Teaching pronunciation in high school world language classes

One of the great things about teaching high school is how long I have all of my students. I'm now in my 3rd year with some of them, and it is so much fun to see how much they've learned in the last two years! One of the things that I've been doing in my classes is reinforcing basic concepts that students need to be able to function in the language. So for example, at the college level, I taught numbers and the alphabet in the first few weeks of first-semester Spanish, and then almost never worked on them. Partly this is a reality of teaching at the college level...the expectation is that a lot of material will be covered, so you don't really have time to spend building a solid foundation.

At the high school, and especially as the only Spanish teacher at my school, I can move at a pace that's conducive to deep learning. So we do go over the alphabet and practice sounds a lot at the beginning of Spanish 1, but I've been building on that by doing a weekly pronunciation lesson. My first year, I did the same lesson for Spanish 1, 2, 3, and 4, and then with each new year, I build a new set of lessons. So in year 1, I went through the alphabet letter by letter starting with vowels. In year 2, I did that again with Spanish 1, but for Spanish 2, 3, and 4, I went through vowel combinations and we practiced pronouncing vowel sequences (ae, ai, ao, au, etc.). In year 3, we're still working on vowel sequences in Spanish 3 and 4, but we're getting a little bit more detailed and comparing what vowel sequences sound like with and without accent marks on weak vowels. This will only take about half the year, and I'm still debating what we'll go over in the spring. In Spanish 1, I have students practice the vowels every week all year, so by the end of the year, they're doing relatively well with vowels for the most part.

So here's what it looks like so far:
Spanish 1: individual letters (a, e, i, o, u, and then all consonants starting with b and ending with z)
Spanish 2: 2-vowel sequences (ae, ai, ao, au, ea, ei, eo, eu, ia, ie, io, iu, oa, oe, oi, ou, ua, ue, ui, uo)
Spanish 3: 3-vowel sequences, diphthong vs. hiatus contrasts, still deciding between allophonic variations and accent patterns/rules for the spring semester
Spanish 4: TBD next year

The one thing that I realized this year that's missing is that I haven't been doing any perception practice with them. I want them to be able to hear words and have a basic idea of how they're spelled, but without doing listening practice, most students aren't going to make those connections. So I've started incorporating listening practice to help students make associations between the sounds and the letters that represent them. In the interest of not overloading myself with prep, I'm doing the same listening practice at all 4 levels with words from the bottom of the 10,000 most frequent word list of the RAE so that I'm using unknown words.

We have short days every Friday, so I take a lot of stress off myself by making Fridays my pronunciation and culture days (basically one lesson plan for all 4 levels of Spanish). I have a short reading and map activity about a different Spanish-speaking country that students work on while I'm circulating through room having them all pronounce the word list to me. I'm working on putting all of my lessons into one big presentation so that they're easy to access. I'm not done yet, but this is where you can find them if you're interested:

Spanish 1 pronunciation lessons
Spanish 2 pronunciation lessons
Spanish 3 pronunciation lessons

Spanish 4 pronunciation lessons

Why pronunciation? I know the trend has been to move away from teaching pronunciation since the audiolingual era, and some of that is a good thing...students don't need to sound like native speakers. But they do need to be intelligible in order to interact successfully in the target language, and the longer I teach, the more I realize that even in a "phonetic" language like Spanish, in the absence of direct instruction, most students aren't going to make the sound-letter correspondences. (And the results of my dissertation research suggested that even a small amount of time spent on training learners to perceive sound contrasts is enough to help them measurably improve their perception even over a relatively short period of time...not gonna lie, I really want to do a longitudinal study on this with my current learner population. Some habits die hard. :D)

Advice for the Spanish Praxis test

I've had various requests for help with the Spanish Praxis test over the last few years (since taking it myself to get my K-12 certification), and I thought I'd put a few thoughts together for people who are going to take it soon or need to retake it.  While the test-taker agreement (and my own memory) do not allow me to disclose the nature of the items on the test, ETS's practice test and prep materials offer a good starting point for study. So here's my advice (I received a 200 on the Spanish Praxis, Praxis Core Reading, and Praxis Core Math, and a 196 on the Praxis Core Writing).

1.  Pay to take ETS's practice test. I had been teaching Spanish at the college level for 18 years and was pretty confident that I'd do well on the Praxis, but I still like to prepare for tests. So I bought the ETS practice tests for the Praxis Core and the Spanish Praxis and did all of them as if it were a real test (timed, no use of outside resources, etc.). If you have test anxiety this is especially important because you can get used to the exam format and how the timed sections work.  When you take the test, it will show you your correct and incorrect answers, but it won't save them when you exit, so if you want to remember what you got wrong, you'll want to make sure that you leave enough time to go through your answers after you're done taking the test. For free, you can check out ETS's World Language Study Companion.

2. Do as much as you can in the target language.  The thing to remember about the Praxis test is that the goal is to see how well you can communicate in the target language in terms of both receptive and productive skills. It helps to know what the test looks like, but if your ability to understand and communicate in the target language is limited, there are no easy fixes. If you've taken the test and haven't passed, you probably need to amp up your time in the target language. Some ways that you can do this:

• Change your settings to Spanish on apps, social media, email, etc.  The more exposure you have to Spanish (and the more you're doing in Spanish on a daily basis), the better you'll do, because you're picking up incidental vocabulary, giving your brain a chance to process different sentence structures, exposing yourself to cultural knowledge about the target language, etc. We need lots of exposure to input (listening and reading) in the target language to become fluent, so the more exposure you can give yourself, the better off you'll be.
• Read and listen to the news in the target language. If you look at the practice test, you'll see that a lot of the listening and reading comprehension passages are pulled from the news. So the best thing you can do to prepare for the reading and listening comprehension sections are to read and listen to a little news every day. That's actually advice that I've been giving my students for years before taking the practice test, because that's basically how I learned to read with some degree of fluency. I did my study abroad in Costa Rica, and I was struggling to read academic texts because there were so many words that I didn't know. So I would sit down with a dictionary every night and try to plow through my readings, but it was slow and painful. I needed to be reading at a level that was more accessible to me in terms of vocabulary (and topic familiarity), so I started buying magazines and newspapers and reading them, and that's how I built enough vocabulary (and reading skill) to read at a higher level.  For students who are generally interested in Spanish but who aren't taking the Praxis, I recommend finding articles, videos, and podcasts on subjects that are interesting to you, because you'll be more invested in learning Spanish. For students preparing for the Praxis exam, I recommend mixing it up. Do read and listen to news about topics that interest you, but also read and listen to news on topics that are less interesting, because there's a high probability that you will not care about some of the topics, and this will help you prepare for trying to recall information about a topic that you don't care about (which is always harder than recalling information for a topic that you're interested in). 
•  Talk to yourself. Speaking is a skill like any other skill, and you get better at it by practicing.  Use ETS's practice test speaking prompts to get started so that you know what the tasks will look like and practice those task types, but even beyond that, spend at least a few minutes every day talking through your day. If you struggle with verb tenses, work on past, present, and future by saying what you did yesterday, what you're doing today, and what you're going to do tomorrow. I know I'm a weirdo, but I did this when I took French, Portuguese, Italian, and Mandarin. I wanted more speaking practice but I was poor and couldn't afford to pay a tutor, so I just talked to myself to work on the language. You don't get the interpersonal side, but you do get practice speaking, and that helps even if you're just talking to yourself.
• Talk to other people. If you have the chance, have as many conversations in the target language as you can. A number of universities have started to offer conversation classes for teachers and teacher candidates because it is HARD to maintain fluency when you're teaching lower levels, and these would be a great opportunity. My own alma mater, UNL, is offering this type of class online this summer (SPAN 432/832), and the University of Colorado's Certificate in Language Teaching offers a telecollaboration course to practice speaking, so you could do this from anywhere (and potentially get started on graduate classes to move up that pay scale!). You can also pay a tutor, or if money is an obstacle, you could join a language exchange site  and trade your English knowledge for practice in the target language (Google language exchange websites and find one that works for you; I don't have any recommendations because I haven't used any of these for a long time). 
• Practice writing. Again, look at the writing prompts in the practice test, or check out the prompts in ETS's World Language Study Companion. Practice writing those specific genres of writing so that you're familiar with the task and the structure. I taught Spanish composition for a number of years, and one piece of advice I frequently gave to students was to use more specific words. Words like bueno, malo, interesante, cosa, etc. are pretty generic, so work on expanding your vocabulary enough to be more descriptive with your adjectives. For example, if you're writing a persuasive essay, the odds are that you think whatever you're trying to persuade someone to do would be beneficial. So instead of saying "XYZ would be good because...", you could say "XYZ sería beneficioso porque..." If you're arguing against something, you might use the words dañino (harmful) or consecuencias negativas. These are relatively minor changes that make your writing sound more sophisticated. If you're working on interpersonal writing, practice controlling register. Is the situation formal or informal? If you're testing in a language like French or Spanish that distinguishes between a formal and informal you, and a singular and a plural you, practice using those verb forms in your writing. 

3.  Follow directions and organize your ideas. In the free response sections, make sure you're following the directions. You may be able to speak and write fluent Spanish, but if your response doesn't follow directions, it isn't going to get a very good score, even if your Spanish is flawless.  The scoring rubrics are available here in ETS's study companion. Note that for any score above 0, you must address and complete the task. 

If you look at the scoring rubric for the Praxis, you'll see that a well-organized response falls into the 3 score criteria (the highest score) for all types of free response tasks. There are a lot of other criteria, but organization is the most easily controlled characteristic for a non-native speaker. Realistically speaking, you may not have great control of grammatical structures or pronunciation, or a wide range of vocabulary. It takes a long time to acquire some things; I was still having a lot of trouble with preterit and imperfect during my master's degree program, and I really didn't grasp it until I was working on my PhD in Hispanic linguistics. However, everyone is capable of organizing their responses coherently. In addition, a lack of organization can create the impression of disfluency, especially for non-native speakers. This isn't exactly the same thing, but in a study on pronunciation, Munro (1995) found that non-native speakers were judged to be harder to understand when they uttered untrue statements than when they uttered true statements. So even if your grammar and vocabulary are generally good, a lack of organization combined with even minor language errors typical of a non-native speaker may create the impression that you're not fluent.

If you are an aspiring educator and want more individualized language practice, I would recommend a site like LinguaMeeting (I have not used this site but have seen it recommended by trusted colleagues in world languages). I am not offering tutoring at this time, but if you would like to schedule a brief chat (free), please email me. My PhD is in Spanish linguistics with a certificate in second language acquisition and teacher education, and I've taught a variety of classes in Spanish at all levels of instruction, from first-year high school to advanced graduate courses in Spanish linguistics. See my CV here for a full list. For more information, please email me at aksaalfeld AT gmail.com.

I don't receive any form of compensation for any of the products or classes that I've recommended here.

Benefits of being a “new” teacher

“New” is a relative term, obviously, since I’ve been teaching for almost 20 years. (How did that happen? 😂) But this is my first year teaching high school, and while there are a number of differences between teaching at the college level and teaching at the high school level, one of the bigger differences is the amount of prep time I have. Because I’m teaching all day, any prep (and grading) needs to be done during my 55-minute plan period, or outside of school hours*. By contrast, I usually spent 9-15 hours per week actually teaching at the college level.  This may sound ridiculous, but I easily filled the remaining 25-30 hours/week with prep, grading, meetings, etc., without taking into account all of the research I was supposed to be doing to publish enough articles to get tenure.  The great thing about my schedule is that I have students in class 55 minutes/day 5 days/week. Both the amount of time spent in class as well as the fact that we meet every day have huge advantages for language learning, and I have been amazed at the difference it makes in terms of students being able to use the language!  But the comparative lack of prep time has meant that I’ve had to scale back a lot in terms of how elaborate my lessons are, because I physically don’t have enough hours in the day to plan everything I’d like to do.

So I’ve been doing a lot of recycling and repeating, and guess what? My students actually remember things, because we’ve gone over them more than twice! For example, at the college level, I spent two days max going over the alphabet in Spanish 1. The most that can be said is that students were familiar with it, but they didn’t really know it, because we had to move on to other topics. It might seem silly, but it’s really crucial that learners know the alphabet to be able to function in another language; without it, they can’t exchange contact information, because they can’t spell out usernames or email addresses. So we’ve been going over the alphabet, numbers, days/months, and other basic language elements that are essential to be able to function in another language, and my students are rocking listening comprehension!  I use bingo a lot because the students love to play, and it means that they hear the words over and over so that they can actually understand the words when they hear them, as opposed to reading them but then not recognizing them when they hear them. (As I add more bingo games, I'll post them here.  Other resources: memory/Go Fish cards, flash cards, and crossword puzzles.)

That’s not to say that I won’t be glad to have a little more experience under my belt so that I can come up with more interesting ways to recycle content. But I'll need to remember that me having more experience doesn't mean that I should move faster through the content.

*It's worth noting that I'm more fortunate than many teachers in that I actually get 55 minutes of uninterrupted planning time every day, as well as an hour or two of uninterrupted work time almost every Friday afternoon. (I love my job!) This Cult of Pedagogy post indicates that many teachers end up with little or no planning time, and have to do all of their planning and grading outside of school hours. Food for thought from the same Cult of Pedagogy post:

"But isn’t that just the nature of the job? Not everywhere. According to a 2010 research brief from Stanford University, U.S. teachers spend 80 percent of their work hours delivering instruction to students. The average in other high-achieving nations? 60 percent. And brace yourself: In South Korea, Japan and Singapore, that average plummets to a staggering 35 percent. Yes, you read that right. In these countries, just 35 percent of teachers’ time is spent teaching students. The rest of their work hours are spent collaborating, studying, and planning, making their instructional time as good as it can be."

Note to self: Remember to try things you're bad at

I've been teaching high school Spanish for about three months now, and as part of my responsibilities, I'm the Spanish club sponsor.  In October, we went to see the Hispanic Flamenco Ballet perform, and learned about Flamenco Omaha, a dance studio that offers flamenco lessons.  Students were interested in learning to dance the flamenco, so we've been having lessons for the past three weeks.

(Not very big) secret:  I am terrible at the flamenco (or anything that involves any kind of physical coordination, really).  I can manage OK as long as we're repeating the same step, but if any kind of transitions are involved (or I'm supposed to be moving my hands and feet at the same time), I need to practice over.and over.and over.  I still don't look graceful or elegant after practicing so many times, but I'm at least following the basic steps (but missing lots of details like hand movements).

It has been fun and good exercise, but it's also been a good reminder for me as a teacher.  Picking up language features has always been very easy for me.  But for some of my students, learning Spanish is like learning the flamenco is to me: we need to repeat, and repeat, and repeat, and break it down into smaller, more manageable pieces to be able to do something remotely resembling the model.  And then repeat 8 million more times and then we'll have it down.  :D

Having some success with hand movements because I didn't have to move my feet at the same time.
Assisted by my 3-year-old.

Another great resource in technology for language teaching

I was scrolling through my Twitter feed today and discovered a great new resource!  FLTMAG is a new online magazine dedicated to language teaching and technology, with a focus on practical suggestions for using technology in language teaching. Check it out!

World's best dictionary, now available online for free!

Confession: My least favorite class to teach is composition. I think it's critically important for any major, especially a language major, and I worked really hard to develop a good class after it flopped the first time I taught it, but I'm much happier teaching writing as a component of other Spanish courses rather than in a course focused entirely on writing.

Before I taught composition the first time, I reviewed lots of composition textbooks. There were some that were OK, some that were fairly good, and some that weren't so great. But there were none that I felt were worth the ridiculously high prices that textbook companies were charging. Students need models to write well, but in the internet age, there are plenty of models available online for free. It did take more work on my part, because I had to build the course from scratch, but in the end, I had exactly the course I wanted (notwithstanding the fact that I didn't want to teach composition at all). 

So I thought about what students really needed, and realized that most students want and need to build their vocabulary. And I had this fantastic, amazing dictionary that I randomly found at the U of Illinois bookstore (because I used to troll language dictionary sections in bookstores, before I found this dictionary) that was perfect for the advanced second language learner (beginners, too, but beginners can get by with the one that doesn't weight 10 lbs). This beautiful dictionary was the Collins Spanish-English unabridged dictionary, and it's perfect because it's the only dictionary I've found that includes word usages with the possible translations of a word. This is essential for second language learners, because if they're using a dictionary (or online translator/dictionary) that just gives them a list with no clues as to what the differences are between the different words, they will just pick one, and invariably, it will be wrong. The Collins dictionary gives examples, in phrases and sentences, in both languages, so that learners can tell if that's really the word they're looking for or not. For words with multiple meanings or parts of speech, this is crucial. So I made the dictionary the required textbook for my composition classes. The last time I taught composition, in spring of 2012, my entire class was online except the required dictionary, which students found odd, but at the time, there still wasn't an online dictionary that came close to the breadth and depth of the Collins dictionary. But thanks to my friend and colleague Gwyneth Cliver, a German professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, I learned today that the Collins dictionaries are now available online for free! I compared an entry for the word 'can' from my paper dictionary to the online entry, and I'm happy to report that the online version contains all of the same information as the paper version. So while I'm thankful that I don't have to teach composition again, if I did, there would now be no textbook requirement, since the world's best dictionary is available free online. 

(I love this dictionary so much that I have multiple copies of the unabridged version. I justify this compulsion by saying that it's too heavy to cart back and forth between home and school, so I need a copy in both places.)

Live from Wyoming! Quick tools for making videos

Life has been a little hectic over the last two weeks, which is why I've been absent. I live in Nebraska, but my husband is working in Wyoming for the summer, so we've just temporarily moved out here and gotten settled in. My goal for when we're not moving to a new state is to post two updates per week.

I'm starting to work on course materials for the fall, and one of the things I'm working on is preparing instructional videos for students to use outside of class time. You might be hearing/reading about flipped or blended classrooms, which is part of my goal with these videos. So why bother with such a big change?

1. Deeper learning. I was mainly interested in this concept because I was noticing a problem in my Spanish linguistics class. The class met once per week, and had a weekly homework assignment. (I know it doesn't sound like much, but the homework assignments are challenging, and require a fair amount of time to complete.) What I noticed was that a number of students failed every assignment, but never asked for help. They clearly hadn't understood the material. If I notice that the whole class is having trouble with a topic, I change the schedule and devote more time to the topic. But what do you do when 2/3 of the class is doing fine, but 1/3 is completely lost? I realized that these students needed to be able to review the material outside of class time, and a good way to do that is to create videos. (The other part of the course redesign was the implementation of digitized homework assignments delivered via Blackboard, which allowed them to repeat an assignment. This was crucial for understanding the material.)
2. Better preparation. This will depend on how you structure assignments, because if you just post a video and ask students to watch it before class, in my experience, they won't watch it and won't be prepared for class. But I've had a reasonable amount of success with posting videos and assigning online homework (delivered through Blackboard). I should say that all of my homework assignments are listed in the syllabus (and on Blackboard) from the first day of class, which helps students stay on top of when they have things due. This approach might not be as successful if you assign something for students to bring to class the next class period.
3. Opportunity for review. Remember when you were a student, and you watched your teacher do something on the board, and it looked really easy? But then when you went home and tried to do the homework, it was much harder than it looked? Making a video allows students to go back and review the content while they're doing the homework, so that they can keep working instead of giving up until they can talk to the teacher to figure out what they're doing wrong. (Learner autonomy!)
4. More class time for getting help. The last hour or so of each class period was for students to work on homework and ask questions. This was enormously successful, because a lot of students work and have families, so office hours aren't always feasible. They're still getting all of the contact hours because the instruction is given outside of class time, but they have an opportunity to ask for help (and work collaboratively with other students, which was also beneficial).

So that's the why. Here's the how. There are actually multiple ways you can do this, depending on what platform you're using. I always use PowerPoint, because I'm presenting information, and PowerPoint is the clearest way to do that. In theory, you can add audio to PowerPoint, but when you try to save it as a video (which appears to be an option only in PowerPoint for Mac), it doesn't incorporate the audio. (In addition, the audio quality seems to be better if you record it in a different program, in my experience.) So what can you do?  Here's a quick solution that works for PowerPoint for Mac:

The only thing that I do differently is that I record my audio separately in Audacity (a free program you can download here), and then add it into iMovie. It's a lot easier to edit that way, so I don't have to re-record nearly as much.

Another option that could involve any program is this free app available through the App Store (also only for Mac). It allows you to do both screen capture and webcam (and put them side-by-side if you want). You can publish videos to YouTube or Dropbox. Videos under 1 minute are free, but videos longer than a minute appear to cost $1.99 to publish. (I'm not sure if it's a $1.99 flat rate, or if it goes up by length of the video.)

UPDATE (10/27/2013) : The newest version of this app allows you to publish videos of any length for free with the Adobe Presenter Express watermark; it's $1.99 if you don't want the watermark to appear on your videos. Here's a video that I've done using this app:

On the Windows side, probably the easiest free option is Windows Movie Maker. You can import pictures and audio into Movie Maker to create a video the same as for iMovie. You can save your PowerPoint slides as images (see instructions here), and then import them into Windows Movie Maker.  I would also record the audio on Audacity for Windows Movie Maker. (A tutorial for Audacity is on my to-do list for this blog.)  If you have a few hundred dollars to spare, you might want Adobe Presenter, a plugin for PowerPoint. Older versions have been limited in that you've had to have an Adobe Connect account to publish your videos, but Adobe Presenter 8 allows you to upload your video to YouTube. (Retail price is $499; you may be able to get a better price through your school due to volume licensing.) 

Suggestions or questions?  Let me know!

Does txting mk u crazy?

As a specialist in linguistics, I teach a class that deals with the nature of language and language change. In the first chapter, there's a true/false question that says something like: "People use language less correctly today than they did 50 years ago." A lot of students will say that the statement is true, for a number of reasons. So one of my objectives for the course is to demonstrate that one of the most fascinating aspects about language is that it changes constantly. If it's not changing, that means it's a dead language, because human languages change naturally.  As a related principle, I want them to know that language change does not equal language deterioration.

That's why I think this video is so interesting. It does a great job of pointing out that humans have always complained about language deterioration, and also makes a case for cognitive benefits that arise from being bilingual and bidialectal, and makes a good case for texting having evolved into its own dialect.

So how can you use this information in your classroom?  Each language has its own texting lingo, and thankfully for us old folks, nice people offer texting dictionaries online. So for Spanish, here's one dictionary. This will depend on your own personal tolerance for mobile devices in class, and your school's mobile device policy. But if they have their phones with them, why not tell them that they can only text in the target language during class?  If all students have phones with texting, make an activity designed around that. You'll actually be helping them develop their brains instead of contributing to the deterioration of the language, lol. :)

Know links to dictionaries in other languages? Leave them in the comments! Thank you!