Staying in the Target Language: Tips from someone bad at it (& thoughts on an EdCamp)

On Saturday I attended langcampct, an "EdCamp" for language teachers. An EdCamp is an "unconference" (I know) which is sort of a thing where the participants themselves decide, on the day, what sessions they'd like to have, and there's no dedicated panel leaders or schedules or talks. On the whole, I think such a format would be most valuable as part of a larger pedagogy conference: one or two blocks of "unconference" with more structure for the rest of the day. That aside, it was interesting and valuable, and most importantly, free!

This is what our session schedule ended up looking like.
You can find notes from all the sessions linked there, and there are some additional ones here.

The session I got the most out of in terms of concrete ideas was about ways to encourage students to use the target language (editable doc: please be careful). I didn't love everything I heard- since it was not all CI people by any means, there was a lot about forcing output. But, this leads us to the main topic of this post.

One major goal for a lot of CI practitioners is to stay in the TL for 90% of the class time. This is something I struggle with big time for a couple of reasons. Mainly, I'm not that good at Latin-speaking yet. Working on that. But also, my kids aren't super interested in participating because there's no motivation for them to do so. I've tried a lot of different participation tracking systems but they're hard to keep track of in the moment and they're mostly fundamentally punitive. So... Gotta find a good way. Here are some things I've been chewing on lately, plus my favorites from this past weekend's "unconference."

Stuff for your walls to help you teach and your kids learn

On the heels of my last post about the scary side of being a language student, it seems like a good time to share one of the ways I support my students' learning and my own teaching: stuff on the walls. All of the posters have both Latin and English. (editing to add: Tell me if any links are wrong or broken please!!)

How I use these:
tldr purposes:

1. Useful to point to when I want to use an adverb or something we haven't targeted yet
2. Scaffolds output activities with high frequency, very useful words.
3. Some kids use them to help with little words on assessments
4. More written Latin around the room means kids spend more time looking at written Latin.
5. Color and charm!

Most important are the Question Word posters. Many TPRS teachers use them. When circling, I point at the correct interrogative as I ask the class questions. Over time the kids mostly learn them without my directly targeting them.

The word posters generally are there partly for my own convenience and partly for the kids. It means I have more narrative freedom because a lot of the "little words" are available for me to point to when I'm telling a story. Sometimes you need a "therefore" that you didn't plan for and it's not worth fully targeting for this one time... so with these, it's provided. The kids also like them for doing free writes. I've also been complimented on my room by my department chair and principal, so that doesn't hurt either.

I heard somewhere that having lots of readable text just around increases literacy. That is a big part of why I made these. I don't know if it's true or what, but Latin Latin Everywhere seems good to me.

The good stuff is under the cut.

Desk Dictionary

One of the tenets of CI that I struggle with is giving a ton of non-targeted input. That is, ideally, you're supposed to spend 90% of class time in the target language. Although I know Latin very well, I have had little practice speaking it. Unlike a modern language, speaking is very rarely one of the goals in traditional Latin classes regardless of the level. Writing is occasionally emphasized, but those courses are few and far between, and they focus on writing in the rhetorical style of our most famous literary lights.

At any rate- one of my two big goals for this semester is to spend more time speaking Latin with my kids, and for them to start speaking more too. To that end, I've made them a "desk dictionary" (feel free to suggest a catchier term, ideally in Latin...). You can print or download it here. Please feel free to copy, edit, & share as you like. See below the cut for more.