From Eric Herman:
You’ve heard how some teachers do “reports of the day” typically as a way to work in that boring, topic-based vocabulary mandated by a backwards department. So, they may frequently start class answering “What is the weather?” The vocabulary gets acquired over the year. Well, I don’t have any particular curriculum to follow so I don’t do that (anymore). I used to a little bit. I made all these slides with visuals of all the topic-related words and did it a few times, but realized how non-essential so much of the vocabulary was, and so I stopped it. The kids were pretty into it, since they knew how to play the game and we did a lot of fictional and personalized reports as a result of storyasking the reports.
My point is, I started doing “Activity Reports” and I think there is great potential. This past week I started class by establishing meaning for: “What did you do yesterday?” Then, I asked it as an open-ended question to the entire class, inviting whoever wanted to share. I let them respond in English at first if they didn’t have the language. I had 2 columns on the board: an “I” column and a “you” column (in this case “usted”). I wrote in both columns whatever verb was used by the student. Looked a bit like a traditional lesson, albeit a very tame one (only 2 conjugations) and with a strong CI spin. Nothing wrong with teaching for learning as I also provide tons of CI. The conjugation pattern didn’t have to be explicitly taught since it was staring them in the face. I have some kids who are good monitor-users and will be able to express more than they’ve actually acquired. After a while, I’d change those columns to “we” and “they.” Teaching conjugation horizontally throughout the year. Sometimes, I would expand the student response, like an OWI, by using the question words to get more details.
Each day there were kids who wanted to share. Plenty of personalization and community building as we learned what other kids do. I was afraid it would be boring and the kids would sniff out my hidden “tense” agenda, but for 1 week, for 10 minutes at the start of class, I maintained engagement. And I was providing easy CI in the preterite tense.
The 3rd day of this with my 8th graders I also established meaning for “What are you going to do later?” and we did the same thing. Now, all I have to do is change the time frame in the question a little bit and I can continue to get reps on the same vocabulary, the same past and future tenses (e.g. tomorrow, this weekend, last weekend, last birthday, etc.). Depending on the day and the time of the year, it will make more sense to ask certain time frames (e.g. school basketball game that afternoon, so use “after school”) I imagine if I did some of this every week over an entire year, then by the end of the year, the kids will have heard a lot of past and future tenses and thus acquired some of that vocabulary and structure.
ACTFL’s speaking proficiency guidelines consider the use of past, present, and future to be a quality of the “Advanced” level. An intermediate-mid or high is someone who can handle intermediate expectations and inconsistently handle the aspects of the advanced level. In other words, kids who don’t accurately manage the 3 tenses, but can use them, are demonstrating an intermediate characteristic. Plus, these questions and the vocabulary in the answers is high-frequency as defined on a list and “kid high-frequency” because it is relevant to these students’ lives.
I’m sure many of us already do this. Even traditional teachers do some of this. It sounded lame to me at first. But I think my kids welcomed the routine and there were a few kids whose hands shot up at the chance to share what they did or were going to do later. It’s how we approach it that makes it different, i.e. turning it into a teacher-guided listening activity with tons of CI.
Eric