I got this question:
Q. I was wondering how you introduce classroom objects. I was thinking about doing something with a bag full of objects and have student pull them out one at a time and circling each object after it was revealed. Do you have any suggestions? I would really appreciate it! Thank you!
A. What I do is I just speak French to my kids and I don’t worry about the classroom objects. It’s not the answer you probably want, but I don’t see where my kids, if travelling in France, will need to ask for a pencil sharpener. They can just to into a bookstore and buy one or walk over to one, if they happen to be in a school, and sharpen their pencil.
We in DPS take the above stance. Increasingly, ACTFL is saying the same thing, but they, unlike us, continue to mention teaching thematic units. It’s the only difference Diana Noonan can find in the newer ACTFL publications like the one I mentioned here last week. (Diana told me just this morning that they strongly support comprehensible input, but they still use the terms “memorize” and “thematic units” in their publications). And, of course, so do most school districts arrange language into thematic units, even though, to learn a language, we don’t need to, nor is it wise to, memorize lists or do anything but hear the language all the time.
BUT our administrators and some of the teachers who have come before us make us do it. Then, what to do?
I do not have a bag of classroom objects and circle them. I just can’t do it. Way too boring. It would last five minutes tops before the kids’ heads hit the desks with loud cracking noises. (“Class, what color is this pencil? That’s right, class! The pencil is yellow!” – and the kid is thinking, “I can see that it is yellow! I wish we could do a story.”) If it’s not interesting, meaningful, compelling or personalized, two ingredients that Krashen says are necessary for comprehensible input to happen, then they won’t acquire it.
So we are left with one conclusion. Boring stuff that is required information for one to keep one’s job will have to be memorized. So I do that. It’s the only thing I can think of, since words like pencil sharpeners don’t exactly jump into stories.
So I teach them separately at the end of the year or just before the semester (if it is a common assessment) in the old fashioned way. I give them a list of classroom objects and make them memorize those and the numbers and weather expressions and all that. I just find it stilted to start each class asking about the weather or the time. I DO insert weather and time a lot into stories, and I circle them a lot, but I can feel the air come out of the tires of the CI roadster when I do that. So I put all that stuff on their short term memory and just do it that way.
Here are some related articles on this topic. Pls. let me know if you have further questions.
https://benslavic.com/blog/thematic-unitsword-lists/
https://benslavic.com/blog/i-love-my-thematic-units/
https://benslavic.com/blog/thematic-units/
https://benslavic.com/blog/thematic-units-2/