Realidades

3 thoughts on “Realidades”

1. Rebecca

   November 8, 2010 at 8:30 am

   I, too, am new to CI, and tied to common assessments with Ven Conmigo. I tried an experiment last week. I pulled out an old final and asked my level 1 students to attempt the questions. Some said “Uh, oh, I’m gonna fail for sure” and others “This is easy!”… I did get some valuable feedback, the best of which was “It sounds right” when I asked “How did you know that was the right answer?” 🙂 I figure I’ll just keep on churning out CI and they will do just fine on that multiple choice farce of an assessment. (Our district has an “exam exemption” incentive for students. Typically 50-60% of my students do not sit for finals. That’s another one for Pandora to open.

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2. Carla

   November 8, 2010 at 3:44 pm

   I am also trying to work with Realidades. My students’ knowledge has to be aligned with it by the end of the year. There’s a realidades tprs group on yahoo. Some people seem to do great with it. I am still trying to figure it out, so help from anyone else would be appreciated…
   One thing to consider is what kind of support the other teachers give students. Some teachers still do the “index card with all the info you’ll forget” trick. Are they doing the assessments straight from the book? I couldn’t see the majority of even the textbook trained students passing those…
   I think that focusing too heavily on the vocabulary doesn’t really help anyone. My students last year had so much vocab that they didn’t have time to soak in how to use it. and that’s causing them trouble this year. So if you can figure out what your students really need to know for their tests, that would probably help them. Grammar seems to be more important than vocabulary. So I have deemphasized my cumulative vocab tests by making them matching tests. That way they are exposed to them all year, but vocab dominates less.
   With the TPR resources, I appreciate that Karen has mostly weeded out a lot of the low frequency words, and then divided the rest into TPR and stories. I think what you’re supposed to do is do all the lessons at once at the beginning of the year. That way you build up a vocabulary base to be used in stories. I tried that this year, and once we got to a certain point, things just had a textbook flavored heaviness. I hope that will get better as I improve with TPR. I tried to add some more high interest words into the mix, and I took a break from the TPR list. We’ll TPR them as we get to their chapters. As for the stories, high frequency words are foundational in TPRS, I think, so i’m using stories from a variety of sources, and I think everything will work out in the end.
   Karen assumes (from what i can tell) that you’re teaching the Para Empezar theme words some other way. She uses them in the Episodios but doesn’t actually teach them. So this year, I skipped the episodios and I’ve started trying to use more songs to teach those things. It’s easy to find songs with days, months, weather, seasons, body parts, etc. And I spread them out over the entire year, with simple vocabulary at the beginning of the year and complete sentences coming later. Maybe you could spread them out over a semester… Maybe you could get permission to line up with the other teachers at semester and finals, and give the other assessments in a different order… that would give you a lot more flexibility.
   On a positive note, my students are able to read this year, whereas last year, we gave up on Pobre Ana after a painful couple of weeks. I’ve reorganized everything. In the interest of class discussion, we have done whatever words seemed to enhance conversations about the students. So we have used a lot of words from units 1, 4, 5 and 6., skipping school and food words. Strategically choosing vocabulary seems to have helped them a lot. On a negative note, I was just looking at my semester exam, and I see that now my students will not be ready to take the usual one.
   I’m trying to get together a frequency list of all the vocab, to help me cut the list confidently. It hasn’t been too big a problem so far since we’re still on high interest words. well actually it has been a problem…but I think it will become even more important later.
   Yes, it really feels as if the textbook has a stranglehold on what students learn. Textbook vocab lists take up a lot of time but often don’t give a lot back… If anyone else has ideas of how to deal with this, I’d love to hear them too.

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3. Grant Boulanger

   November 8, 2010 at 7:30 pm

   Who are the CI teachers out there who are trying to create assessments that can be given across buildings and teachers that actually do measure something and actually can be used to inform progress and proficiency?
   The struggle here is huge. Motivations behind the idea of common assessments are indeed stemming from the assembly line mentality- Grades not based on proficiency are essentially meaningless when comparing one teacher to the next. Some out there want these grammar tests to make it super easy to determine ‘who should move on’ based on these tests… and the fact that we are all bound to teach whoever comes through our doors is offset by the notion that language learning is being forced into a linear progression and kids must know pronouns and have 100% subject verb agreement and know obscure, infrequent vocab before moving on … Who has an answer to those of us who want make common assessments across multiple buildings a gateway to further language study rather than a bottleneck?

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