lessons and label them from “day 1 – greetings” to “day 180 – closure activities” and everything in between.
At the end of each day, I take a few minutes and discard what I didn’t use and change anything that didn’t work. I save it as ‘rd’ for real deal – the version that will be my starting point next year.
This week was my second week of classes. I pulled up my DTG from last year and with fifteen minutes of tweaking the date, adding school messages about Picture Day and new bus routes, and checking handouts, I was ready to teach a class worthy of a walk through or even an observation.
While many teachers are seeking unscripted, no-prep classes to better interact with their students, I have found that by having my scripted class, I am able to be more emotionally available to students.
CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT TIP: WHY REINVENT THE WHEEL?
I don’t have to remember whether I taught something to period three but not period seven. It is all in the daily tech guide, freeing me up to be more present for my students. I teach in a large building with three other level one teachers and I know that I have taught all that was required so that next year my students are prepared for new teachers. Since using the DTG, no one has ever come back to complain I didn’t teach something.
All of us teachers need to craft our own ‘teaching voices.’ They may be pure TPRS, ci, owl, traditional or our own eclectic blend. But, if you are struggling with classroom management, make a slideshow with an outline of your class and start inserting musical transition videos to help keep your students on task. Watch my template video for inspiration.
By creating a classroom management tool for a very difficult class, I inadvertently created a system for keeping any level one class in the target language. While I still use English to discuss matters of the heart and to clarify something new, the students are accustomed to most of the class being conducted in the target language.
Click here for a preview of frequently used videos.
Click here for a collection of videos explaining the day’s daily tech guide.
Click here for the daily tech guide template – it will help you to start to create your own daily tech guide.”
CSCTFL Central States Session How to Power a Level One 90% Target Language Class
Stay on Task and in the target language with transition videos.
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