SLAyyy: Second Language Acquisition for Everyone
Join Ben (he/him), Bryan (he/they), and Bill (he/him) as they Gaslight (reflect), Gatekeep (read research), and Girlboss (share successes) language teaching!
SLAyyy: Second Language Acquisition for Everyone
Ep. 09 SLAyyy Sheltering Vocabulary
Gaslight
Not Moderating Rate of Speech
Establishing Meaning
Out of Bounds
“How do you say…?”
Planning for Comprehensibility
Use of #authres
Gatekeep - "How does lexical coverage affect the processing of L2 texts?" by Ana Pellicer-Sánchez, Stuart Webb, Andi Wang (Applied Linguistics)
“How easy is easy?”
Reading Speed and Motivation #saccade
Neurodiversity and Reading
Girlboss
Park and Pause
Using Frequency Dictionaries
Write and Discuss
References
Novels and Resources by AC Quintero
Conversations about Language Teaching
Presentation by Marcos Benevides: “Extensive Reading: How easy is easy?”
Bill’s Thematic Picture Dictionary for Food (Spanish)
Blog Post by Handsome Bald Man about Write and Discuss
Text us about how you’ve Gaslit, or Girlbossed your language classroom.
Email us at SLAyyyForEveryone@gmail.com
hi, everybody, and welcome back to another episode of SLA, second language acquisition for everybody. Today we are thinking about the topic of sheltering vocabulary. Sheltering vocabulary, the idea of sheltering vocabulary is that you don't just throw tons and tons of new vocabulary willy nilly at your students as you're giving them input in writing or oral input, but instead you are sheltering, you're keeping small, keeping protected the amount of vocabulary that you are using so that you can maximize student comprehension. and thereby maximize acquisition. Now, let's gaslight. What have been some pitfalls, some pits you've fallen into when have not been sheltering vocabulary?
Bryan:Happen when I just, I focused a little bit too much on the like natural rate of speech and like, especially like sometimes it will happen if I have a heritage speaker in the class where like I'm just They can understand the natural speech, so I just temporarily forget that I need to do as much as possible to make it comprehensible for like, you know, even the student who needs the most support in the classroom. And so, I'll just like say a sentence like I would in English, and then like maybe a couple sentences, and then I realize like everyone's staring at me. Like, what the hell is he saying? And I'm just like, Oh, wait a minute. I need to back it up. Slow down and the variety of vocabulary that I'm using. So that's when it happens to me.
Bill:For me, I think the most frequent occurrence is that I will be saying something and I'll be right about to say something else. And think, I would have to establish meaning for this word in order to be able to use it. And is that, like, worth the mental load right now? If as we're moving on with a reading or something like do or usually it's in class discussions because if it's in a reading, I'll probably have glossed it if I think students might not know what the word is, or I'll preemptively ask, Oh Okay. Significa kick here this year, blah, blah, blah. To establish the meaning, but yeah, I often lose. Track of my flow if I have to stop and think on how to simplify language because, you know, I've always heard shelter vocabulary, not grammar, so I've been making sure to use like subjunctive and level one and with words that seem similar enough. To like the, the indicative. But if I have to like stop and clarify everything, then it's slowing down class for me and it's also bogging them down too, because they have to wait for me to reformulate to make sure that they can understand. But also, I mean, that's kind of like our job is to make sure that we're understood. So hopefully they're dealing with it. Yeah. When I have to pause and think of a different word. So how can we say, like, I have to circumlocute, you know, to make it comprehensible for students.
FishRod:I always want to say to students is like, you have a very complex brain in your first language and you have many brilliant creative thoughts and you can't say all of those in German yet, but we're getting there. But I think it might be helpful to externalize that as well. Yeah, it might be even helpful to say to students, honestly, like I'm trying to figure out a way to say this in German that we're sure to understand. And that won't cost us 20 minutes. I don't know, you know, something shorter like that. I hear that I think for me, it has also come down to a matter of training kind of what your approach to teaching with comprehensible input or teaching for acquisition is, for instance, I was kind of trained in a milieu of teachers who were strongly kind of like self proclaimed untargeted comprehensible input teachers, which meant that instead of picking target structures of like verbs or nouns or verbs and nouns together that they chose activities that would provoke communication. And then discovered the language that was needed to complete the activity with students. So some activities that kind of get slotted into this, like, untargeted approach are things like a one word image or card talk or let me think what else could be, you know, even a picture talk to a certain extent can be fairly untargeted based on how the conversation goes or weekend chat. Things where you really, really don't know what the students are going to respond with. And that is kind of the point, is to develop that language and develop that conversation.
Bill:Yeah.
FishRod:But I was excited by that because I was excited to actually talk to students about real things. And my perception was that targeted input was so, just like, made so small and seemed so limited that it would be unnatural and strange. But I found that you do have to walk the line between every word is new and you have to establish meaning with either some sort of acting or gesture or writing on the board or showing a picture and stuff like that, that is so laborious and it doesn't
Bill:Okay. You
FishRod:that is what makes it fresh and interesting and every class is different, every year is different, but also making sure to provide enough repetitions to students through things like circling questions and personalization of new vocabulary. allows you to, you know, play with a little bit more vocabulary, but it also helps get the repetitions that students need in order to acquire those words and structures. I have also fallen into the trap of becoming just the dictionary for students, where they, again, we're exploring something interesting, exciting, and we just get bogged, or maybe we're just talking about the weekend, and we get bogged down in a never ending series of, How do you say blank questions in German? And I can tell it's because of their desire to communicate comprehensibly about what we want to communicate about. They're like following their natural urge to be a part of a conversation, but that can also make it feel so slow and such a slog. If you're getting so much new terms, it's like, well, so and so mowed the lawn this weekend, but so and so learned how to paddleboard. And then so and so did this. And you're just like, my goodness. And so I think one of my, like, learnings for myself is to just go slower and deeper. Try to discover the more common terms, the more high frequency terms to talk about this side or the other. But also use lots of repetition of the same stuff and kind of stick with one topic for longer instead of moving on quickly because otherwise then that word is not going to get acquired anyways. I would have been thinking about, uh, our, uh, How do we talk about a podcast? That's like a friend to the podcast. Our podcast friends, our podcast friends over
Bill:I think people say friends of the pod.
FishRod:friends of the
Bryan:of the
FishRod:pod conversations
Bill:That's something I hear frequently.
FishRod:Yeah. I'm thinking about conversations about language teaching and they in Diane and read, we're talking about something similar where yes, we could teach specific terms about, I don't know particular items of clothing that are cultural or the very specific food or stuff like that. But you can also go a level up and do the more high frequency kind of category word. And so instead of saying like, Oh, this is a Blank. And then the blank is, you know, some sort of specific cultural clothing item, for instance, that you could say something like, oh, this is a special clothing. And so that you can kind of gloss over that a little bit. And maybe you include the name of the special clothing, but you can also establish meaning for what it is. by using more high frequency terms instead of getting down into the nitty gritty of everything. I think that can help shelter vocabulary towards high frequency structures that are more useful in a wider variety of situations and avoid the wild spread of just going every, you know, how can I say this, how can I say this, how can I say this, through their entire English vocabularies, which are expansive by their age.
Bryan:Yeah, I think I start out kind of, I mean, I think I would say like I kind of indulge that a little in the beginning, but the fact is that it only happens in the communicative context that I set up that don't require super advanced vocabulary. So they'll ask me like. You know, how do you say bunny? I saw a bunny. You know, it's like, I can give them a word here and there and I find myself with the level ones and a little bit with the level twos, like I'm often just giving them the words and I don't necessarily expect them to acquire them right away and use them right away in their vocabulary later on, but as they get higher in proficiency, I become a lot more insistent on them, using circumlocution, and I always say, like, you use the words that you already know, and I do encourage them to use a dictionary if they have time while they're writing, and eventually I get to a point where I'm just like, I am not Mr. Dictionary, you know, you cannot talk to me like I'm Siri, and just ask me any word all the time, and they get mad when I do that, but eventually they're like, okay, yeah, I understand, like, it is kind of annoying to have to write every single word I want to know on the board, and then that kind of forces them to use the language they already have,
Bill:And a couple of things on that, which might be on like the area of girl bossing, but something that I picked up from Dr. Terry Waltz was. From watching some demo videos was allowing students one or two words in English. And because I tell students like, I would love for you to speak up more in class. Even if you do have to throw in an English word, because like, try it in Spanish first, rather than like defaulting to going to English to try to get your point across because there was one word that you wanted to say So I would much prefer and I'll do it in English as a second language instead. But like, yeah, like yesterday I had to pick up mi teléfono to make una llamada. Like, that doesn't break communication. It shows off what you can already do. And, that helps me know what words I need to focus on to make sure that you get them. So I would love for you to Spanglish. Which I also think like, there was, which I'm not going to try to use the terms because I think I might be wrong on my definitions, but Actful had even an article in the language educator a year or so ago. In support of using your first language to aid in communication, because we're in a context in which the students do share a language. So it's not breaking down communication. It's helping them continue to discuss whatever it is that we're discussing. And then me as the teacher, like I said, like I can make note of, Oh, we need this word still. I haven't given them enough input on this word yet. So I need to make sure that I use that more often so that students don't have to rely on English to talk about those things, but it's a process. Slow and peaceful.
Bryan:which is the encouragement of mixing your own language or the shared language with the language that's being learned in the classroom. And it helps a lot to develop students confidence because it shows that their identities are valued. So it comes, I think, primarily out of the ESL context encouraging students who do share a language in the classroom to use it along with English. But I think on the other side, we can do that a lot in world language. Like, realistically, when you go out in the world, you use your language, you're probably going to use an English word if you, you know, don't have time to or you're not able to. Ask how to say it, or you can't look it up or something. And you know that you share some English with the person you're speaking with. So it is like a strategy communication strategy that will help them to get their message across, be successful communicators. So I highly encourage it. And I love it actually, like. When I notice my students start to do the franglais, like, I don't even, like, ask them, and they're just, like, you know, I may not have a policy in place at the time that they have to speak French or whatever, but, like, they'll just start having half of their sentences being French and half in English. Eventually, like, it gets up and up, and then I do ask, like, you know, Alright, it's time to actually do it in French, because, you know, it's been four years or whatever, but it's, that is a really important thing to do. Recognize that it's okay to use your home language in certain situations. There are obviously some contexts in which you want them to only use the target language, but they shouldn't feel like. makes them a communicator or something because of that.
Bill:So we kind of took a turn, sorry, I was going to say, we kind of took a turn to output. Like student output. So I was wondering if you either of you had any more thoughts on some of the pitfalls of providing input and going out of bounds.
FishRod:totally. I think it's a planning consideration, right? Like, this is something that we kind of like when you were talking about Bill with your issue is that like, you can maybe anticipate the things that need some explanation or clarification or some sort of support. Sort of, you know, while we're giving input, obviously we have, we can use all variety of extra linguistic supports like gestures, facial expressions, drawings on the board in the language and also in English, you know, there are a lot of things that we can do live and in the moment to supplement that thing, but it comes down to planning and kind of thinking through. The activity, the text, the video, whatever it is, being prepared for those things and being prepared to have those supports ready for students so they can understand. I think also, you know, kind of having a moment with yourself and see. If you're using cognates effectively, which can mean, you know, perhaps using more or using brand names to stand in for things, right. You know, using, well, I don't know, whatever it use Nike's for shoes, use blah, blah, blah for, you know. it is, Kleenex for a, tissue or whatever it is. But then also being mindful of the fact that sometimes we can overextend cognates in an effort to make it more comprehensible to English learners and start warping the language a bit. into something that might be considered awkward by a speaker from the language community. We're teaching about. So I think you just have to be mindful of those things. It's a hard line to balance between wanting the comprehensibility and not wanting to take it so far that the language you're presenting. Students is just like wearing some fancy jewelry.
Bill:So, are you saying to be mindful and demure with our cognitive use
FishRod:Boo,
Bill:is that I feel like that's gone past. we're getting into the point of its fringe because it's no longer in the focus of the youth.
FishRod:but to be cringes to be free billion,
Bill:Cringe is to be free, and I am the freest.
FishRod:I feel like
Bill:any final gaslight thoughts?
Bryan:I mean, I guess like it always ends up turning to the conversation of the place of like using authentic resources in the classroom and like, you know, there's lots of strong opinions. in both directions about that, but I do personally think that you need to both use texts that are comprehensible and authentic resources, but it's the way that you use them and when, right? But like yeah, it can be really discouraging if you just throw, like, a news article at a student just because it's related to whatever topic you're talking about and, like, you don't do a lot of pre teaching of the vocabulary and, like You know, providing extra supports and like, just sometimes I think as teachers, we might forget a little bit what it's like to not know the language, like, you know, like, we can read and understand it. And so we're not really thinking about, like, what language students have already been exposed to. We run
FishRod:Okay.
Bryan:it may be authentic and we do eventually want them to be able to understand those kinds of texts. But it's like, you have to really pick and choose and be careful because. It can really affect their motivation if they feel like, oh, I'm not good at learning this language because I can't understand a, know, New York Times article in the country of the language that I'm learning, which is not a realistic expectation of a first or second year student, you know, so.
Bill:All right. Well, how about we take a quick break and then we'll come back for some gatekeeping or ungatekeeping. Right. Well, for this week, we read the article. How does lexical coverage affect the processing of L2 texts? And it is from Ana Pellicer Sanchez, Stuart Webb, and
FishRod:going
Bill:Andy Wang.
FishRod:out a lot of
Bill:Yeah, I wanted to start off with what were their questions here?
FishRod:I think, you know,
Bill:they wanted to look at to what extent does lexical coverage the cognitive effort involved in text reading, as reflected by tracking measures, which is This is a really cool research tool that Brian is fired up about and maybe has some thoughts on. And to what extent does lexical coverage affect processing of unknown words? And does processing time on unknown words predict participants ability to recall their meanings? And, does lexical coverage modulate this relationship? So, they used eye tracking to examine how lexical coverage, the, the the breadth of vocabulary affects the processing of a text specifically with Unknown vocabulary, and if there was a relationship on how long readers stayed on a word. as well as the relationship between processing time on the unknown vocabulary and learning. So, they used. 94 second language advanced learners of English. And they did have to remove data from some of the participants because of issues with technology. So they were all postgraduate students at a university in the UK from a variety of different first language backgrounds. So kind of, you know, we have to be humble in our understanding. There are definitely some. Benefits that we can take from this study, but they did not find a significant impact on the amount of attention spent on unknown vocabulary. And they said the presence of higher number of unknown pseudo words. Did not seem to impact the amount of attention devoted to process them. And they also said that they didn't seem to spend more time processing the unknown words when there were fewer of them as they initially hypothesized. So they thought maybe like, Oh, if there's fewer unknown words, maybe they'll spend less time because they don't have to do that process of figuring out unknown words over and over and over. So maybe. There's less unknown words, maybe amount of time that they spend on unknown words will shrink. They did find that processing times were significant predictors of vocabulary gains. The lexical coverage does not seem to have a major effect on the cognitive effort in processing the text and new vocabulary. They also found that the processing times were a predictor of vocabulary gains. So they saw that the amount of new vocabulary didn't seem to have an effect on cognitive effort. in processing the text and new vocabulary and that small increments adding little by little new vocabulary might not necessarily make texts easier to read. So if there's no difference in, they're taking the same amount of time with new words as they are with a few new words as well, as with A bunch of new words. It didn't really change how much students were paying attention and really what that means for us is when we come across a new word, establish meaning, try to use it give them opportunities to engage with the new vocabulary, hopefully in a new way. A way that will like still be on task. So like, if you're reading about a specific culture or a specific event, and there's a new word, try to tie the word in to use it in ways that are related to the context. So that's just like a quick, quick overview. Ben, I know that you had said that you pulled something. That you found interesting and helpful for teachers. And Brian, I know you wanted to take a swing at the eye tracking.
FishRod:Totally. Yeah, I, you know, that's kind of, as Bill summarized, like they didn't find a lot of support for their hypothesis that, you know, learners would slow down more and process fewer numbers of new vocabulary terms better that was not necessarily the case. But I think the literature review actually was very helpful for me. To recognize that this article is about processing, which is like, just how much time are they spent, like, letting their eyes rest on these new terms and think about them? And I think that starting from a baseline via their literature review that. In order for texts to be kind of minimally comprehensible, there has to be 90 percent coverage of the vocabulary in the text. That means 90 percent of the words were familiar, just like, that's the lowest that they went. And they mentioned in the article that, a student without the teacher could maybe manage that like a TV show with 90 percent coverage of the vocabulary and TV show because there are a lot of visuals that help kind of support what the learner is seeing in it. That help of comprehension, whereas like studies have shown that like you're getting kind of minimal kind of barely holding on comprehension at 95 percent coverage and that 98 is more optimal for like reading for comprehension. Yeah. And so I think that just that part of the literature review, even if they didn't find that the in terms of processing, you know, gains or benefits for vocabulary learning or whatever, and the time that they lingered on new vocabulary, even if that wasn't present in this study, they were also working in an incredibly narrow range anyways, that has been fairly well established in reading research to kind of be the sweet spot. So I think it brings us back to us again, is that like, when we're giving students something to read. that is, you know, made for comprehension, made for them to acquire lots from it. We need to be thinking about that vocabulary coverage and keeping it in that 90 percent plus range. Otherwise, you know, their global kind of comprehension of the whole text is going to be difficult. And, you know, they might not be getting as much acquisition from it as if we gave them targeted doses of input of where, you know, using By and large vocabulary that they were familiar with. I think the other thing that I kind of took away from this is how it might affect motivation. Kind of like Brian had touched on earlier, where they noticed that the saccades, which are just like how, how many essentially words in a group that your I can take in at once before it jumps to the next group of words to take them all in. Because when we're reading, we're not necessarily. doing one word at a time when we're reading fluently. We're kind of taking in a grouping of words and putting it all together in meaning. that these saccades were much, and I don't even know if that's, I'm gonna find out later, it's like, saccades, saccades, or something, like, like a Greek philosopher, I don't know. But anyways, that these were much shorter there were many more new vocabulary terms which meant that, I bet for the reader, it felt much more effortful. If you're having to process text in these smaller chunks and go like, Oh, I have to inch along in this text or I'm going to miss something because there's so much new vocabulary that likely felt more effortful, even if it didn't take significantly more clock time, it probably just felt like more of a chore. And are students going to be motivated by something that they feel is a total chore all the time? Maybe not. And so giving them. reading that feels more comfortable and fluent can be more motivating. But I think it's like Brian said earlier that it's a question of just kind of like the whens, right? Like, when do we use authentic resources and for what purposes? It might be, you know, they might be more suited for teaching things about interculturality showing particular language and context or, or, or we also want to give fluent reading experiences to our students because that can be very motivating for their competence.
Bill:Yeah, and that reminds me of the often requested presentation on how easy is easy. Which floats around in some of the Facebook groups from time to time. And it's a great presentation and we'll share it in the show notes, but it shows in English what a text looks like if it's a hundred percent comprehensible, 98 percent comprehensible. 95 percent comprehensible all the way down to, I think, 50 percent comprehensible. I forget how low it goes, but they just use nonsense words to trip up the reader. And like, I used the presentation with parent night this past year to kind of like emphasize, Hey, please make sure your kids are letting me know when something is unclear. Because otherwise, this is what it feels like. And when we got to the part where it's even like at 80%, people are checking out and They don't want to follow along anymore.
Bryan:And I guess just about the eye tracking obviously I'm not incredibly versed in using this as a research method because I've never done that before, and it was enlightening to read about this and see that maybe know, the results of the study may not indicate a whole lot in terms of the way that eye tracking is affected by the different. Levels of vocabulary that are known, but I do wonder whether like. Things like neurodiversity could play into the way that we use our eyes to process text. I know that sometimes readers might around a little bit in terms of, looking for the most interesting part of the text, but then they go back and read it again, and it may not actually take them longer to read, it's just that they don't read it in the order that might be expected, so would that be interpreted in the research as someone who is not processing words well, I don't really know it's just something that kind of comes to mind when I think about different kinds of readers. But yeah, it seems exciting, the kinds of information we can get from things like this. And I don't know, maybe one day we will all be wearing headsets that track all of our eye movements as we read during class. Sorry, I don't know where I was going with that. Anyway, all pretty interesting to me, and I'm excited to see what new studies come out that use this because I know it's something that's only come up in recent years.
FishRod:It is saccade, by the way.
Bill:All right, so now that we've talked about some of our issues, we've taken a look at some of the research around. text coverage and vocabulary choice. How have we girlbossed in terms of out of bounds vocabulary and the like.
FishRod:I think it is a measure, like, in class we have so much more opportunity for comprehension supports and so we need to be making use of those to make sure that students are comprehending, but also checking for comprehension, like, certainly, that students are comprehending.
Bryan:Okay. all for
FishRod:comprehensible, but actually comprehended. And so we can,
Bryan:today
FishRod:of input on a variety of topics pretty broad input by using comprehension supports, to ensure that it is being comprehended. And we want to give repetitions on those new terms as well, so that they are not one and done, you know, things that live shortly in our students brains and then move out Bill, you had talked to in kind of our preparation about park and pause. Do you want to expand on that?
Bill:Sure I actually just in general, I think me personally, I've been doing my part to girl boss. Out of bounds vocabulary in class I think, but one of the things that I try to do is park and pause when an unknown word comes up and students tell me that it's an unknown word to them, I want to try to park and pause. and pause. On that word. So I pull that out. And then I park on it. And like I said, like, I try to keep it in context of whatever it is that we're talking about. An example that I had talked about with you all before we started recording was yesterday in Spanish word, the phrase say throughout the day it's about came up and I used it and students said, what's that mean? And I was like, Ooh, a great opportunity to use a really useful phrase over and over and over. Because between me and all of you we weren't really getting very productive with what we wanted to talk, what I wanted to talk about anyway. So we just use the phrase C'est Trat Today. It's about, and talked about our favorite TV shows. So it wasn't a phrase that they knew before, but because I was able to just stop and use it over and over and over now they were better prepared for today when we saw that phrase, se today in a different context. So we just talked about like, oh, what's, what's your favorite show? What's your favorite show about? Is it about a man? Is it about a woman? Is it about a couple? Is it about a mystery stuff like that. And we got a lot of repetition of that phrase because students told me that they didn't know what it was. And then I was able to take the moment to. Establish meaning and then I like to call it like jump starting acquisition where like flood the input with a specific phrase over and over and over not guaranteeing that they'll internalize the phrase, but at least maybe it'll be easier to pull out of their memory when it comes up again. So that's one way that I try to mitigate confusion when. Words unknown words come up in class
FishRod:I love that too because I think that could also serve to slow the teacher down when it's so easy to power through new words and then add new word and then new word and more new word. It's helpful to have strategies like that. As a reminder, like, oh, this is a new word. I'm going to park on it for a while and kind of, like you said, just flood with that word. So then maybe in the future when you're trying to use that word again as part of something else where there also is new language. You don't have to flood that one as hard, right? I liken an acquisition to kind of like when you're painting with a spongy paint roller that you get like that very thin layer at first. And then when you hit it again with another layer, the layer gets, more opaque and that eventually you get to the desired, paint. opacity that you wanted covering whatever you were covering. But it takes a couple of goes over with the sponge roller and the sponge roller doesn't get it perfectly, clear, all the first time.
Bill:sometimes you still need topcoat later
FishRod:totally. So I think the park and pause slows us down and gives us, you know, a better chance with that new stuff and prevents us from flooding too much into the input. Because again, 90 to 100 percent range for reading texts is where students are comprehending it from just barely to fully And, you know, even the article mentions that, like, even with 100 percent comprehension of all the word, like, there's so many things that go into reading comprehension that, know, who knows if that means they just, like, perfectly understand something, right? But we want to give them the best chance possible, and so we need to be sheltering our vocabulary to give them that best chance possible. And so using these strategies, I think, slows us down helps us get that good concentrated input of stuff that is useful.
Bill:note, but a question do you ever? Get students that like they on you establish the meaning once they understand it And then they just start getting bored because you have to use it over and over and over because just because you understood it once Doesn't mean that you're That you've acquired it. Like, I understand that it's easy right now in the moment, because I just told you what it meant, but I really need to lay on those layers of pain and I need you to play the game so that you can actually use the language later.
FishRod:I think that kind of reminds me to myself something that I haven't maybe this year been doing as well is just kind of like the preventative education of the students of the process and what it looks like that like, yeah, sometimes it will feel easy and like, that's great. You know, Grant Boulanger has that great poster of like, we first we learned to, does he do listen first?
Bill:I think it's listen, then read, then write, then speak in.
FishRod:we read and then speak what we, you know, wrote that sort of like kind of sequencing that puts like oral and written input first. I would like to open more honest conversations with my students about like, Are you able to say that? to use that? Kind of without my support all the time, 100 percent of the time. Because I did it, it's funny, I had it with my level ones, I had a couple weeks where we were doing pretty samey sort of like, Special person interviews overlapping with card talk and stuff, And I had kids be like, It feels like we're just kidding, it's like so repetitious or whatever But then we did like a week of stories around Halloween and they were like, Oh my gosh, it was so much too much new vocabulary, even though I knew I was using all my techniques and stuff like that. And so I think. like that's a conversation where like I could teach you a new word every day and it would be hard for you probably, you know what I mean, or by a new word, obviously, you know, a bunch of new words every day but we need the repetition. Like, that's just how we, that's how we get the acquisition going. That's how I'm, we get your brain so full of the language that you're able to use it easy peasy.
Bill:Yeah, I even just a student today asked, like, why do, we ended up spending much longer on the Legend of La Llorona in Spanish one than I intended to this year. But a student asked, like, why do we spend like 3 weeks on the same story? It's like, well, you can understand it, but can you yourself retell the story yet? And like, oh, yeah, I guess. It's like, and I want to make it easy for you to be able to retell it. And so like, I'll do my best to make sure that even if it is something that you can understand really easy, that we're doing things to process language as well.
FishRod:to your side that just brought up as well is that I've had a couple of students in my upper level class. So 3rd and 4th years who we were just kind of reflecting writing, you know, right? Reflection in English about how things were going and quite a few of them had expressed kind of discontent with, like, how ungrammatical they felt. their language was and I was like, Hey, y'all, this is actually a good thing because you have developed enough taste to understand that the German that comes flooding out your mouth and sometimes out of your pen is like wacky and you like know that it's wrong, like you're aware that it's wrong, but you would not have that awareness unless you had soaked up a lot of language. And so we just have to keep going with that language soaking up until stuff that you read and listen to becomes in the same style as what you're able to say, right? that those start matching a little bit more.
Bill:This is why we should be around for these little nuggets,
FishRod:Yeah, like, it's the, you are developing, and German has a lovely word, language feeling, which just means, you know, sense of what is right and what is wrong, that kind of intuitive, acquired sense that we have in our languages that we speak proficiently, even yeah. Like, I'm like, yes, you are developing that, and it's a good thing. So you're in the frustrating intermediate valley, where you do some U shaped learning, and things get weird for a minute. really mad, and yet, you have a sense that things are wrong, which means that you know better, somehow, somewhere deep in that, that brilliant little noggin of yours. So,
Bill:is the Intermediate,
FishRod:it is frustrating.
Bill:is the Intermediate Valley anything like the Uncanny Valley? Like, it's almost language.
FishRod:creating something, yeah,
Bill:Intermediate learners are just like messy, messy, messy with the language. And it's a beautiful mess. So I don't mean to like, say that it's not language. It is language. They are communicating. That's the purpose. Just trying to be funny.
FishRod:but no, it totally isn't.
Bryan:say something that is a little perhaps controversial,
FishRod:Yes.
Bryan:Well, I personally believe that we need to, well, let me put it this way, I explicitly teach my students about guessing meaning from context because that is one of the interpretive skills that Actful lays out for like, you know, Rubik's four doing an integrated performance assessment because when they're out there in the world, chances are they're going to run into some words that they don't know, and they're going to have to kind of figure out. global meaning based on the words that they do know. So I create a lot of exercises if I am using an authentic text where I take some word like a sentence where I know they know most of the words, but there's going to be one word that they absolutely don't know or might trip them up. But I know they might see again down the road and I teach them strategies, you know, I explicitly teach them like what prefixes are, suffixes are like, model like when I'm reading things to them, like I would go about guessing what a specific word or phrase or whatever it means so that they can then do it. And we practice it a lot. And I
Bill:Transcription by CastingWords
Bryan:like I think They need both like they need to be able to acquire language that they're experiencing and also they need to have that kind of like cognitive skill of guessing meaning because it's just frankly, like, they will have to do that if they actually use the language out in the world.
FishRod:Who did I hear? Someone was just talking about, like, and maybe it was, again friends of the podcast, conversations about, like, language teaching talking about, like, that. What makes a very powerful learner of another language and the skills of interculturality is being an observer. Right? Like using all of your clues, using your best observation skills all the time to try to figure things out. Because yeah, it is easy mentally to get into the place of like reading fluently word. I don't know time to stop, you know, like that. I see that. And I understand that. I think that if we, like you said, if we can model those skills for being a very good observer, like, huh, I'm looking at this article. It has some headings. I see some pictures like, you know, thinking more, you know, giving those a little bit of metacognitive strategies for eventually when they are out in the French wild or out in the German wild, out in the Spanish wild, like I think making them those observers they're Hopefully we'll also kind of like, you know, it's an element of their skills of interculturality, which are being an observer able to kind of outside of themselves to see kind of the bigger, bigger pictures, in contexts and interactions and sort of stuff.
Bill:And one more, like actionable suggestion that I do when I'm working with some consistency is when a student does ask for clarification of a word thanking them publicly. And what I do less consistently is get everyone in the class to thank them for making sure that we all understand. So that's something that I need to work on. And then, oh yeah, I had an idea earlier and thanks Brian for the reminder Because who was it talking about clothes and like all those specific pieces of clothing. Yeah, then something that I've been working on, I use a frequency dictionary from, I think it's from Mark Davies. it's almost invaluable, like being able to if I'm writing something for students, I try to check the frequency dictionary because if it's a more frequent word, they're more likely to encounter it elsewhere, which will give them. More repetitions of the word in different contexts. But a handy dandy thing that they have in that dictionary are different thematic lists. so like a list of most frequent animals or most frequent pieces of clothing, most frequent foods most frequent transportation nouns. I'll take like maybe 25 to 50, which sounds like a lot, and I get that. And I will make a one sheet Pictionary for students. So, today I gave my Spanish 4 students one that had a bunch of different foods, because we're about to talk about food deserts, and, like, using leftovers. to make sure that we don't waste food. So I wanted to make sure that we all had similar vocabulary related to food. So I gave them this, it's got 50 different food words. I don't expect them to learn and acquire every single one of them, but I give it to them, let them put a whole punch in it so they can keep it in their binders. And then they've got that reference for at least. Until they throw with their binder away at the end of the school year but we do other things with us. Like, we'll play fly swatter or like modified fly swatter with it. So, like partners will put it in between them and I'll call out a word. Maybe I'll call out a word in English and they have to, like, be the first to touch the picture with their finger or something like that. Or today we did the, like the Pictionary game on GimKit with it. So they had like the support because on that game, you have to type in your answers. So I want to make sure that they have the spelling, right. So they can actually participate and have fun. Because if they have to guess the spelling of it over and over and over, then. That's not fun and it gets really cumbersome. So yeah, those are a couple of like actionable things that I do. I don't know if I've shared my thematic lists anywhere, but I also don't know if I'm ready to share them yet. So just be on the lookout for those.
FishRod:You can't do this to us, Bill.
Bill:I know
FishRod:No, I think,
Bill:I'll share the food one in the show notes.
FishRod:Yeah. and I would say recommend to our listeners as well, if you can find a frequency dictionary that is so illuminating of like, what am I spending time on? Am I teaching my kids the most common collocations of various, you know, verbs and nouns and all sorts of things together. That has been very interesting for me. My one final tip in terms of how to girlboss sheltering vocab is to use the technique of right and discuss is that instead of sometimes I used to let my conversations get so carried away and we would just talk about whatever came up
Bill:Okay. You
FishRod:as language instead of just as an isolated term. And then you have a text that is level appropriate and was comprehensible to your students that you can reuse later for various purposes. And, you know, assign it as homework, read it as the warm up the following day, get more repetitions on those terms again so that you're getting better text coverage in the future by, you know, not just letting those, new terms to slip by. So I'm
Bill:And
Bryan:students comprehend enough of the text or, you know, whatever language they're receiving, but also ways that they can be taught to handle unfamiliar vocabulary. And yeah, see you next time.
Bill:keep on slayin bye!
