I have a poster I got a few years back on the wall of my classroom. It reminds me of the “Believe” sign in the show Ted Lasso where he has this word that he points to in the locker room at every practice. Well, my word is not a word and if it were it wouldn’t be “Believe”, but it is a poster of the famous soccer player Pelé kicking a soccer ball and it says “Everything is practice.” Reading, writing, listening, speaking, thinking and functioning in two languages comes with practice. They are skills that only get better through ongoing practice. Therefore, we spend a lot of time practicing all types of reading, writing, listening, speaking and thinking in class and every once in a while, we grammar.
When I was a graduate student at the School for International Training we used Diane Larsen Freeman’s term, grammaring, to talk about the practical act of using language in a grammatically correct, and practically accurate way.
Part of Language Arts curriculum is knowing the parts of speech as well as being able to consciously or subconsciously use the parts of speech in an accurate way. For most students in Dual Language programs, grammar is not a central focus of instruction, as it is in a World Language class. It is good to practice parts of speech, by reading and writing and identifying what accurate language looks for readers and writers and sometimes we learn a little bit about parts of speech as they contribute to how well written sentences look or powerful verbs or adjectives are used to create imagery for a reader.
I have been using vocabulary and grammar lessons this year as an opportunity to do cross linguistic transfer, which has become the new big thing in Dual Language classrooms, the ability to use resources from both languages to better understand how to use both languages and learn in them. It contributes to literacy development, which is an important goal of Language Arts class in Spanish.
In the image included here, you can see how I used a pronoun lesson in Spanish to explain the big differences in form and use between Spanish and English and why Spanish is a “pro-drop” (pronoun dropping) language and English is not.
Grammar is a hot topic for Dual Language teachers because we want accuracy in the way our students use language when they speak and write, but how do we teach it in a way that doesn’t detract from all of the rest of what we have to teach everyday?
Grantmo 