A dictogloss is a strategy that can works well with upper level students and allows the teacher to focus on multiple modes of communication within one grammar lesson. In addition to hitting multiple modes of communication, it also engages students in some metacognition as they complete a mistake analysis. If you're new to dictogloss, check out this post for a more detailed explanation. When creating dictogloss lessons I like to have a template from which I work. It helps me know the direction my lesson is going in and helps my students have a familiar format (which cuts down on the time spent explaining directions). Let's go a little further to understand the template and the flow of these lessons. Part 1: Creating your scenario
When writing your scenario, here are a few things to keep in mind
Part 2: Writing your dictogloss When creating your text be sure to...
Part 3: Planning for the co-construction When students are working together to rewrite the story, circulate the classroom but try your best not to help. You want to see where their errors are because that is important at a later part of the lesson. Part 4: The follow up dictogloss Keep your similar processing strategies in mind when you do your second dictogloss. Remember, this second one should be a continuation of the first script. This is a good area for you to focus on another area related to your targeted grammar. For example, if you are working with object pronouns maybe your first one focuses on feminine nouns and your second is on masculine nouns. Or if it's double verb constructions, maybe your first one focuses on the verb "should" and the second one is on the verb "to be able to". Part 5: The co-construction When you are going over everything as a class, ask students to go part by part. Have them give you answers in short chunks. It's ok if they can't give you a complete sentence. If someone gives a wrong word, ask if anyone has a different word. If a student misses a word, leave a blank and see if anyone has an additional word to add to the sentence. Also, highlight your new grammar point and work with students to co-construct some kind of rule. This is where some explicit teaching can come in handy to help students notice the new grammar and understand it in the context of the dictogloss scripts. Part 6: Mistake analysis Once you have the complete text, ask students to look over their version and the correct version and see if there are any patterns in terms of what they missed. Did they tend to miss articles? Did they tend to misspell words? Did they forget accent marks? Ask students to find these patterns and ask them why they might have forgotten them or missed them. Part 7: Extension activity Now that you've done a lot of work with the scripts and have noticed the new grammar, you don't want students to stop there. Take the information from your texts and have students work with them. Create an extension activity where students write something back to the person or use that information to complete a follow up task. In an ideal world, students would also be using the new grammatical structure to complete that task. Using the template can help create a flow to the lesson and help set expectations for future dictogloss lessons for teaching grammar in context.
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Concept attainment is a really simple way to dip your foot in the water to allow students to discover patterns in the target language. Click here for a more detailed description of concept attainment. Concept attainment is best used when you have two ideas that are distinguishable in your language's grammar. Some of the best uses for it include:
I've created a sample lesson for a Spanish 1 class in a school unit when indefinite articles are typically taught. Here's how it works: First, the teacher will explain to students that they're going to see a bunch of words on the screen. At first, the teacher will tell students if the words are in the yes category or the no category. Then, the responsibility moves to the students to discuss and write the words in the correct categories. The words will be shown individually on the screen like this (without the yes/no next to them) Next, students are going to revisit those columns with the titles of sí and no and their job is to write new headers for those categories. Essentially, this is the part where they take a look at all of the words in the yes/no columns and figure out what the words have in common and how they can explain what they're seeing. After sharing answers to the reclassifying of the two columns, the teacher can fill in the gaps with any necessary or missing explanations. From there, it's now on to students to immediately apply their learning in a task. In this example, students are asked to describe wall to wall what they see in their classroom. There are sentence starters/verbs that are given to provide scaffolding because the targeted grammar is the un vs una so students should focus more on that and less on the words like tiene, aula, etc. A few notes: First, the yes and no words were chosen specifically because of their articles. This is a generalization of the "rule". As a next step, other words like lápiz, reloj, celular, etc. can be introduced simply with the un/una in front of them as one chunk for students to work with. Second, when presenting the words on the board one at a time in step 1, I purposely left out the un and una. I wanted students to focus on the endings of the nouns. If I had kept the un/una in front, they would have noticed that and made no connection between the noun ending and the article. Third, the yes column are all the una words and the no column are all the un words. By showing more words that will take una this is an attempt to break a likely pattern of overgeneralizing the use of un. Students tend to assume all nouns receive un or el when that is not the case. By providing multiple counter examples to this, the hope would be to help students notice this difference early on in their language learning journeys and to not overuse un in the future. Where Do We Go From Here?
I taught this grammar, great! Now what? The instinct would likely be to jump in and start explaining definite articles next but that instinct might hinder students' understanding of indefinite articles. The next step should be to continue with learning targets and activities that require students to use those indefinite articles to complete other tasks such as:
Try this out and let me know how it goes! Structured input, a part of input processing, is a strategy I have been coming back to more and more in my classes over the past year as part of my 'grammar teaching toolkit'. In short, structured input is a way of manipulating teacher written input so that we tend to learners' processing strategies and help learners process the meaning of verbs before the forms. Structured input has 6 key components:
Here are some examples of structured input that I have done with my classes this year in different contexts. You'll notice that I tend to use the same format for each one. This is done on purpose to help students understand the directions for the activities and it helps me to have a template to create them. Context For Activities In The Folder Structured Input Present and Future: In this Spanish 3 unit, we are studying health and healthy habits. The first activity is done early in the unit where students are processing tú form verbs in the present tense to help them prepare to ask questions in an interpersonal assessment. The second activity is done after learning the future tense as well as present and past. Students are reading input and determining if the action happened in the past, present or future. To do this, students are processing the meaning of the verbs as well as the tense markers. Structured Input Present and Subjunctive: In this Spanish 3 unit, we start the year by talking about parts of the house and describing houses and gradually work up to discussing homelessness. The first activity is done early in the unit where students are discussing what they do around the house. Students are starting by checking off the sentences that apply to them and using the pattern to write additional sentences. Then, they are working to differentiate between the I and he/she forms of the verbs. To do this, they need to understand the context of the scenario and understand what the words in the input mean. The second series of activities come later in the unit when learning about homelessness. Students learn the subjunctive which is a complicated concept for them to master because it requires the expressions and the change in the verb. To help with this, these activities are isolate those two components. In activity 6 they are processing the meaning of those verbs in the subjunctive and checking off what they believe to be important. In activity 7 they are now working with the expressions to complete each statement/opinion with a subjunctive expression that logically finishes the sentence. In the final activity, they are asked to begin combining these two skills together to write original opinions but with simplified expectations of output. Structured Input Present, Preterite and Imperfect: This one might be my favorite. After learning present, preterite and imperfect in prior units, the teacher combines them to be able to differentiate between the three tenses. First, the teacher creates a series of sentences in present, preterite and imperfect on the topic and says them out loud. Students listen and based on the meaning of the verb they determine when the event took place. Then, they are asked to write questions using those different tenses as a follow up. Finally, they are working with expressions used for each tense and read/process sentences where verbs are seen and must determine a logical time marker for each sentence. Structured Input Preterite: This activity comes as a close second for my favorite one. Students are exposed to the preterite vs present tense for "I" forms of verbs. Students have to read and process/understand various sentences on technology use and classify the different kinds of technology that are being used in each sentence based on the iPhone library categories. Students are then exposed to an explanation on the preterite to help them make sense of what they processed. Structured Input Preterite and Imperfect: This activity is important to understand in terms of context but relates nicely to incorporating culture with structured input. Prior to this, students learned about Spain during the lockdown period of March of 2020 and the differences in the ways it was handled. Using that information, students determine if different sentences talk about what someone in the US did or what someone in Spain did. These sentences force students to process the sentence for cultural content and for verb connections as well. Structured Input Subjunctive: In this activity, students are completing sentences with a logical expression by processing verbs in the subjunctive. To follow up with that, students are determining who's opinion the sentence corresponds with. This is open ended in a way because a student could choose to write an expression that allows the meaning of the sentence to correlate with either person but it forces them to understand the meaning of the subjunctive verb in the context of the sentence. Structured Input Imperfect:
This is a classic template for structured input that I use. Essentially in part 1 students read a sentence and determine who it pertains to and write a few more sentences of their own. In part 2, they hear a series of sentences and determine if those match their teacher's life or not and write a few additional sentences using those patterns that they heard or saw in the input. Do you remember back in the day when your teacher would tell you that it was time for a dictation? I remember in my Spanish classes feeling pretty confident and in my French classes feeling like I never knew how to spell. Those activities felt like little pop-up practices with spelling or listening or something...I wasn't always sure to tell you the truth. Well, we've come a long way and now it's time to look back at those dictation activities and think of how we can repurpose some of them into what are known as dictogloss activities. A dictogloss activity is one where students work with a teacher-created text and work to re-construct that text in which a grammar point is embedded. I have taken a slightly different approach to what you might find online from ELL teachers and worked to add a bit more of a game-like element to it that matches the strategy by Bill VanPatten. Here is a video explanation of this technique. A dictogloss activities differs from a traditional dictation in a few ways. First, it adds a communicative purpose to the actual text. Normally, kids listen to a text, copy it down best they can and then review it before moving on to the next activity. Dictogloss is different because it lets kids actually analyze the meaning of the text and communicate about what they just heard. Another advantage is that it incorporates all 4 skills- listening, reading, writing and speaking. Students listen to the passage, read the correct passage at the end, write the passage as they hear it and talk about it with a partner. Steps To Making/Using A Dictogloss Activity 1. Teacher writes a short text with the grammar point embedded As the teacher, you need to think about what length of passage your students can truly listen to, understand and replicate. A novice can only probably handle 2-3 sentences at most. An intermediate can handle maybe 4 sentences. Advanced level students could maybe handle a 6-7 sentence passage. It's important that you also have your structure embedded in your passage. It should be apparent and repeat itself multiple times. It's better to have one, single structure (one form of a verb) instead of many (all forms of the verb). 2. Teacher explains the activity to students and makes sure all vocabulary is familiar When you explain the activity to students, make sure they are aware that there will be a new grammatical structure in the passage. This heightens their awareness of new grammar and lets them become detectives to finding out the pattern. You also want to make sure all vocabulary words in the passage are familiar. You don't want them struggling with a new word when they should be trying to focus on grammar. 3. You read the passage to students but students can't write anything down This is where the dictation part starts but with a twist. Students are to listen very carefully to the teacher but can't write anything down until they have finished. This adds a bit of a game element to the activity. Language processing strategies tell us that students will likely remember what is heard first the best, last the second best and everything in the middle will be where things get jumbled up. Think about that as you write your passage to make sure you have some structures in the beginning/end. 4. Students reconstruct the text the best they can Start by having kids work by themselves to write out as much of the passage as they can possibly remember. Then, have them work with a partner to construct a the passage using both of their notes. This conversation should be in the target language. 5. Tell students you will re-read the passage and they should focus on the areas they are missing Re-read the passage but still don't let them write anything down. When you finish, they work with their same partner to finish the passage based on what they heard. 6. Review the correct passage as a class Go over the passage together and have different students tell you different parts of what they heard. As misconceptions or difficult parts arise, point them out to students and ask them why they think those parts were difficult. When you finish, ask students where they believe the new grammar point is and you can briefly explain how it works. 7. Use the content/message of the passage as the basis for follow up tasks After everyone has the correct information from the passage, ask students to do something with what they just heard. This could be a conversation about what the passage says or writing a follow up to the person in the message or writing a continuation of the message. The follow up should ideally involve students using the new grammar point that you helped them construct in the activity Some tips:
What grammar points work with this: A common question that's asked about grammar in context is what to do with smaller grammar points that don't merit a PACE lesson or structured input but still are worth noting or pointing out. Dictogloss works perfectly for those. If you want to teach things like double verb construction, object pronouns, demonstrative adjectives/pronouns, etc. those work really well with dictogloss activities. The key is to make sure they are simple and noticeable my students when they are listening. Give some of these a try and let me know what you think! Ready for a new strategy for teaching grammar as a concept? Look no further than Concept Attainment. This is a relatively straightforward activity for teachers to plan and kids really get involved in their learning. It's way less 'involved' than a PACE lesson or a structured input lesson. If you'd prefer a video explanation, check out my YouTube video talking about this technique. To start, it's first important to understand that this comes from a school of thinking known as Constructivism. A good way to describe Constructivism is to say that it is ‘an approach to learning that holds that people actively construct or make their own knowledge and that reality is determined by the experiences of the learner’ (Elliott et al., 2000, p. 256). In other words, learning becomes less about teachers giving the information and more about students socializing and working together to build their own meaning that makes sense to them. The image above does a nice job showing how students talk to one another, they think/reflect, they go back to working together, they work with the teacher and share out and start the process all over again. This is key to understanding this technique called Concept Attainment. Above, I created a visual to show the different steps to creating one of these lessons. It's fairly straightforward in terms of how you create and execute it. Step 1: Create and show a presentation with words/phrases and go through them one at a time. Each time you show the word/phrase, you simply say that it is a "yes" example or a "no" example. You don't explain what "yes" and "no" mean. They simply see a word/phrase and you tell them yes or no upfront. You usually do about 3-4 of these and show more "yes" examples than "no" examples so they can fully understand the concept. Step 2: Now it's their turn. Either one at a time or all together, you display the remaining words/phrases on the board. Students then work together to classify whether each word is a "yes" or a "no" based on the teacher's first few examples they showed. The most important part of this step is the conversation that happens between students. By them talking out the categories it helps them in their learning more than just being told information. Step 3: As students are classifying the words/phrases, have them keep track on a chart with "yes" on one side and "no" on another side. This will become important at the end. Step 4: After finishing the task, ask students to work together to come up with new titles for the "yes" and "no" categories based on the meaning of those words/phrases and what they have in common or how they contrast from one another. This helps to ensure that they are using their own words to explain their own understanding instead of just being told information. For example, take a look at the chart above. Prior to showing this chart, I showed students examples of certain expressions in Spanish and classified them as yes and no based on whether or not they used subjunctive to express doubt. I showed the first few examples, they worked through the remaining examples and this was the list that was created. Students then renamed those categories based on their observations. They used words like positive/negative and agree/disagree which, to me, are their own ways of expressing what I could have taught them all along by telling them 'this is the subjunctive with doubt'.
How does this work with grammar? From my experience, I think there are a few grammatical points that could be taught using this method. I'm sure there are more but my list includes:
Try this out and let me know if you like it and if you have any other ways we can use this method! I recently decided to make a sample PACE lesson on a topic that is frequently done in level 1 classes. A lot of us do a unit on free time and that is often when we do the present tense. There are countless infographics out there to help us with this topic that I used to help with this PACE lesson. While this example is in Spanish, I'm confident that resources like it exist in other languages so this could be rearranged/tweaked to match your language. How is this organized?
Presentation:
I hope you enjoyed or will enjoy my #NECTFL21 presentation and resources
Here are a few easy to read infographics about grammar in context.
Depending on your situation, some people may be able to teach new concepts or continue with their curriculum and that begs the question of how you can do that with teaching new grammatical structures. One of the methods I suggest is to use a PACE-like lesson. Click here for a detailed explanation of what PACE is. Right now, our students are looking for a reason to be intellectually curious. They want something to stimulate their brains and the PACE Model is the perfect way to do that. First, you're going to choose your grammar carefully because you want it to relate back to your theme/topic and actually be used to communicate something. For example, if you want them talking about their future goals/aspirations you want the future tense and not the imperfect subjunctive necessarily. From there, you'll choose an authentic resource or teacher written resource that encompasses that grammar and your theme/topic and you'll give that to students with some interpretive tasks (true/false with justification, identify the main idea, find these supporting details). This is a text I gave my students in my Spanish 3 class about making resolutions. They were given this with the task of figuring out the main idea, I gave them some key words I wanted them to find, I asked some true/false questions and asked for their personal reaction to it. Under normal circumstances I would continue this over a series of several classes to get a ton out of the resource but with restricted time and online learning I cut this a bit in half. From there I drew learners attention to the grammatical structure that I wanted them to notice in this text. In this case, it was the future tense. I bolded/color coded the grammatical structure in the text so learners knew where to draw their attention. If I said "tell me what you notice" there are any number of problems that could arise. This assures that learners are focusing on certain words and have a better chance of co-constructing the tense. In a normal class I would then have learners think-pair-share and begin to co-construct how this tense is formed, when we use the form, what happens in yo forms, are there any patterns, what irregulars do you notice? In an online format that can still be done but it's going to be altered. Here's what I post in Google Classroom to get the conversation started. I would prefer to put this in the target language but it could be argued that in an online format, English might make sense as well. These are sentence frames that students need to complete to talk about how the tense is used, what patterns they notice, etc. Students first fill out these sentence starters on their own. From there, they can see their classmates responses and must comment on each other's answers talking about similarities and differences in what they noticed.
In the next step, you have a list of student observations and you as the teacher can now use their words to co-construct the grammar. So if a student pointed out they noticed a certain pattern, you can screen shot that and put it in a Google Doc and say "yes this is the pattern to form the yo form of this new tense". If another student hypothesizes this tense is the future because they know resolutions are for the future the teacher can screen shot that and say "yes this is the future tense that we use to talk about what we will do. This is similar to how we make resolutions". Students essentially create their own guide to the new tense and the teacher acts as the guide who sorts through the information, presents it and fills in any gaps. The last stage is the extension phase. This is where the teacher designs tasks that allow learners to use the new grammar they just co-constructed and use it to communicate in relation to something related to the theme. Here's my step by step explanation for the PACE-like lesson: 1. Decide upon your targeted grammar point based on the communicative goals of your thematic unit 2. Find a resource or write a resource that incorporates the new grammar within the context of your theme/topic. Don't make the grammar too obvious 3. Provide learners with the text and interpretive activities to better understand the resource (this is the presentation phase) 4. Draw learners attention to the targeted grammar after they have finished the reading (this is the attention phase) 5. Post a question in Google Classroom with sentence starters for students to use so they can point out their observations. Have students write their own first and then comment on each other's work. (this is part of the co-construction phase) 6. Screen shot posts that talk about how to use the tense, how to form it, what patterns they notice, what irregular verbs they notice. Post these in a Google Doc and fill in any knowledge gaps or information students may have missed. (this is another part of the co-construction phase) 7. Provide extension activities for learners to use the new grammar in the context of your thematic/topical unit (this is the extension phase) As many teachers have pointed out on Twitter, providing comprehensible input for students right now is a struggle that we are all working through as best as possible. In terms of input as grammar, Structured Input is a great method that works to either reinforce a grammar point or introduce it through discovery. See this post about what Structured Input is. Moving this idea to an online format, I've been thinking a lot about those ridiculous quizzes you take online when you're super bored (kind of like right now). You know, the ones that are like "what kind of friend are you?" "where is your dream vacation?" "what kind of vegetable are you?" No matter how odd they are, we still find ourselves clicking away and answering the questions. This can be an awesome opportunity for Structured Input. Here's how it works. First, you'll pick a silly question related to your theme/topic that will actually engage learners. You'll also create a scale or some kind of results page for students so they know that when they finish the survey/quiz they will be learn the answer to that question. Next, you'll write out your statements. Here's where the grammar comes in to play. Choose your targeted structure and write all of your statements with that targeted grammar. Notice how the ones above are set up. If you're a Spanish speaker, you'll notice a few things:
The best part of Google Forms is that it provides you with a great set of graphs and data that you can use for further discussion. These graphs are great ways to extend the conversation so that students can then talk about their answers, analyze the class results, draw conclusions, etc.
Click here for the template I used that you can modify and create when you make a copy. Here's my step by step guide to creating one of these: 1. Create a Google Form 2. Decide on your catchy question based on the topic/theme you are working with. Also bare in mind the targeted grammar 3. Decide how you will score the results 4. Write out as many questions as you want using the targeted grammar structure •Remember to keep it simple. One verb tense. One verb form. One subject pronoun •Remember to avoid subject pronouns •Remember to avoid time markers like yesterday, tomorrow, normally 5. Make the Google Form a quiz in the settings in the upper right hand side. 6. Decide how many points each question is worth and choose the right answers |
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