Authentic Spanish texts

This exercise was really helpful in seeing which vocabulary would be most important to teach students when we start our unit on helping others. I chose the foundation website in Spanish for UNICEF and the Spanish website for Pies Descalzos in Colombia. I also looked up a news article about Pies Descalzos along with 2 additional news reports detailing the poverty in Guatemala and another sharing how UNICEF is trying to eradicate poverty in Guatemala.

In using voyant-tools.org, I found some even more exciting resources. The term berry is one that I am going to use tomorrow in class to help my students to write a comparison essay about two legends we heard and listened to in class. The texts were difficult for them, so I figured if they can click on the words, they can see how the more frequent words are all tied together. I linked to the one that would go with this corpus below. I really like how you can see how many documents have that particular vocabulary word as well as the collocates.

I was surprised to see the word profiler results. The news article about poverty in Guatemala had the most level 1 and function terms than the websites. I would have thought that those sites would want to be more readable for the general public.

In the corpus, there were 4,223 total words and 1,162 unique word forms. The websites had fewer words than the news articles did, but I think they still had a lot of helpful vocabulary. I think that to introduce the vocabulary I might use one of the shorter articles and have students try to identify some of the words in context by giving them multiple choice options for the English definition. I would choose words that appear more than once so that they can test their hypotheses in all contexts. I would also like to ask them how they feel the vocabulary from the text would apply to the next one if I give them just the titles.

Ten words I would focus on because of frequency are: niños, pobreza, desarrollo, mundo, infancia, países, mejorar, salud, bienestar, and derechos. I would really work to give students as much repetition of those words as possible. It should not be too difficult with the state of affairs in the world. In the frequency list, there is only 1 verb, so obviously I should offer more than that. Promover, sobrevivir, and alcanzar are a few that are frequent and in their infinitives.

In any individual reading, I would probably gloss up to 5 terms that I think would truly affect their comprehension of the text. Luckily, many of the words are cognates and so those would not need to be taught explicitly; only to go over pronunciation.

Overall, these tools are really helpful and put data behind the words we are going to teach our students.