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)
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