I have mentioned before that I do not come from a traditional teacher-prep background. Most of my career has been in direct sales, going business to business, making connections with business owners, and selling the value of my product… copiers. Needless to say, I was never taught HOW to teach reading before becoming a Spanish teacher. Most of what I do is by trial and error. And I do a lot of borrowing (STEALING!) other people’s ideas. I am so grateful for the CI community and the wealth of information I can glean from blogs and Facebook.
And yet, reading is so important! We know that reading improves vocabulary and implicitly teaches grammar, sentence word order, and spelling in our L1. Guess what? It also does all of those things in our L2! In fact, According to Dr. Paul Nation, it takes at least 40 encounters with a word or phrase in context before it begins the process of being cemented into our memories. FORTY! That’s a lot! When I read that research, I knew there was no amount of studying a person could do from a list to acquire language. And I can’t ensure that I will provide 40 or more instances of the same word in class. The only way to get enough reps of a wide range of words/phrases is to read, read, read… and then, read some more. So, I began an FVR program and started incorporating novels.
A few weeks ago, I went to a dual credit training session. In Indiana, and many other states, high school students can earn university credit for certain upper-level classes at a significantly reduced rate. At this session, I was to present a 7-8 minutes lesson from my textbook to the Spanish-teaching cohort. Textbook? Ummmm…. this was going to be interesting. As many (possibly most?) CI teachers, I no longer use a textbook. I knew that 7-8 minutes was never going to be long enough to explain even a portion of what I do in my classroom. So, I decided to talk about how I incorporate whole-class novels into my classroom activities.
Here is the presentation I created:
If you would like to use it, you can download the presentation here.
I chose to discuss Vida y Muerte en la Mara Salvatrucha. This book is edgy and, yes, it refers to violence. But I’m not kidding when I say that my students were engaged from the beginning to the very end of this novel. It helped that the MS-13 had been recently named as the World’s Most Dangerous Gang, it was frequently mentioned in the news, and a lot of my students are politically savvy. I actually had parents write me notes or speak to me personally about how impressed they were that we were covering such an important issue in Spanish.
If you know me, you already know that I prepped waaaaaaaaay more material than necessary for a 7-8 minute presentation. And I am so passionate about sharing CI methods that I can go for days on just one slide. Sooo, about three slides in, the professor showed me his timer… I had already spoken for 9 minutes! Oops! A couple teachers graciously indicated they were interested in what I was saying and asked if I could just continue anyway.
Here are a few links to information contained in the slide. I hope they are useful to you!
