Acquisition doesn't happen overnight but keep giving the rich, comprehensible inputs and it will happen. Trust the process, trust the research, trust your students. Remember, they need to build the system first before they can start to look more deeply at the components of that system. In Year 3 next year we will start to look more closely at grammatical accuracy, at writing and speaking for different audiences, in different tones. Remember Grant Boulanger's mantra "The less you force them to speak, the more they want to speak". and, it results in so much fantastic, impressive and fluent output. The books allow us to regularly discuss big themes, important topics and social justice issues. It allows children to acquire language naturally to learn about each other, about me and about the world. Just free writing.įlooding students with compelling, interesting, and most importantly, comprehensible inputs that centre on narratives and stories from our lives, our identities, our passions, our fears and our cultures. These entries are mostly done in class, with no dictionary or computer. Below are some of their most recent entries in their "Diario de Lectura". We have never done anything about the conditional tense I've never (explicitly) taught them 'debería, sería' etc. We don't do lists of vocabulary or regular high-stakes testing. They have had plenty of pop-up grammar explanations about the differences between "comió" and "ha comido" for example. We've maybe done two worksheets total across the two years that had a focus on accuracy. We have looked at one, after a student asked about the endings. In the two years, we've never ' done' or ' practised' a verb table. Since around 4 months into year 8 (their first year of Spanish), we have started almost every class with 5-10 minutes of silent reading. In those two years we have read 6 class novels and they've each read 10-20 other graded readers during their free voluntary reading time at the beginning of class. The students are aged 12-13 and have had approximately 2 hours Spanish per week, minus all the school holidays of course. My Year 9 class are now 4 weeks from the end of our second year together.
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