77. Teaching Second Languages in Middle School with Ashley Mikkelsen

Brittany 0:00

Hola como estas Senora Ellie

Ellie 0:23

hola Brittany, estoy muy bien. Thank you for asking.

Brittany 0:27

Welcome to The Teaching Toolbox Podcast. I'm Brittany and I'm here with Ellie

Ellie 0:33

hola again

Brittany 0:36

Today we are here with a very special guest, Ashley Mikkelsen of Señorita Spanish fame, to discuss the importance of teaching languages in middle school. Ashley is a secondary Spanish teacher from North Dakota. She's currently on a break from classroom life to be home with her littles, but she is looking forward to going back when all the munchkins are older. She started out teaching what she calls a sample platter class in sixth and seventh grades, where students got to try out French, German, Latin, and Spanish before teaching Spanish 1, 1b, and 2 to 8th through 12th grades. She blogs and shares resources at senoritaspanish.com - that's S, R T, A spanish.com

Ashley 1:26

Hola,

Ellie 1:27

You know that sample platter sounds really cool. I wish we would have had something like that when I was in junior high, it wasn't middle school then, but junior high, because I think we started our languages in ninth grade, which was still junior high, and we just picked one.

Ashley 1:40

Yeah, I think it was a really nice way for the students to get a feel for how the languages might happen and what they might like about them, before they had to pick like a course of action. I will say that the downside to it is that it is incredibly rare to find a teacher who is fluent in four languages in order to teach them, let alone a whole district full of us. So it was very difficult, especially, you know, we're going to talk about some teaching methods in a little bit here. But my French, I describe as confused Spanish, my German was like a week long summer camp when I was in third grade, and my Latin is, I'm Catholic, so you know, so there's a little bit of that, but it was a really, really really fun class to teach, and I really liked starting my career with that.

Ellie 2:23

Well, let's talk about some stats and facts. First off, the top five languages spoken in the world are Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, English, Hindi, and Bengali. Yet I know that we were offered to learn Spanish, French and German in middle school. Are those still the main classes? Or what are the hot foreign languages these days?

Ashley 2:45

So this is something that's like, super dependent on where you are and what your school can sustain, both in hiring and in just numbers for class sizes. So it's not uncommon to also see Latin, Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, Italian, even some native languages are becoming included in offerings, which is really cool to see.

Brittany 3:03

My parents made me take Latin in high school. It wasn't offered at middle school, and that's when we started foreign languages. And I was doing very well in Spanish, I took Spanish for three years and was excelling at it, but then they all of a sudden made me take Latin, and I hated it. I actually dropped out after one semester. The only word I remember is agricola, which is farmer. And I got a three in character for my bad attitude in Latin, which meant I had to do a study hall, a fourth study hall, while all my friends had a off period and got to go outside and hang out and stuff. So I was very angry.

Ellie 3:47

Sidetrack,

Ashley 3:48

when those memories come out, man.

Brittany 3:51

What is the best way to teach a second or a third language, or does it depend on the language? So there's a little bit of flexibility depending on the language. But the short answer is that we learn language when we receive input that we mostly understand. This is called comprehensible input. So the best way is to deliver comprehensible input to your students. But it's not really that simple, of course. So different factors can affect how much input your student receives. One of those things is like affective filter, kind of like what you're talking about with attitude. If students are tired, if students are hungry, all of that's going to affect that learning, and that happens in language classes as well. But you can also see the type and the source of input affecting how well students acquire the language. So if you're going to kind of reframe that, you can say that not all input is created equally, so just because it's getting language in front of them, it doesn't mean that they're gonna absorb it, and that absorption process varies. And I think that's something that most teachers just kind of know, right? Like, if you put on a movie in Spanish, and students are like snoozing at their desks, they're not getting Spanish. Obviously, they're, they're clunked out. I think we all know engagement matters, right? So there is such a thing as optimal comprehensible input, and some of those factors include comprehensibility, obviously, but also how compelling it is. And I think a lot of us bring that as engagement, right? We can see that as well as repetitive, which feels really weird to say that comprehensible, repetitive, and engaging. You hear engaging and repetitive, and you're like, those are two different things. But really something that you have to think about is you can't just hear something or see something once and get it like magically in your brain, right? If you think about a baby who's learning language they go through. I mean, most babies go through almost a year, if not more than a year, before they start producing language themselves, and some of that is right, their mouth developing and growing and that sort of stuff, but their brain needs that time to be hearing the language from those around them before they're able to start outputting. So if you think about, okay, babies go through a long time, many, many hours of input multiple times. That's that repetitiveness, and then going back to the whole snooze fest, watching a movie thing, right? If we don't have a kid's attention, that inputs not compelling, they're not going to be interested in processing it, right? That input they need to be able to like, be paying attention to it. Otherwise, it's just in one ear out the other, and nothing's happening to acquire it in their brains. That's a lot to say that - probably like, whoa.

Ellie 6:32

It makes total sense, though.

Ashley 6:34

It really does, when you think about what we know about just seeing kids learn language naturally. Oh, you can see how that can be applied in the classroom. So that's a lot a lot of research to say that input needs to be comprehensible. It can't just be like, blah, blah, you know, like the Charlie Brown teacher sound,

Ellie 6:50

yeah, yeah.

Ashley 6:51

That's not gonna fly. They need it more than once, and if they're not interested, they're not gonna get it. And there's some great research on that out there. If you are a like research reader, if that's something that you know lights your lights, your fire will links them for you.

Ellie 7:05

Yeah, we'll put those in the show notes.

Brittany 7:07

It's a lot similar to like math or anything like that, where it's spiral, it has to keep coming back up for it to sink in. So I know you teach Spanish. What are your favorite methods to instruct middle schoolers on the idioma de Espanol? I think I said that right language of Spanish?

Ashley 7:27

So just something that I want to make sure we're clear on before I dive into this, just because it's really commonly misunderstood, it's that comprehensible input, like that stuff that I was talking about, is stuff we want to deliver to our students, but it's not necessarily like a teaching method or a style of teaching - like so many times you hear people start to think about comprehensible input in their classes, and they are like, Okay, I want to get started with comprehensible input. I promise you, you are already giving your students CI, otherwise they would not be getting a thing right? If you're speaking to your class in Spanish and they understand you that's CI. But we can start talking about ways to make it more comprehensible, more engaging, more purposeful, in that repetitiveness that you can deliver to them. So let's talk about just some different ways that you can do that. So many times people want to get started with CI, but they see people like putting on plays or acting out scenes or doing these, like super high energy activities that are very like teacher centered. And that's not everyone, right? Like, teachers are different. We're all different people. We all have different gifts. We're all just different styles, right? Of teaching. And you think even from a student perspective, one classroom you'd walk into would be like this and the other classroom to walk into, and you knew what to expect, because that was what that teacher was like. So if you're a teacher and you're seeing all these people doing these very high energy things, just know that there's tons of ways to deliver CI. There's not one right way to do it. So hopefully that helps that become less stressful. But since you asked, like, my favorite ways, my personal favorite ways to deliver CI to my students include a daily startup class routine, and this is something that I would describe, kind of like circle time in a preschool classroom or kindergarten classroom. If you think like they come in, we talk about how they are, we talk about what day of the week it is and what they have going on that day. And we also talk about the weather just and this is very brief. It's not like this huge 45 minute conversation about what day is it today? Because that's boring, right? Nobody loves to do that every single day. So this is very short. The only thing that makes that kind of stretch longer for me is when I mentioned like the day of the week and what they have going on that day. That's a great opportunity to make those connections and make those relationships build even stronger in your classes, because it's so fun to hear them say, like, Oh, it's my birthday today, or I have a game today, or we have a concert tonight, or, you know, and then those other pieces of language come in naturally, because they want to share about what's going on, right? So that's awesome. And then the next day, you can be like, how was your whatever, you know, so then. I also like to do different routines for each day of the week. And I call these daily routines, but it's really like a once a week kind of thing. So on Mondays, we start with a weekend chat, and that is exactly what it sounds like. It means that we chat about the weekend. And this is actually a really great way to start introducing past tenses to students who, you know, kind of traditionally, you might think that, Oh, we don't learn past tense until, like Spanish two or the end of Spanish one, but really, you can start kind of trickling that in purposefully, by getting them to share about what they've done. So that can be a really fun way to just kind of sneak some of that in there.

That's awesome. I love that.

I just love it. I also like to do what's called free voluntary reading, or FVR. Sometimes people call it something else, because you know, if you tell students we're going to do free voluntary reading, they're like, this is not free, nor is it voluntary. I suppose I'm reading. You're like, okay. But basically they pick up something that they want to read, and they read it for however many minutes you're working on. And that gets into like, reading stamina. And there's all sorts of stuff that happens with that routine, but basically, we want them to encourage that love of reading in the language, because that's a great source of input. On Wednesdays, I like to do what's called Música miércoles, which, if you are not a Spanish speaker, just means music Wednesdays. And this is from another blogger. Her name is Allison. She blogs over at Mis Clases Locas. But the fun thing about this routine is that you're introducing them to music from all over the world, from different artists and different genres, and then you just talk about it. And you're just saying, like, Hey, do you like this song? Or do you know, what did you think about it? And sometimes we do things like, you know, if the music video is set in a city around the world, we might say, you know, where is that city? Might do a little bit of geography, we might talk about where the artists are from. I'm big on making sure they know where the countries are, because it drives me absolutely crazy when I'm like, Okay, this artist is from Peru, and they're like - I really like to kind of sneak in those geography moments there, just to, you know, my own pet peeves. And then on Thursdays, I do what's called special person interviews. And this is created by Bryce headstrom. He also blogs and writes online, but the gist is it's almost like again, back to that preschool time where you have a person come up and they have kind of a time in front of class to share, right? If you're thinking about show and tell. I use this to really work on some of those novice skills. Because some of those novice skills include talking about like yourself, your likes, your dislikes, your you know, activities that you do, your family, those kinds of things. So I structure mine very, very, very scaffolded, which is to say there's a ton of visual vocabulary support on the screen. So say I ask them, like, how old are you? I will point to the screen and say Are you? And then I give them, you know, like, we all have a general age range for our students, so there might be, like, five options on the board, but I'll read the numbers and point to them, and then I'll help scaffold the answer back, you know, back and forth.

Nice.

And I always love to start this routine, because this routine, because this is something that can be kind of scary, right, especially if it's like, first day of Spanish one. You're pulling them up there, and they're like - Try and find an admin or another staff member who has some clout with the kiddos. And I have them come be a special guest, so they do the exact same routine that my students will do in the, you know, coming weeks. And I show them how, like this teacher or this principal or this whomever who doesn't speak Spanish, either can be successful. And I walk them through, like how I hold their hand through the answer. And we all hear about them, and that really kind of sets the tone for it's not so scary to be in front of their classmates doing this thing. And they, you know, think it's funny to see so and so in front of the class. So on Fridays, we're finally to Friday, we do either a movie talk or a picture talk. And this kind of brings it back to when I was saying, like, throw on a movie in Spanish, but then they all fall asleep. Well, if you think about Spanish, one students and input needing to be comprehensible. If you just play a movie for them, they're not going to understand it. That's way too high of language for them, right? So when you think about Movie Talk or picture talk, what this strategy is is that you use a visual, like a movie or a picture, and you the teacher, are providing the input in terms of, like, you're describing what's happening on the screen. You're pausing, and you're asking them, you know, do you think this is going to happen next? Do you think that's going to happen next? Oh, no. How do they feel? What's, you know, like, those sorts of things. And you're really just using that as the talking point, but not the source of the language. So that way you can make sure that you're, you know, leveling up or leveling down, or whatever you want to do. And the nice thing about this is, like so many teachers are departments of one, and they teach, you know, however many preps. Like, maybe they teach 6 7 8 , or maybe they teach K through eight. Like, that's an insane prep load, right?

Wow, yeah.

Sometimes when you're doing things like this, it's nice to just plan. One thing, like, pick out one movie and use it all the way across your levels, because you can just tweak that language so easily. Like, Oh, do you see red? Do you see blue? Who in the classes wearing red today? You know? Like, that's, I mean, I don't know that sounds really simple, but it that is, it doesn't have to be crazy.

It's all wonderful, though. Like, these ideas are so exciting. I'm like, I want to teach language.

It makes so much more sense now, like, what my Spanish teacher was trying to accomplish,

yeah,

To me, I was, you know, like, why are we doing a movie, or why are we doing music, you know, but now, being an adult and hearing you talk about it. It makes more sense now what they were trying to accomplish.

I had an amazing Spanish teacher when I was in high school. I absolutely loved her, and she started every day with just talking to us. She would just tell us a story, and we would like, as students, we would kind of play a game like, who can keep Senora talking the longest? As I got older, and I studied this, and I started learning about this. I was like, she's a freaking genius. And then I had the honor of working with her, and as I was like, we were started to become co workers, and this relationship changed, and I was talking with her about this, she was like, I don't know what to do with this. Like, this feels a lot. This is overwhelming. This is new. And I was like, You are so good at this, you just read this in your classes. I don't even want to, like, touch anything that you do, because you are so so good. Like, she's just such a natural, like, storyteller. And that's really what like right language is about communication. And so she would get us involved in her stories, and we would share about our whatever we were doing that day, you know? And sometimes class would literally just be us talking, and as we leave, the students would all be, like, yeah high five, and I'm sure she was like, yes, it's really great. So let's talk about some things that aren't necessarily like daily routines, but things that you can build into, like your lesson plan and your components and use throughout your units, throughout your chapters, however you're setting up your curriculum. So first, I really can't not talk about reading, because when we're thinking about sources of input, reading is so good, right? It's King you know this as any language teacher knows, reading, reading, reading, right? So some of my favorite ways to do reading with novice Spanish learners are gallery walks, because it can take what would look like a packet of reading and would just feel so scary to them if you just split it up into those chunks that are a lot more bite sized, and then add that movement piece where now they're going to be up, they're walking around the room, they're visiting a reading, they're doing something with it, right? Classroom management, you can't just set them loose. Or at least, I've never been able to just set them loose. And then, you know, you're pulling it all back together. And before they realize that, wow, they just read eight pages of Spanish and showed that they understood it. But it didn't feel like that, you know, or however much it could be 14, 15, pages of Spanish when they're all said and done,

wow,

but because we split it up and they moved and they looked they didn't even realize, right, that was so many paragraphs, but they feel really successful, and that is so key for them to feel like, oh my gosh, I did this. Other things that I like to do are to do short stories with them, especially ones that I've written, because you can really there's this concept in comprehensible input, and delivering comprehensible input to your classes, where you want to shelter vocabulary, but not shelter grammar. And what that means is, and what what you might think of that is, right, if you were in Spanish, you maybe took Spanish from somebody who taught with a textbook, maybe you would receive a list of vocabulary that was like, 75 to 100 some words long, you know, you had to translate them. And then there was like, this is the grammar focus for the topic, right? So if it was like, you got a huge list of activities and like, frequency words and whatever. And then you learn how to use gustar and say, I like to do list of activities how often, right? And if you think about that, that's asking students to just shove all these words into their brains, use them for a little bit, and then they're gone, right, which we already kind of talked about, that doesn't work all that great. So instead, if we kind of flip the script on that and we work on purposeful structures and high frequency verbs, then they can master saying things like, I like, I go, we go, you go, you know, I have. There are what we call the super seven. There's also the Sweet 16, but those are just referring to chunks of language where, if you have these verbs down, you can basically communicate anything you want. So really, really, really nailing down those in whatever tense you want, right? Because we're using natural language. We want to talk about yesterday, that's fine. You want to talk about, you know, two weeks into the future, totally fine. But we're going to try and keep this vocabulary to a really manageable process, because they can always get a little bit more vocabulary here and there. And as they get more skilled, they're going to be able to circumlocute, which is, you know, that's so so, so important. And if you're not, like, familiar with that phrase, or what that is, is, if you've ever played a game like taboo or catch phrase, and you can't say the word for the game. Those things are so good for circumlocution, because you have to talk around the word, right? So if I say um, that okay, I The other day I saw um, you know, like the red cars that go really fast and they're really big, and they help fire, the fire helping cars that go like, Do you know what I'm trying to say? Yes. I don't need the word for fire truck, because if you're talking to somebody who knows what that is and knows what that word is, what's going to happen is they're going to go, oh, a fire truck. And you're like, yes, thank you. And then you keep going,

but you'd be out because you says, Help Fire.

That's true. That's true. But like, you get the idea, right? So helping them, kind of like structure it, and understanding that you don't need 300 vocabulary words per chapter. Let's you know, bring it down. Okay, so circling back to we were with short stories, it's like, really thinking about how you can shelter the vocabulary so it's not like, oh my gosh, so much, but you can also personalize that vocabulary for your students, right? Because it makes it so much more compelling, so much more engaging when you're talking about things that they are interested in. So like, up here in North Dakota, it is not uncommon for me to bring in, like, a story about a hockey player or ice or, you know, skating or whatever, because that's something that lots of people around here live and breathe - hockey. So we would talk about that. When I was in Illinois, I didn't know a single student who played hockey, which was, I'm like, Well, okay, but you know what I mean? Just being able to shift those kind of details for who you have in front of you makes it so much more compelling and engaging for them. And then this kind of ties right into that next kind of strategy that I was going to share with you is storytelling and story asking. So in a short story, you might write it ahead of time, print it, and do all sorts of reading activities with them. In storytelling and story asking, this becomes more of, kind of think of like Mad Libs, where you're co creating the story as a class. And this is where things get really creative, really engaging, super fun, you know, because you might say, Okay, class, we have a person who, like, tell me this person, tell me this person's name, and they'll, you know, throw out a name, okay, tell me what this person is like. And so now we're describing this person. We all get this character formed in our heads, and then we're like, okay, person is going to and you like, you can kind of frame the story, but you also, you're just asking for input. And if you have set in those structured chunk of actions that you know that you want to work with, you can kind of give them those fill in the blanks for nouns, or like, Okay, were they very tall or just a little bit taller? Were they really short or, you know, and you can kind of build those things together. And then this is probably my favorite part of storytelling, story asking, if you have multiple class periods, you're gonna wind up with multiple versions of the same story that is just different enough that if a student picks up a story from the other class period, they're going to be able to get it right, because that formula is there, but they're going to have fun reading it, because they're going to be like, you know, what did second hour say? Who had the best story as a class like, they love that. And then those become a great resource for that free, voluntary reading time, because that's easy reading they can pull off the shelf and be successful with. And you didn't have to pay a billion dollars to build your classroom library. Not that I don't love classroom libraries. It's just, you know, thinking,

right, still, yeah

think about ways you can reduce, reuse, recycle,

love it.

Wow.

I can't leave this out when we're talking about favorite strategies, especially when we're thinking about middle school is movement based activities, because, right, as a middle school teacher, you they have wiggles, right? So much more than like, for some reason, like, they hit sophomore in high school and like, they're still a little wiggly, but it's a lot less than your sixth grader, you know, like so I wanted to share some of my favorite like, get the wiggles out activities, and I did already mention one, so I'm just gonna remind you that this fits into this category too is gallery walks, so where you split up the readings. They go all over the room. They're walking around reading. That movement is so good for them. I also like to do an activity called running dictation, and I use and you might not be able to see me, but running in heavy air quotes because Middle School - quick walk dictation, whatever you call it, what they do there is they're working in pairs or in groups of three. One student goes out to the hallway or to a shared space. They read a short sentence from the wall and they memorize it, or they try their best, and the sentence is in Spanish. So then they're going to come back into the classroom and to their partner, and they're going to say that sentence out loud to their partner, and that partner is going to record it. And sometimes they have to do, like, a couple of trips where they're like, I forgot the word, and then they run back out and you're like, Okay, or they walk quickly back. But that one is, it's just so fun. I always have them switch jobs halfway through, but it's a great way to, like, get movement, but it's not your whole class,

yeah,

if you have a really like class, you know, all sorts of stuff along those same lines. My like one of my all time favorite activities, I call Corre en círculos, which, if you are not a Spanish speaker, this is called running in circles. But again, heavier quotes on the running basically, what that is is it's a scavenger hunt where students are going to start at a piece of paper around the wall, and they're going to look at a prompt or look at a question or look at a phrase or even look at an image on the bottom of the page, and they're going to write it in Spanish or write it in English, and then they're gonna go find that answer on a different sheet of paper around the room, and they're gonna just keep doing that until they get back to where they started. And that's the circle, right? A circle part, because if they do it right, they went in a big circle all the way around the room. And you can do that in so many ways, like that is so flexible for so many things, but I love it, and then last but not least, which I don't I feel like you maybe don't associate it with the getting the wiggles out, but stations, I love stations. And they, you really do think they do have movement, because every seven minutes or so, whatever your rotation is at, they're gonna get up and move to a new spot. And that kind of stretch break that's really purposeful can be really helpful for them,

definitely.

Wow. I'm just blown away by all of these like activities. They sound so engaging and just perfect for middle schoolers who have all that energy, and they love that time for some social interactions, giving them some time to talk, and everything that's I'm just blown away. It's amazing. Are there blog posts or anything that people can go to to find some of this information, and we can like list things in the show notes, but you have blog posts that people could could search out yet.

I have a blog post on every single one of those things I just mentioned. I also have YouTube videos on them. If you're a person who would like to, like create examples of things in action instead, I'm over on YouTube sometimes I know videos help people too.

So yeah, awesome. So we'll link all of that up all those places in our show notes. So another thought, like, I took four years of Spanish in high school, like, you know, I took Advanced Placement and whatever, and then I took another year in college, but since then, I really have not used the language since I student taught, you know, I student taught second grade, and I used it then, and that was, like, over 30 years ago, so I don't remember a whole lot. So I'm sure there are a lot of people like me out there, parents, perhaps, who don't remember much of the language that they learned, and they don't really expect that their kids are gonna learn and remember a language. What are your thoughts about that? When people are like, Yeah, whatever.

This is so hard, because it kind of happens in two things kind of happen, right? So if a parent comes into your room or a guardian comes into your room at back to school night, and I like to do back to school night with, like, a demo lesson of what my classroom feels like. And so then usually they leave the room being like, that was a lot of Spanish, but I understood it. How did I understand that? And you're like, bye, you know, whatever. And they are usually like, I remember bano and cerveza and, like, I took, you know, exactly, like, four years in high school, and I don't know, you know, whatever. And you're like, okay, but I bet you didn't just have lessons like this, where you're like, there's just Spanish coming into you, and your brain is going, oh, you know. So it just becomes this really weird situation where they will both say, like, I don't remember a thing from my Spanish, and then they see what you're doing, and they're like, What are you doing? That's not school, like, that's not how we did Spanish. So this becomes really weird because you're like, Well, you just told me you took four years of Spanish, and you don't remember a thing. And then you're looking at what I'm talking about here in terms of how we teach Spanish, and what they're going to expect to see in my classroom, and they're like, well, that's, you know? And you're like, yes, it's not like what you did - what you did not work for you,

Right? Right? Yeah.

So that becomes really frustrating sometimes, because some parents put those two together and they go, Oh, that's cool. Let's see some changes. And some parents look at those two things and they're like, why would you do anything different? This is how we do, you know. And so that becomes kind of difficult. Then you have to really reinforce, like, this is research based. This is what we are doing. This is why we are doing it. This is how your student is going to be successful. I do tons of parent communication. I send home like, I have graphic organizers that are like, this is my job. This is your student's job. This is what I want to see from them. This is what they will see from me and just like, non stop talking about how, like, I know this is different than what you've seen before. It's for a good reason, I promise you know. And then just really, like, okay, then we have our first conference of the year, and I bring out their students work like, we'll do timed writing at the beginning of the year. We'll do timed writing like, right before conferences. And I'll say, look, two months ago, this is what your student wrote. This is what your student wrote here. And more like, very frequently, it will double or triple in length, even in that short amount of time. And then, you know, I don't know how your schools do it, but our schools will often have students come with to conferences, and then I'll hand them that that paper, and I'll say, tell your grown up. I always call them their grown ups. Tell your grown up what this says, and then they read them and translate it for them. And their grown ups are always like, Oh, that's a lot of Spanish. And I'm like, Yes, like, the whole proof is in the pudding kind of thing really applies here, because they're hesitant, they're not sure that this is great, or they're even like combative sometimes. And so having this explanation and referring back to research and referring back to sources, and how this, you know, all of that sort of thing, where you can really back yourself up and have faith in your knowledge as the expert in the classroom really makes things so much easier, but also being able to be like, Hey, student, show your stuff. Like, let's do this. Because you're like, you're awesome. And I want your grown up to know that. Like, wait, I mean, they're the grown up knows that,

but in this way,

yeah,

so I would imagine at that point you'd probably be getting a lot more buy in from the grown ups,

it really depends, some Yes, and sometimes even from students that you know, as we're talking about that kind of combativeness, sometimes students are coming in from another school that hasn't, you know, made these shifts, or they had an older sibling who did it this way, or, you know, it doesn't feel like school - very often, if they come into the classroom and then they were just in a class where they were, you know, watching the teacher, taking notes, doing things. And it's not like I'm saying other, you know, every other classroom in the world is doing this. But if you think about a traditional school day, they might walk into the Spanish classroom and be like, what? There's music, there's running, there's jumping, there's we're just talking. I don't, I don't necessarily have my kids take notes on things that doesn't feel school like. So sometimes that's almost the biggest hurdle here, is that, like, okay, they see that you're doing something different. They see that it's working, but they're like, but you know, where's your this? And you're like, Well, you don't do that. And they're like, that's not school. And sometimes that shift happens, and sometimes they drop your class or request a different teacher next, you know, the next time around. And you know what? The thing about this is that when you think about language learning over the past you know, several decades in our country, how many adults now were successful in how language used to be taught? What's the narrative? It's always, oh, I took four years of Spanish and like, I don't really remember anything. So if you think about now, we really want to encourage that retention, both in the program, but also in the language in their brains, and just actually being able to communicate. And so if you see like, Okay, well, we maybe lose a student, because this doesn't feel like school, but we retained like 95% of our students in the program, and they went through it because they were so much more successful because it wasn't rules and grammar and memorizing and that, right? There's always people who are successful with that. Many of the people who were successful went on to be language teachers, because, right, we did it. And so it's hard sometimes to see a teacher who's still teaching that way and tell them like, well, there's other ways that you could do this, and you're going to have higher retention, and there have been really cool studies on how switching to CI affects program growth. I'm gonna get off tangent here, but the idea is that somebody might be frustrated that you're not teaching classes where you're doing grammar, you're doing notes, you're doing a quiz, you're doing a test that is going to be a much smaller percentage of people who might leave your program, who might stop learning the language, than the people who you lose when you do grammar, vocabulary, heavy testing of the like this sort of strategy, instead, that attrition rate is so much higher, right? So if I were gonna pick and choose like, I'm okay with saying bye to like one or two students who don't feel like fun is cool in Spanish class, for whatever reason.

I mean I would like it,

I will say those students are pretty few and far between.

So is this considered like an immersive program?

No. And this, this wording gets really tricky, because there are, like, certain things that have to be ticked off in boxes to be called an immersion program or not. And I would just say, like, it is just a focus on using and delivering comprehensible input to your students. And actually, I would argue that it's not an immersive language, because English is not not used. That was a terrible way to say that we're talking about research is - Our goal in the language classroom is to spend 90% of your time in the target language, which some people hear that they're like, that's a lot, and you're like, but that leaves 10% for that English clarification, or the L1 clarification, or, you know, whatever scaffolding support you need, and that tool can be used so purposefully to make sure the input is comprehensible. Sometimes you feel like, okay, I'm trying to get them to understand Spanish. I'm like, miming, I'm playing charades with them, and they're just not getting it. Stop. Stop spending 25 minutes acting out this word. Write the word in English on the board. Say it in English. Say the word again. Move on, you know? So I would say immersion is a different style of teaching, like they might, you know, be focusing on comprehensible input, because we know that that's so good, but in a traditional setting of second language teaching, I think it's a little bit different there. When you know that you have that English as a strategy and a tool to pull out and say, Okay, are we on the same page? Yeah, all right, here we go again. You know that kind of thing?

Okay, okay, thank you. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Ashley, this was amazing, so much information, jam packed. You gave us so many awesome ideas for teaching languages, and this conversation makes me want to go do my Duolingo and relearn Spanish all over again, or maybe try a different language. Maybe I can do something all new. We hope you heard some great tools from Ashley to add to your teaching toolbox. And Ashley, where can our listeners find you? Most often I'm over on Instagram at senorita underscore Spanish. I blog at senorita spanish.com and if you are a video watcher, I am on YouTube. I know sometimes it's just easier when I can show what I'm talking about when it comes to like an activity or a game or that sort of thing. So if you're somebody who likes visuals, over on YouTube,

awesome. Check all of those things out. And if you enjoyed today's discussion, please share the podcast and our friend Ashley, with your teacher bestie. We'll talk to you soon.

Bye.

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