Autumn's the Season (for Reading Instruction)

I have tried, with each of these blog posts, to begin my post with an anecdote from personal experience--something closely related to the topic, a story or an example from my own life (and usually relating to Spanish acquisition). But for this one, I have been having trouble coming up with anything from my personal experience, and I have been trying to work through why. Chapter 9 of the text brings up some excellent points about tailoring student writing tasks to reflect and expand upon the writing that students do on a regular basis. It's so interesting to think about the ways in which the structured writing that school often requires widely differs from the authentic compositions that students may create on their own. When I was in high school, I actually participated in the NaNoWriMo challenge--I still have the shirt that I got when I finished. I didn't have a computer, so I handwrote a 50,000 word novel in the course of one month. (That's not to say that my work was...

I think one of the most interesting things I have experienced in my practicum actually (interestingly) did not involve Spanish at all. One day in class not soon after the Parkland shooting, a few 8th graders began a discussion that ended up taking the whole class period--and to my surprise it ended up being really good. The students were actually quite respectful of one another and their opinions, and listened when Mrs. Vieceli reminded them to think about the story from all sides. I was surprised and impressed by the civility with which the students were able to discuss a controversial topic like gun violence--certainly more civil than the majority that were going on at the time. A large reason why this discussion was able to happen, from my perspective, is the facilitation of the teacher. Mrs. Vieceli helped them along with questions and guided them away from trigger words that would cause arguments or unreasonable comments from the participants. I'm not sure I've heard t...

When you look at the title of this blog, I would guess that immediately you recognized a word or two if you've had any instruction in Spanish--maybe the articles, maybe "inglés", but not too much else. Then going back and reading it again (like you probably just did), you could potentially decode the meaning--"bendición" is pretty similar to "benediction" or "blessing", oh wait, I learned "aprender" at some point, "segundo idioma"--that's got to be second language because this is the ESL blog post. So you've got the general idea now, but it wasn't immediate--you needed a moment to sort through it all. And that's assuming that you have some background in Spanish, which may or may not be the case.  For English language learners, this is a daily and near constant experience in school. Depending on the level of their abilities in the various language skills (listening, reading, writing, and speaking), ...

As a voracious reader, I have always had a fairly extensive vocabulary, able to use complex words in a variety of contexts. I remember being complimented throughout high school for my use of technical language in the essays that I wrote. For a while, it surprised me that not everyone was the way that I was, or the ways my high school best friends were. Why would you not want to learn new words that make you sound smarter? Why are there people out there that don't enjoy reading all the time? I still wonder about that at times, but now I have a different perspective, as a future teacher. My questions are more based on how I, as a Spanish teacher, can encourage the use and acquisition of vocabulary in my students--and why they would be unmotivated to do so. Traditional vocabulary instruction in Spanish often involves the use of word-to-word translation, vocabulary lists, and forced memorization. That's how I learned Spanish, from the beginning. And sometimes, it seems that w...