Let's celebrate success!

https://goo.gl/photos/ZvJ23xgZM28AiXo58

Today as we enter the month of September and we slowly start to wave goodbye to summer, let the sun shine and let me share a success story using TPRS and comprehensible input online!

Back in April an ex Spanish student of mine contacted me because he wanted to learn French.

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Personalized questions in French: l'étoile du jour.

https://goo.gl/photos/QtQ95BFaxjMXP18X8

This morning, I was reading the Active learner blog post about "Café y conversación" and it inspired me to share about an authentic conversation I had last week with my French students. As mentioned in the post: "When we have authentic conversation about topics that students want to talk about,

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acquire28 acquisition33 answers8 authentic1 beginner10 Blogging2 compelling10 comprehensible41 comprehension31 conditional2 Education8 French20 if clauses1 IGCSE12 oral11 output10 personalized13 practice17 questions19 repetition11 repetitive5 speaking37 story34

How to develop fluency for an oral examination?

The speaking examination for the IGCSEs can be a stressful experience for our students as they are having to speak in the target language for 15 minutes and they are being recorded. It is therefore best to practice this experience often during class time. In the past I have used Audioboo so that my students could practice and review the general questions (which are a series of linked questions on two or three topics which students have covered in grade 9 and 10).

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Back to school with a song: mi persona favorita

I am back to school after a wonderful summer vacation and in order to get back into the swing of things, I found this catchy song which I played to my grade 8 and 10 classes:

As I mentioned in an earlier post,

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acquire28 acquisition33 answers8 communication7 comprehensible41 future1 input39 listening29 lyrics1 past5 personalized13 present3 questions19 Rio Roma1 skills24 song10 Spanish27 speaking37 structures6 TPRS34 vocabulary18 youtube17

Story script in Spanish

I am huge fan of the Michel Thomas method. The only thing that is bothering me is that it hugely relies on translation. I was trained to use the target language as much as possible in the classroom and my mentor taught me a few tricks to get the students to understand me in the target language like using lots of cognates.

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