Mini Telenovela

       This program, Destinos, has been used in high school and community college classrooms for years to provide an interesting way for Spanish learners to experience the language and culture.The telenovela consists of 52 episode, each episode is 30 minutes long and begins with a two to four minute introduction and overview of the storyline. The first episode, however, takes nearly 12 minutes to introduce the story and its characters (and does so in English), but eventually continues in Spanish. The use of English is useful for beginner learners and also provides the viewer with background information that would be impossible to convey in simple Spanish.

      The stories are easy to follow for beginners and each episode includes a comprehension checklist for the students to answer. This is one place these videos could be used to get students speaking in the classroom. The teacher could pause the video (if watched in class) and elicit responses from students, or if the videos are assigned for homework, she could also invent her own comprehension questions to have the students respond to and share in class. Although the telenovela is obviously outdated, the storyline is still interesting and each episode ends in a cliffhanger, providing more opportunities for students to speak in class. The teacher could have the students write and perform alternate endings in groups or predict what might happen in the following episode.

     My sister told me that when she was in Spanish at the university level, her classes followed these episodes weekly. She says everyone really got engrossed in the plot and looked forward to Fridays when the class would get to watch the next episode.

Using Technology

     This website, maintained by RosettaStone, offers free language exchange for language learners, putting them in contact with native speakers and learners alike.  The site is easy and secure and once you have created a profile, you can choose from various language exchange options from e-mail and chat exchanges to video chat. I like that the site is monitored so that the users are really only allowed to share ideas in the target language, as opposed to using the site for help with homework or using it as a personal dating site. 

     Although most of these resources are best used by students individually, for classroom use, a teacher could assign the students to document one or two hours of chatting per week or even have them present to the class about some topics they discussed in chatting with native speakers and other learners.

     Students could also keep audio journals that document their progress. This website  offers good advice on recording your voice to make podcasts. They provide a list of free software that can be easily downloaded to record your voice on your computer. Using voice recordings could really be fun in the classroom, as students could make blogs  to keep up with over the course of the semester or year in which they can express what they have learned and present their podcasts to share with others. Voice recordings could also be used to involve students more in the classroom. The teacher could have the students create their own listening activities in groups for the rest of the class. If doing this, it’s probably a good idea to work with the students individually during office hours to make sure what they have chosen is appropriate and presented coherently. The possibilities of incorporating this sort of technology in the classroom are limitless.

Presentations and Commercials

This is the website of an Oberlin College Spanish teacher familiar with levels 1, 2 and 3 (beginner, intermediate, advanced) and it has some good suggestions as to how to go about organizing oral presentations in the classroom. I agree with the author that for lower levels, such activities like describing how to make something or telling the class about a trip are best. This gives the student the opportunity to practice speaking about something that is meaningful to him or her and is a great way to incorporate new vocabulary as well as practice new grammar and  verb tenses in a fluid discourse.

Although it might not be practical for community college learners, high school Spanish students could definitely benefit from some of the games suggested on this website. I especially like the Pictionary game and the “Who am I?” game to get students speaking in Spanish in fun ways.

Another good site that could be used to get students talking is a Dutch site for foreigners learning Spanish called Ver-taal. This video would be good for showing the students the imperative tense. This particular video is from Chile and communicates how people can prevent forest fires. The teacher could show this video in class and then have the students get into groups of three or four and create their own commercial. The assignment could be structured so that it either incorporates vocabulary the students have already learned or new vocabulary the teacher can provide, depending on the topic chosen for the commercials.

Youtube is also a good resource for short videos on various topics in Spanish that could serve as examples for presentations in the classroom. This in-flight movie provides an introduction to the city of Caracas, using simplified Spanish and vocabulary the students will likely be learning in the classroom. One activity the teacher could do with this is have the students work alone or in groups to create a video about their hometown or anywhere they have been. They could use this video as a model of some topics to include in their own presentations, as well as to get an idea of what kind of language is used when describing people and places.

Talking about their lives

This site on Spanish language and culture offers a reading of a poem, “Instantes”, that talks about what the author would do if given the chance to live his life over again. The site provides the text as well as the audio of the poem. This could be a good exercise to promote a discussion about what the students might change in their lives if allowed to do so. The activity could lead to great use of the conditional verb tense and “if” clauses, as well as allow students the opportunity to be creative with their language. A teacher could play this poem in class and assign students the task of creating their own personal poem to be read aloud the following class. 

Another link from this same website presents a receptionist at a hotel describing a scary experience that happened to her while she was working. This video is most appropriate for more advanced students as the speech is natural and no transcript is provided (although there are exercises for learners to fill in the blanks if they do so on their own).  In the classroom, a teacher could play this at the beginning of an activity in which the students will talk about a scary time in their own lives,  which could be done in small groups or in pairs. The clip focuses on the preterite and imperfect forms of the past tense and provides the students with an authentic example of how people relate stories in Spanish which could be used to help them create their own.

http://coerll.utexas.edu/spintx/
 Spanish in Texas website. Contains videos of Spanish speakers discussing their lives and the use of Spanish in their lives.

Teaching Speaking and Video Clips

This website, created by the National Capital Language Resource Center, provides suggestions about all aspects of teaching languages and is particularly geared towards college and university instructors. The site has a section dedicated to “Teaching Speaking” which can be found under the “Principles” tab on the left hand side of the page (The above link should take you straight to it). The site provides many good tips about both what the teacher should be doing in the classroom and what the students should be aware of when working on their oral proficiency.

The NCLRC lists resources (mostly books) and strategies for developing speaking activities. In this “Developing Speaking Activities” section, the site addresses the need for real-life, authentic communicative exercises in the classroom and provides description of and ideas for implementing specific activities. One example: information gap activities where students are partnered and must ask each other questions to get information from one another. The website also gives advice for creating role play and group discussion activities and provides very useful tips about how to implement these activities in the classroom.

Another website I've found provides great examples of native-like speech. This site is entitled Spanish Proficiency Exercises and could be used in the classroom to prompt discussions. It presents video clips of native speakers talking about different subjects ranging from describing physical characteristics to discussions about American business practices. The website was created by the department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas and in the site’s introduction, they make the point that their objective is to provide students with the necessary tools to be able to discuss the same topics themselves in Spanish. The site is well organized, presenting videos on 14 different topics for each of six levels of proficiency: Beginner, Intermediate A and B, Advanced A and B, and Superior. For each topic, there are five or six different speakers from different Spanish speaking countries who present their own view/experience about that topic.

In the classroom, these videos could be used to teach oral proficiency in a variety of ways and the activities could focus on different aspects of speaking. For instance, the teacher could play some videos in class, pointing out differences in pronunciation among speakers and then the activity could become more focused on accurate language production. The teacher might also assign these videos for homework and then have the students prepare a short speech about their own opinion/experience with the topic. The video clips could also provide good opportunities for group work, as some of the topics involve dialog and real-life scenarios like giving directions, talking on the phone, etc.

The videos are a great source of authentic language in that they provide the student with exposure to varying accents as well as themes, both great for prompting discussions. Although the website does provide a script in both Spanish and English for each video, there is the option to hide the script so that only the video plays. They also offer simplified versions of the videos, where the speakers talk slower and some slang is omitted. This would be useful for beginning speakers who might otherwise feel overwhelmed with so much spoken input.