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7 thoughts on “Report from the Field – Steven Ordiano”
Hey Steven – that´s great to hear that CWB and OWI are going so well. Love the image: golden piano, in mouth of alligator, ¨Avec qui?¨ (with whom?). You inspire me on the eve of my first day of classes, and I am going to use ¨qui-per¨ with my students.
I am glad we were able to meet this summer!
Don I hope that your first days are going great. I love picturing you in your classroom. Are you using an artist? I need to ship you that chart paper.
It was awesome meeting you in Moraga. I wanted you to demo a scripted story. You seem like an teacher that is always learning.
What classed are you teaching this year?
“As I learn from this work, I come to understand that compellingness trumps repetitions.”
That is a compelling image indeed. If we could get compellingness out of “wants (to),” “likes to,” “has (to),” etc. we could do away with repetitions. But those structures (targeted or un-) are very communicative. We can use them to have fun splitting hairs by negotiating shades of meaning: “The alligator has to have a golden piano it its mouth, but does it have to have a golden piano in its mouth.” And it may not make for reps in a single day, but over time they build up.
And qui-per is a keeper. With the fun (whooooo) being in English it works for all of us.
“And it may not make for reps in a single day, but over time they build up.”
THIS all day long! The year is long, the words come up all the time, can’t we just relax and use them and let them build up slowly over time? Distributed practice is better for their memories and acquisition anyway. That is my hunch, as a student of languages and teacher, and also here is an abstract from an article from 1981 that makes you go hmm.
High school students enrolled in a French course learned vocabulary words under conditions of either massed or distributed practice as part of their regular class activities. Distributed practice consisted of three 10-minute units on each of three successive days; massed practice consisted of all three units being completed during a 30-minute period on a single day. Though performance of the two groups was virtually identical on a test given immediately after completion of study, the students who had learned the words by distributed practice did substantially better (35%) than the massed- practice students on a second test given 4 days later. The implications of the findings for classroom instruction and the need to distinguish between learning and memory are discussed.
Not to mention that it is more emotionally relaxing to lighten up on the need for massed reps…and relaxing is good for us and the kids. Relaxing is my number one goal. Life is too hard for our kids not to relax and be able to have emotional reserves of energy for them…as the recent “Before It’s Too Late” post highlighted.
Here is the title of the article if you have access to Jstor and like doing research. Full disclosure, I just read the abstract.
Effects of Massed and Distributed Practice on the Learning and Retention of Second-Language Vocabulary, Kristine C. Bloom and Thomas J. Shuell, The Journal of Educational Research, Vol. 74, No. 4 (Mar. – Apr., 1981), pp. 245-248
YES!!! Love this!!! Totally cooking indeed Steven! Keep it coming, so inspiring!
Ahhh Tina my doppelgänger:
“Not to mention that it is more emotionally relaxing to lighten up on the need for massed reps…and relaxing is good for us and the kids. Relaxing is my number one goal. Life is too hard for our kids not to relax and be able to have emotional reserves of energy for them…as the recent “Before It’s Too Late” post highlighted.”
!!!! 😀