with comprehensible input!
The good thing about teaching with comprehensible input is that we don’t really worry about when we teach the various tenses. We can teach past tense in Spanish much earlier than a traditional curriculum. However, one of the areas of teaching with comprehensible input where I struggle is the idea that almost everything we teach is in the third person.
There was a girl/boy/animal. S/he lived in (blank). S/he was smart/funny/tall/short. S/he needed (something). S/he had a problem…
Right? This is the outline for most comprehensible input stories.
Students can tell me loads about other people, but they don’t know how to transfer that to talking about themselves. Yet middle school and high school students LOVE talking about themselves! And, in the real world, interpersonal communication requires students to talk about themselves! They want to talk about what they did –ahem–in the past tense! Therefore, if I want my students to be ready for the real world, how do I incorporate more first person narrative into my comprehensible input classroom?
While talking this over with my brilliant colleagues Carlos and Valentina, they suggested I introduce weekend chat. Start each Monday class with the question “What did you do this weekend?”
Getting started
First I needed to teach a mini unit on Spanish preterite to provide enough repetitions for students to be able to produce it on their own. Because comprehensible input classrooms rarely show students grammar or explicit conjugations, I only showed students several Spanish verbs in the past tense as vocabulary. You can see the complete list of the 12 verbs further down in the article, but here is a sample of our notes:
We took notes and practiced making statements. Next we played Quizlet live with the past tense verbs. This game can be played in person or remotely!
My students are reluctant to speak. So getting them to spill their guts about their weekend proved a little more challenging than I anticipated. Also, there is this crazy thing called Covid-19 going around and it’s currently -8º in Chicago. So to be fair, nobody is really doing anything.
To spice things up, I gave students pictures of famous people and cartoons and asked them to take the perspective of someone in the photo. By pretending they were someone else, they could more creatively talk about their weekend in the past tense.
Students had a lot of fun pretending to be someone else. When I asked them to read their favorite weekend update aloud to the group, they got really excited to act as if they were the character.
More stories in the past tense
The following day we did a game of running dictation, using a story we previously read about a video game playing giraffe. My students are hybrid, so I set up this game on Peardeck for the virtual students. You can read more about that here.
From there, I provided more repetition and comprehensible input by just writing a story each day about my wild life!
In my opinion, students were more engaged with these stories about my life than if I had written about someone else. Even though they knew the stories were ridiculous, they liked making predictions about what happened to me. And all the while they were receiving lots of repetitions of the first person verbs in the past tense! After they listened to my stories, they re-read and drew what happened to show comprehension. Eventually, I also asked them to write their own stories in the past tense and swap with another student to illustrate. This was also a lot of fun!
How to write your own stories
Lots of teachers tell me they are not creative enough to write their own stories in Spanish. When I say I wrote stories in the past tense about my wild life, here are some examples:
I went to Starbucks. I talked to the barista. I drank my coffee. I saw students from our school. I ran away.
I walked to my car. I saw a note. Oh no! Did I get a ticket? I hope I didn’t get a ticket! Phew, I didn’t get a ticket. I read the note. It was from my secret admirer. I went to see my secret admirer. Hooray!
None of these stories are very creative. However, they do use lots of repetitions of Spanish verbs in the past tense!
Even more practice in the past tense
We spent 6 days on this unit, practicing using the past tense in Spanish to talk about our own lives. Students were able to pick up the conjugation pattern, so if I gave them any other random verb, they could conjugate it in the past tense. Moving forward, we will start each Monday sharing highlights from our weekend. My plan is to have students write down 2-3 sentences and then call on individuals to share.
What other ways do you use to get kids talking about themselves?
