Context: This lesson plan is designed for students in a semester-long intro-level Spanish for Second Language Speakers class at the college level in the US. It is a 75-minute lesson that can be planned early in the semester.
Textbook: Marinelli, Patti J. & Karin Fajardo (2019). Conectados, 2nd Edition. Boston: Cengage Learning.
Topic: This lesson focusses on expanding students' abilities to describe objects and people around them using adjectival/copula constructions, and on how to talk about locations and routes.
Objectives: At the end of this activity, students will be able to:
Describe physical properties of objects, places, and people in their direct environment
Recognize and understand previously learned vocabulary and grammatical constructions in naturalistic language use
Discuss the location of landmarks on simplified maps
Have a basic understanding of the uses of ser, estar, tener, and ir, as well as basic vocabulary for physical descriptions and locations.
They will practice the interpretive listening and reading, presentational speaking and writing, and interpersonal speaking modes of communication.
Prerequisites: Students are expected to have familiarized themselves with the conjugations of ser, estar, tener, and ir.
Materials needed: Computer, projector, speakers, printed song lyrics, YouTube video linked above, grammar handout, printed version of simplified map, writing implements.
Structure of the lesson:
Intro - 5 min. Welcome, reminder of homework that is due this week and next. Overview of objectives for today's class.
Rationale: Prepare students for what to expect today, ensure they are aware of assignments to turn in.
Modes of communication: Interpretive reading (English).
Input/review - 5 min. Review conjugations of ser, estar, tener, ir. Projection of conjugations of the four verbs side-by-side - students learned these in class in the previous weeks and practiced them at home. Students read conjugated forms out loud with appropriate pronoun(s).
Rationale: This provides a quick refresher for students about the grammatical forms which will be used to express the meanings at the center of this lesson.
Modes of communication: Presentational speaking (mostly reproduction).
Types of feedback: Repetition, recast.
Assimilation - 10 min. Exercises 1-56 and 1-61 in the Conectados textbook. In pairs, students read over the dialogue and choose the correct word from the pair between brackets to complete each sentence. For both dialogues, students first take 3 minutes of pair work to complete the dialogues. Then a volunteer pair reads the dialogue out loud, the rest of the class is asked for feedback on whether the choices were correct. Instructor engages class in discussion about why certain forms are correct or incorrect in certain contexts.
Rationale: In 1-56 and 1-61, most choices students make are between conjugated forms of tener/ser/ir, helping students assimilate the appropriate use of person forms of these verbs. Some choices concern complements for tener, helping the students distinguish between its various uses (age, possession, feelings).
Modes of communication: Interpretive reading and listening, interpersonal speaking (for the volunteer pair)
Types of feedback: Elicitation from the rest of the class, metalinguistic clues.
Assimilation: 5 min. Exercise 1-58 in Conectados textbook. In pairs, students go back and forth describing one of the people in the pictures by saying where they are from and how old they are, and the other guesses who they are talking about. At the end of the 5 minutes, instructor provides descriptions of people on the photos and has the class guess, introducing Juanes this way and leading into the next activity.
Rationale: This activity helps students use the verbs that are the topic of this class to express real-life meanings (ages, origins) in a somewhat naturalistic communicative activity (guessing game). It is somewhat more open-ended and creative than the previous activity and therefore has an increased processing load, but is still mostly structured allowing students to keep the focus on forms and functions.
Modes of communication: (Guided) communicative speaking.
Types of feedback: If necessary, recast and repetition.
Input - 10 min. Students listen to the song La Camisa Negra by Juanes. They are given a printed copy of the lyrics with a number of blanks for them to fill in while listening (English translation is given except for the sentences with a blank). The blanks are inflected present tense forms of tener, ser, and estar, and pronouns. After the first listen, instructor takes time to answer questions about vocabulary etc. After the second listen, instructor and class collectively go through the lyrics asking for volunteers to fill each blank.
Rationale: This activity helps students practice the recognition of grammatical constructions they already know in naturalistic language data. It exposes students to naturalistic language data in a register/genre that is quite challenging to understand because of the fast pace. However, by focussing attention on individual lexical items which the students already know, this task is made manageable in terms of processing. It also exposes students to a Latin American pop culture item and encourages them to further engage with it.
Modes of communication: Interpretive listening.
Types of feedback: Repetition.
Input - 10 min. Grammar: noun-adjective agreement. Teacher-centered overview of grammar hand-out on noun-adjective agreement. Overview of different classes of adjectives that do or do not show different gender forms, with examples. Small number of fill-in-the-blank exercises with volunteers.
Rationale: This systematizes knowledge about a grammatical structure which students have encountered already throughout exercises in the previous week and earlier in the lesson. Students can compare hypotheses they had perhaps inductively formed to the presented explanation of the grammar.
Modes of communication: Interpretive listening.
Types of feedback: Recast, metalinguistic clues.
Input - 5 min. Students go back to the lyrics of La Camisa Negra and underline 5 adjectives and the nouns they modify. They are told to specifically look for one adjectives that seems to have an unexpected gender/number form (Negra tengo el alma). Instructor asks volunteers for why the adjectives they underlined have the forms they do. Instructor explains how some words in Spanish vary in how their grammatical gender behaves (e.g. el/la mar).
Rationale: This allows students to apply the knowledge they learned in the teacher-centered explanation by searching for which noun-adjective pairs in the lyrics do and do not correspond to the general pattern. Students also learn about grammatical variation.
Modes of communication: Interpretive reading.
Types of feedback: Metalinguistic clues.
Input - 10 min. Students are shown a series of pictures of objects/persons/places that can be referred to with nouns that they know or that are similar to their English translations (man, woman, house, restaurant etc.). Underneath each picture is a sentence that predicates a property of this object/person etc. with a blank for the adjective, and the masculine singular form of the adjective between brackets, e.g. las mujeres son _____ (rubio). Students will write down each sentence with the correct form of the adjective. Afterwards, volunteers are requested to complete every sentence.
Rationale: This activity introduces vocabulary that can be used to describe physical characteristics of objects, persons, and places (tall-short, big-small, clean-dirty, colours and hair colours). It provides a structured context to apply the grammatical rule just learned.
Modes of communication: Presentational writing.
Types of feedback: Metalinguistic clues, elicitation, recast.
Assimilation - 5 min. Students are given a simplified map (3-4 streets), with pictures of the people, objects and buildings that were introduced in the previous activity on various places along the streets. Instructor poses various questions about the locations of people/objects (¿Dónde está la casa sucia? ¿Quién está en frente del restaurante grande? ). Students write down answers to the questions, at the end volunteers are asked to read out their answers.
Rationale: This activity helps students recognize the vocabulary they just learned. It also gives them an opportunity to use the grammar they just learned by expressing e.g. locations of certain objects relative to other locations (Está al lado de la casa sucia), but students can also use other ways of providing a correct locative description (e.g. Está en la Avenida Central).
Modes of communication: Interpretive listening.
Types of feedback: Clarification request, recast.
Extension - 10 min. Students are provided a starting point on the map and an intended destination. They work in pairs to write a short dialogue between someone looking to get to this destination and someone explaining where to find this destination. They are provided prompts in English expressing communicative functions (e.g. "Greeting", "Ask for location of large restaurant", "state location", "ask clarification question with reference to nearby landmark", "confirm or clarify", "thank interlocutor", "say goodbye"). One volunteer pair is requested to perform their dialogue out loud.
Rationale: This activity allows students to be creative with everything they have learned this class period. They get to talk about locations and describe objects and places by choosing strategies they feel comfortable with. It is also a low-stakes speaking practice, since they are speaking with only their partner. The assignment emulates a real-world situation that second-language learners frequently find themselves in when they first travel to a place where there L2 is spoken.
Modes of communication: Interpersonal speaking, presentative writing.
Types of feedback: Corrective, guided recast for written dialogue, clarification questions or verbal recast for oral performers.