Teaching vocabulary is critical in a World Language classroom, but there are several limitations to using vocabulary-centric thematic units such as “Hobbies,” “Food,” or “Places”:
- These units force our Novice students to become experts in very narrow areas of language.
- They create additional work for us, as we are constantly searching for resources that target this specific vocabulary.
- They make it increasingly difficult to design communicative tasks centered around the same theme.
What if, instead, we focused on who is in the room? What if we empowered our Novice students to explore a wider variety of topics about themselves and to foster connections with those around them?
A focus on stories & Special Person Interviews
In our first quarter together, I focus on two key aspects: 1) building our community of amazing human beings and 2) providing foundational language that is immediately useful to my students. Therefore, a typical first-quarter class (65 minutes) will look like this:
Check-In:
- How are you feeling? check-in
First half of class:
- A highly engaging story with high frequency foundational language (Super Seven): We alternate storytelling with story reading. I use mostly Movie Talks, some story listening, and one story-asking. One class, I tell the story. The next, we read the story and do some processing on it. I have learned over the years that this combo works best for my Middle School Novice students.
Second half of class:
- Special Person interview: I use this slide deck by Amy Marshall, which gives students a chance to choose what they want to talk about. We interview a different student each day, asking them questions based on their interests. At first, I ask the questions and little by little, the students take over the entire interview. This, along with a graphic organizer to take notes in, helps everyone stay engaged. Note: Unlike the way Special Person was originally intended, I do not seek short term repetitions of language structures and I do not limit myself to a few questions. We run a full interview (roughly 10 questions) very slowly and focus on one student at a time.
- Write & Discuss: We co-create a short paragraph about our Special Person, which the students copy down. This is where the repetition happens as I ask questions to tease information from students. We call it a Shared Writing:
- T: “Comment elle s’appelle?”
- S:”Mary”
- T writes “Elle s’appelle Mary” on the board
- S write down the sentence on their paper
Little by little, students starts producing the sentences by themselves, especially the ones that come back over and over (name, age, birthday, etc.). Once again, I transfer the ownership of the task to my students.
Exit ticket:
- Tell me one thing you learned about our Special Person today. I accept words, phrases, and sentences, which allows for natural differentiation.
Homework:
- Translate the Shared Writing into English (reading) OR listen to the Shared Writing. I type and create a recording of the Shared Writing and create audio exercises for them. This provides more targeted repetition, which is perfect for at-home practice.
Assessments:
- I conduct regular formative quick checks on the structures that have emerged during the interviews.
- Here is an example of Novice Special Person Quiz after doing 5 interviews (Interpretive listening and reading)
The outcomes
Mid way through our first quarter, my Novice students are able to understand a full 30-second long description of someone. They are also able to produce comprehensible sentence-level language about their classmates, orally and in writing. If I followed a vocabulary-centric thematic approach, they would not be able to do this for a while.
I hope this post gives you some concrete ideas on how to free yourself from vocabulary-centric thematic units. Please let me what questions you have in the comment section. For super helpful free resources on Special Person Interview, check this out.
Note: I acknowledge the privilege of teaching at an independent school for the past 4-5 years, where I enjoy instructional freedom, work with class sizes that do not exceed 20 students, and experience fewer classroom management challenges overall compared to my previous positions in public schools.