Spanish class with Adriana Ramirez
First impressions from Semiahmoo Secondary School, Vancouver
So I made it to Vancouver and after a few days of jet-lag, I had my first day observing lessons in Semiahmoo Secondary School. This is my first blog post since arriving and I’ll be keeping a journal of my reflections throughout this journey.
First a little bit about Semiahmoo Secondary. It’s a state secondary school of around 1600 students located in Surrey, just south of Vancouver city. The students there are in grades 8-12 (roughly 13-18 years old) and students have the option of taking the International Baccalaureat in their final year. I’m told this isn’t typical for every school, but usually one school in each district will offer the IB. It’s also interesting that state schools here offer the IB – back in the UK it’s usually only independent (private) schools that offer this exam.
Semiahmoo Secondary School, South Surrey, Vancouver
The school has a very relaxed feel about it and I was really struck by how calm it felt when I first arrived. The student body is really diverse and quite representative of this multicultural area of Vancouver. Here in Surrey there’s a large Asian community, with lots of students with Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian backgrounds. South Surrey has one of the biggest Punjabi communities outside India, and feels culturally and linguistically very rich.
So why did I choose to come to this seemingly very normal secondary school in the suburbs of Vancouver? The reason: I wanted to come and learn from Spanish teacher called Adriana Ramirez. Originally from Colombia but now living in Canada, Adriana is well known throughout North America and beyond for her curriculum books and graded novels. Adriana is a big advocate of comprehensible input in languages teaching. The term “comprehensibile input” comes from applied linguistics and refers to the language we understand through listening and reading. Second language acquisition scholars have different views about what’s important when it comes to learning a second language, but pretty much all of them agree that comprehensible input is indispensible if we are to successfully acquire a second language.
Adriana Ramírez
How does Adriana’s Spanish classes differ from the “traditional” language class? Well, I would say, quite radically! First, there is a lot of input from the teacher throughout the entire lesson. I always remember being told to “watch your teacher talk” in my teacher training, the idea being that too much talk from the front can lead to students switching off or becoming disengaged. As trainee teachers we were encouraged to give some input at the start of the lesson and then get students onto some kind of “task” (e.g. cloze exercise, grammar drill or comprehension questions).
In Adriana’s classes, she gives a lot of input from the front, yet the students are completely engaged throughout the lesson. She maintained their focus by rapid-fire, structured questions, choral responses and cold calling. The questions serve both as a means of checking understanding but also as linguistic input. The students hear the language modelled repeatedly and key vocabulary and structures are repeated many many times.
Second – the lack of explicit grammar instruction in English or in the target language. Rather than explaining verbs and tense in a declarative way, Adriana was constantly modelling the verbs and tenses she wants her students to acquire. She reinforced this procedural knowledge by using a few verb charts on the wall of the class and she would often point to a particular verb when students might need some extra support. So rather than explaining grammar, Adriana uses grammar. Very occasionally, if there was a grammatical issue that needed explaining, Adriana would do a “grammar commercial” where she very succinctly explained what something meant. However, she wouldn’t dwell on this or do exercises to practise this particular grammar point. There were no grammar worksheets in sight!
Thirdly Adriana made extensive use of a fictional story in the lesson that was accompanied by a silent animated video. Embedded reading is when you have three versions of a story or text: one basic version, one that is expanded with extra language and a third that is expanded with even more detail. It’s a good way of scaffolding reading, and also of differentiating for pupils of varying ability. First Adriana read the story along with the animation, stopping every couple of seconds. The animation aided comprehension of the written text and Adriana asked lots of questions in Spanish. The students then did pair work tasks such as “ping-pong reading”, taking turns to translate the story line by line.
Milton and Hopwood (2023) emphasise the importance of growing a large vocabulary in order to communicate in another language. This has has gone out of fashion in the UK, particularly in England, where the new GCSE is based on the highest frequency words in a language. Milton and Hopwood are critical of this trend and advocate for a planned approach to learning vocabulary that enables students to grow a large lexicon. Reading stories is an excellent way to expand vocabulary in a way that is engaging for students. The content just doesn’t compare with the dry expositional texts you’ll find in textbooks like Stimmt or Studio, and the number of lexical items students meet is much greater than that of a typical textbook text.
I was extremely impressed by the level of proficiency this class had attained in a short space of time. They’ve only been learning Spanish for three months, yet already students were responding spontaneously in Spanish. This is clearly because of the immersive experience students have in every lesson, as well as the sheer amount of input they get receive through reading in class.
In the coming days I’m hoping to write in more detail about some typical CI techniques such as embedded reading, MovieTalk and PictureTalk. Stay tuned!
References
Milton, J and Hopwood, O (2023). Vocabulary in the foreign language curriculum. Principles for effective instruction. London: Routledge