http://cboronline.com/events/gri-skill-building/

As we facilitate student growth across the proficiency continuum toward meeting learning targets, we plan learning experiences for students through the various phases of learning, guiding them from input to independence.

Much focus has been placed on comprehensible input, where students acquire new content on various topics and on output or independence, where students are able to use the new content on their own in real world contexts.

How do we ensure that our students are building literacy and communication skills?

Along with students acquiring more content over time, attention needs to be paid to the building of communicative skills.  What we know is…

• Skills are not acquired just through input of content.
• Students have learned paradigms for skills through language arts
• Advancing in proficiency levels requires intentional skill building

If we take a close look at the NCSSFL-ACTFL Can-Do Statements, they reveal to us the skills students need to advance through the proficiency levels.

https://www.actfl.org/publications/guidelines-and-manuals/ncssfl-actfl-can-do-statements

For example, at the novice level in the interpersonal mode, here are the skills that appear:

Some examples of resources that support building interpersonal skills in the area of expressing opinions at the novice level might be the following graphic organizer, anchor chart, and expressions list:

For building student skill in identifying the main idea and key details from a text,

for French at the at the novice level, some resources to support that skill building might include an anchor chart, graphic organizer, and instructional strategy:

And here’s one for the presentational mode at the intermediate level:

And some resources for building the skill of narrating a story in Spanish:

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Where can I find resources for intentional skill building in the target language?

I invite you to visit a page on my website, entitled “Intentional Skill Building” where I have begun to gather resources in the target language for building students’ communicative skills (click on the image below).

The page is divided into Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced proficiency levels, with segments in between entitled “Preparing for Intermediate” and “Preparing for Advanced.”  The resources linked within the charts are anchor charts, graphic organizers, expressions lists, and instructional strategies.

• Anchor charts

Anchor charts are visuals that remind students about processes or routines that can use

• Graphic organizers

Graphic organizers allow students to place ideas into groups or categories either based on interpretation of text or for preparation of a speaking or writing product

• Expressions lists

Expressions lists serve as supports or scaffolds for students to assist them in persevering through a task in the target language.

• Instructional strategies
  • Strategies for the modes
  • Reading strategies
  • Cooperative Learning strategies
  • Discussion strategies
  • Visible thinking strategies

(photo credit: Heather Sherrow)

Many language educators of novice level courses struggle with student engagement.  The students are acquiring very basic vocabulary and sentence structure which limits what they can express in the second language.  The imbalance between what novices can communicate and what they want to express can be very frustrating and disengaging for beginning language learners, especially at the secondary and college levels.

What if extending and deepening typical novice themes to those in which students are interested and about which they care increases engagement?

Understanding the iGeneration

The students in our classrooms, right now, are members of what is called the “iGeneration.”  They were born from 1996 to the present.

They are independent and competitive.  They are digital natives.  They have an 8 second attention span and they suffer from FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).  They will have 17 jobs in their lifetime and 15 homes.  They spend an average of 10 hours per day using technology.  They would rather watch or listen to streaming media on demand than traditional TV.   They rarely use email because it is too slow and want to engage with relatable but not overly famous influencers.  They value uniqueness, authenticity, creativity, shareability and recognition.

60% of i-Geners want to change the world.  They feel empowered, connected, and empathetic.  They are self-starters and they want to stand out and make a difference in the world.  They are self-aware and self-reliant.  iGeners would take a 10-20% pay cut to work for a company with a mission about which they care deeply.

Students from the iGeneration are also called Generation Z, Founders, Builders, Globals, Makers, Curators, and Developers.  Notice how many of the labels are action words.  Our students want to be involved in their learning, solve problems, and make a social impact.

Note: To find out more about the iGeneration, go to: https://www.grahnforlang.com/knowing-the-learner.html

Tapping into what engages the iGeneration

How might we tap into what our i-Geners seek by making our content themes more action-oriented and socially-conscious through authentic resources?

Typical novice level content themes in a beginning language course might include topics such as:

• personal descriptions
• family
• food
• school
• house
• clothing
• weather
• travel
• my community

Let’s explore some possibilities of how we can increase language learners’ engagement in typical novice themes.  Many of the authentic resources in these extended themes include vocabulary and language chunks that will reinforce and stretch student language.  Keep in mind that the topics should be age-appropriate for the students.

For each idea below, click on the image to go to the Pinterest page containing authentic resources for multiple languages on that topic.

Novice unit: Personal Descriptions

Theme extension: Identity and Diversity

Note: The photo at the beginning of this blog post is of posters made by middle school level one Spanish students after exploring identity and diversity during the personal descriptions unit.

Novice unit: Family

Theme extension: Types of Families, Adoption, Caring for Elderly Relatives

Novice unit: Food

Theme extension: Food Waste

Novice unit: Food

Theme extension: Hunger

Novice unit: Food

Theme extension: Meatless Mondays

Novice unit: Food

Theme extension: Veganism and Vegetarianism

Novice unit: School

Theme extension: Bullying

Novice unit: House

Theme extension: Homelessness

Novice Unit: Clothing

Theme extension: Buying Vintage/Second-Hand Clothing

Novice unit: Weather

Theme extension: Climate Change/Global Warming

Novice unit: Travel/Vacations

Theme extension: Ecotourism

Novice Unit: My Community

Theme extension: Earth Day

Novice Unit: My Community

Theme extension: Recycling

Other socially-conscious topics of interest to i-Geners include:

Volunteering and Giving

Children’s Rights

Women’s Rights

Immigration

Human Rights

Sources:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/403072235386815013/

https://visual.ly/community/infographic/other/generation-z

https://ahappymarketer.wordpress.com/

https://www.roberthalf.com/sites/default/files/documents/rh_0715_grph_1330x3433_genzinfographic_can_eng_sec.pdf

This is my third post on strategies for deepening students’ comprehension of authentic resources.  The previous posts were:

Deepening Students’ Comprehension of Authentic Resources: Supports and Scaffolds and Deepening Students’ Comprehension of Authentic Resources: Visual Strategies.

For this post, we will focus on how to use thinking routines as processes through which students demonstrate deeper comprehension of text.

What are thinking routines?

In the book, Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding, and Independence for All Learners, authors Church, Morrison, and Ritchhart report on research done at Harvard by a group called Project Zero.

The authors describe “thinking routines” as:

• ways to make student thinking visible
• patterns by which we operate and go about the job of learning and working together in the classroom
• any procedure, process, or pattern of action that is used repeatedly
• being designed to promote students’ thinking
• being goal-oriented, and targeting specific types of thinking
• getting used over and over again in the classroom
• consisting of only a few steps
• easy to learn and teach
• used in a variety of contexts
• used by groups or individuals

http://www.visiblethinkingpz.org/VisibleThinking_html_files/03_ThinkingRoutines/03a_ThinkingRoutines.html

Here’s a great infographic that speaks to the idea of how to implement a culture of thinking in your classroom:

The thinking routines are divided into categories based on their function:

• Core Routines
• Understanding Routines
• Fairness Routines
• Truth Routines
• Creativity Routines

The Core Routines include:

• What Makes You Say That?
• Think Puzzle Explore
• Think Pair Share
• Circle of Viewpoints
• I Used to Think…Now I Think
• See Think Wonder
• Compass Points

To read more about all of the thinking routines, click on this link.

How to embed thinking routines into your lesson plans

Here’s an example of how a thinking routine can be incorporated into your classroom.

1. Students interpret several infographics in the target language on the topic of school lunches.  Students take notes about the information they gain from the infographic on an organizer.

After, they meet in pairs or small groups comprised of students who interpreted different infographics to discuss and share what they gleaned from their infographic using their organizers.  Students add ideas to their organizers they gained from classmates.

As an extension and to deepen student comprehension, the teacher regroups the students to have a discussion about what they learned from the infographics.  They use the thinking routine called “I see…, I think…, I wonder” as a guide for their discussion.  The teacher provides the students with an expressions list to use while they share in small groups (agreement, disagreement, I think that…, I wonder why…., better, best, etc.).  Students talk about opinions they have and questions they have about the topic of school lunches.

There are many resources online that have versions of the thinking routines in other languages.  Here are some links for Spanish:

Visual Thinking- Rutinas de Pensamiento

Rutinas de Pensamiento

​Rutinas de Pensamiento (weebly)

¿Que son las rutinas de pensamiento? (infographic)

Rutinas de Pensamiento (PDF)

Rutinas de Pensamiento (strategy cards)

To explore more about thinking routines, visit my website: https://www.grahnforlang.com/thinking-strategies.html

or my Pinterest board: https://www.pinterest.com/grahnforlang/thinking-strategies/

To read more about Project Zero, go to:  http://www.pz.harvard.edu/projects/visible-thinking

This is my second post on the topic of deepening students’ comprehension of authentic resources.  The previous post focused on visual strategies.  This post will highlight supports and scaffolds that assist students in comprehending authentic text.

Graphic organizers

Interpreting authentic text can feel very daunting, especially to our reluctant and struggling language learners.  Having scaffolds and supports to help students focus and organize their thinking can make a big difference in student confidence in and perseverance through tasks.

A graphic organizer that is labeled with specific categories gives students “buckets” for the ideas they glean from the text.  Am I looking for opinions, reasons, and examples the author is giving?  Am I interpreting a description of a person and categorizing my notes into physical and personality traits?  A well-labeled graphic organizer can be just the support some learners need in lieu of being a given a blank sheet of paper on which to collect “notes.”

For example, in a French class while reading a children’s storybook in the target language, the teacher gives students a graphic organizer set up as a story map.  The story map helps students know what they are reading/listening for in the text.

Here’s an example of a story map organizer for Spanish:

Here’s an example of a graphic organizer in Spanish from Really Good Stuff where students write the main idea and details from an authentic text.  Click on the image below to access a PDF of multiple graphic organizers in Spanish.

For similar tools, visit this Pinterest page:

Anchor Charts

Another example of a scaffold or support is anchor charts.  Anchor charts give students a framework to think about a text and its structure.  They are visual and often are created by the teacher in real time with the students where student input is added to the chart.

Here’s an example of an anchor chart about how to make connections with a text-

• text to self
• text to text
• text to the world

It gives students sample sentence frames they can use to make those connections with the text.  The anchor chart remains visible in the classroom as a support to which students may refer to in the future.

Here’s an example of an anchor chart in French reminding readers about the types of details for which they are reading or listening while interpreting an authentic text.

Below is an anchor chart in Chinese that gives students guidance on how to express their opinion about a text they have read/listened to called “OREO Opinion Writing.”  This is an example of a structure that students likely have learned in their English/Language Arts class and is easily tranferable to the language classroom.

For more examples of anchor charts, here’s a link to my Pinterest board:

Productive group work

A very powerful way to support language learners in deepening their comprehension of authentic text is to provide them with opportunities to work in pairs or in a small group. Having a partner or group members to check and verify their thinking can be a great way to build language learners’ confidence level in their ability to interpret authentic text.

Some of the advantages of productive group work from the Center for Innovation and Research in Teaching (CIRT) include:

1. Students able to take ownership of the subject matter.
2. Students develop communication and teamwork skills.
3. Content is reinforced as students work together and “teach” each other.
4. Content may be broken down into parts.  This allows students to tackle larger and more complex problems and assignments than they would be able to do individually.
5. Students can work together to pool their expertise, knowledge and skills.

Collaboratively tackling a challenging task that involves interpreting authentic text is a bridge to language learner independence in the interpretive mode.

Some of the best routines or processes to use during productive group work time is cooperative learning structures like Jigsaw, Numbered Heads Together, and Round Table.  Visual directions on how the various cooperative learning strategies work can be found online to ensure that the teaching of the routine can be done in the target language.  Here’s an example of visual directions for the Kagan structure called “Rally Coach”:

For more ideas for productive group work, go to the Flexible Grouping page on my website:

or visit my Pinterest board on the same topic:

“Scaffold” by erix! is licensed under CC BY 2.0 

In the interpretive mode, the word “text” carries the same definition as the Language Arts Common Core: anything that is read, listened to, or viewed.  Not only does that definition include videos, audio clips. memes, infographics, poems, articles, and short stories, but it also includes visuals.

Visual Literacy

Visual literacy is the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image.  In an article on Edutopia, Common Core in Action: 10 Visual Literacy Strategies, the author, Todd Finley, discusses ways to increase students’ visual literacy skills such as:

• Think Alouds
• Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS)
• Five Card Flickr
• Image Analysis

For more information on Visual Literacy or Visual Thinking Strategies, here are some links:

• Visual Thinking Strategies website: https://vtshome.org/
• Visual Thinking Strategies to Improve Comprehension: http://www.colorincolorado.org/article/visual-thinking-strategies-improved-comprehension
• Visual Thinking Strategies: Milwaukee Art Museum: http://teachers.mam.org/collection/teaching-with-art/visual-thinking-strategies-vts/
• ​Teaching Visual Literacy in the Classroom: https://www.literacyideas.com/teaching-visual-texts-in-the-classroom/​ 
• 7 Things You Should Know About Visual Literacy: https://library.educause.edu/~/media/files/library/2015/3/eli7118-pdf.pdf

“Reading” Pictures

In my blog post entitled “Teaching Listening and Viewing Skills Using Authentic Resources,” I shared some simple ideas for having students interpret visuals:

Some strategies students can use when “reading a picture” are:

• describe what they see (what is going on, who is doing what)
• make connections with the visual
• describe how the picture makes them feel
• express an opinion

In that same blog post, I shared a tool called a “picture description frame” which gives students the language they need to describe a picture:

Examples of the picture frame for multiple languages can be found at:

https://www.grahnforlang.com/scaffolds-and-supports.html

Focus on Fine Art

We have heard the phrase, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”  How can we leverage the power of authentic visuals such as fine art to give students a context for interpersonal exchanges and presentational products and performances?

Fine art, in particular, offers some unique benefits in that it usually has a cultural context.  So, the discussion of the artwork extends beyond what is seen in the piece to the connections the artwork has to the historical time period and to the cultural products, practices and perspectives.

The painting below, La Tamalada, by Carmen Lomas Garza shows a family working together to make tamales:

In addition, consider the possibility that viewing fine art can also be a practice in language structures.  “The Boating Party” by Renoir (which is the artwork at the beginning of this post) can be used to talk about who is looking at whom, a great practice in using object pronouns.  “The Artist’s Bedroom at Arles” by Van Gogh is a great piece for practicing prepositions of place.

Scaffolds and Supports for “Reading” Fine Art

There are expressions lists that exist to serve as scaffolds and supports for students when describing a picture or piece of art:

Spanish:

French:

And here’s a PDF from the Instituto Cervantes that offers a more in depth look at describing artwork in the target language.  Scroll to the appendices to see expressions lists they provide:

https://cvc.cervantes.es/ensenanza/biblioteca_ele/publicaciones_centros/PDF/napoles_2013/05_diez-fumado.pdf