During this reflection series, I am noting an “AHA” moment from each day of Mike Peto’s 2024 Brazilian Portuguese Classes, which are available on his CI Master Class Site. 

 “AHA” Moment ~ Day 6: The Weekend Review in the Past Tense 

Today’s class started in a terrific way reviewing what was discussed from Friday’s “What are you going to do this weekend?” section from class. 

What made this extra effective was that Mike, as the teacher, wrote sentences in the past tenses based on what the students had told him the prior week. So by now writing in the past tenses, using language we had already contextualized on Day 5, we were just able to read these sentences without thinking much about the verbs. During this “reading time” with students, you are also able to easily introduce the second person/you by asking your students questions about what they did over the weekend as they relate to the sentences. You can then do comparisons about others in the class: did anyone else do that etc? 

Reflecting on my one practice as a teacher, I really liked how effective this strategy was in terms of helping develop more of a discussion-based experience with students instead of what I often do which is: each student be prepared to tell me a sentence of what you did over the weekend using the “chat mat” like slide that I have on my board. I also must note that I do not usually do this activity before second semester in Spanish 2 because I have never included the past tenses earlier than that. I know this was my own pedagogical choice but I love that I have now had a novice level language learning experience this summer not only working to acquire the present tense and simple future using “going to” but also the past tenses.  

Thinking from my teacher lens, I know writing sentences and frankly remembering any details like this might be a difficult task to do for all classes over a weekend but here are a few ideas I have that I am going to try with students: 

-As an exit slip or as part of the quiz on Friday, have students write a sentence about what they are going to do over the weekend via a Google Form; this way the sentences are generated. Also, when I do a Google Form, I always have a drop down menu of our class periods so that I can easily sort any form by class. 

-Of course, if you did a Write and Discuss during this activity on Friday, you have a great deal of the details that you could easily modify for Monday.

-If you have some super-star students who need additional jobs to hold their interest, they could be your Friday Scribes and write on a shared Google Doc for you as you talk to students in class.  

-If it is an online class via Zoom, there is a new AI feature that writes notes based on the experience. I have yet to try this but I wonder what it would produce for me as a teacher in a bilingual class setting like ours?  

 “AHA” Moment ~ Day 7: The Exit Quiz

In this class we were able to see an example of an Exit Quiz, and it was a follow-up to a Student Interview. Earlier this summer, I talked about how I feel this is going to be a very important part of my class practice this coming school year, see it here. Seeing this student quiz example was good because as I had noted earlier this summer, so many of my daily quiz questions focused on language in the past but Mike’s questions focus on content. In our Portuguese class, the questions were told to us in the target language and they were questions that directly related to the content of the day. Again, I like the idea that if students are following and comprehending our input as teachers then they are able to do well on the quiz. I also think by asking questions like What is the teacher’s favorite food? & What is one thing that the interviewee likes on her pizza? not only requires all students to focus during the day’s content but also would require them to let a teacher know when they do not understand something. This is a critical piece of self-awareness that we must be building within our students. Remember, when teaching, it is our goal that Input be Comprehended to help students acquire. It is my responsibility as the teacher to make sure this is happening and students do play a big part by helping let us know in any way they can; whether by their eyes and looks, their responses to class questions, or when they just tell us they do not comprehend something.

 “AHA” Moment ~ Day 8: Pop-Up Pronunciation 

I hear from teachers all the time that say we must spend giant amounts of time on pronunciation. In many traditional classrooms there are weeks spent on pronunciation lessons and practice. When I hear this, I often respond that you as a teacher need to use and expose students to natural language and help students make connections to the written word and how something is pronounced. For example, you never want to ask me to pronounce something in French because I have not had enough exposure to French in order to pronounce something correctly. In this whirlwind experience of learning Brazilian Portuguese, I have the advantage that so much of it is like Spanish but almost none of it sounds like Spanish and for me, the pronunciation is the hardest part. 

In our class Mike took the time to teach us how certain letters are pronounced. These pop-up pronunciation lessons were wonderful, short, and sweet – they were exactly what we needed to start making better decisions pronouncing Portuguese. 

In fact, Mike even incorporated a strategy that is key for us as teachers: use your resources. In my core foundation during my first 7 years of teaching and preparing to be a teacher, I knew all of the shelves and shelves of textbooks that I had in my classroom and at home. I would make references all of the time to different books and pages when preparing lessons, and use them collectively in building my Mosaic of World Language Teaching (shout out to the namesake of my Blog). In Brazilian Portuguese Class, Mike effectively used some pronunciation explanations and examples from textbooks that helped us improve our pronunciation and gave us many examples that are so often hard to come up with on the spot (believe me I have tried). Again, his “prepared” Pop-Up Pronunciation lesson was exactly what we needed. 

 “AHA” Moment ~ Day 9: Focus on Incorporating Different Persons and Perspective 

While teaching us Mike was doing this (but then he also told us he was doing it): he was intentionally incorporating different perspectives and persons with regard to his verb choices throughout his different contextualized activities (first person singular, third person plural, first person plural etc.). Since our class could handle more than a traditional novice middle or high school class, I think he moved us along a bit quicker than the former but his intentionality was there. This intentionality of choice becomes crucial for teachers because we know that a generalization of many educators with regard to the CI / ADI / TPRS approach is that students only experienced language in the “third-person” narrative sense. I would say that depending on one’s exposure this could be true in a very traditional storytelling/asking setting, but most of us today use many CI approaches using all forms of verbs. This is a reminder for me because I have experienced great intentionality in the design of Mike’s Portuguese class. 

 “AHA” Moment ~ Day 10: Part 2: Focus on Incorporating Different Persons and Perspective 

Can I just write a quick AHA moment? Perhaps this one can be it. During a follow up class to an all class creation of a One Word Image that was a watermelon, we read a next day reading that asked something like this in Portuguese: 

Having these questions written in the reading was a perfect and intentional decision to expose us to four other forms of the verb “to be.” In my “teacher notes” from this day’s class, I wrote the above information and the word: BRILLIANT!  

-Am I a watermelon? 

-No, I am not a watermelon? 

-Are you all watermelons?

-No, we are all people.  

~Gary

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