Translating Spanish into Mosaic: Initial challenges and ideas

When I first expressed interest in Mosaic, I told my principal I would like to start with a small group of students that already had experience with Spanish. Our feeder offers Level 1 Spanish spread out over 2 years; my thought was that I would have students that had either one or both years of middle school Spanish completed when they walked into Mosaic. No such luck. The demographics just aren't there: we don't have enough students enrolled that meet that criterion.

Enter challenge number 1:
How will I make Spanish meaningful for my students and incorporate it into their projects when their language proficiency goals should and will have to do with much lower level thinking? As ACTFL's Proficiency Guidelines state:

Novice-level speakers can communicate short messages on highly predictable, everyday topics that affect them directly. They do so primarily through the use of isolated words and phrases that have been encountered, memorized, and recalled.

This means that while my students are learning brand new information through hands-on projects about which they are very excited, they will be hardly able to tell me about them except through lists and short phrases (and probably a lot of grunting and pointing).

Like many, I try to be a dreamer and a realist at the same time, and I like solving problems with what I have. Thus, until my dream for world language instruction in this country to be requisite in education at a young age becomes a reality, I have a few ideas for tackling this.

My goal is to get students out of the novice proficiency level and into intermediate as quickly as possible so that they can begin to meaningfully communicate about what they're up to in the target language. Any language teacher will tell you that in order to do this, you need a ton of input. This adds another layer to the challenge since Mosaic is free of the bell schedule and therefore mandatory seat time. In other words, I won't be able to force input as I have been able to in traditional courses.

This "problem" is also the beauty of Mosaic: students move at their own pace and are free to do so for the first time since they were introduced to our overly standardized public education system. They can find out what really interests them, and they can engage in deeper level learning because they are directing it themselves. No matter my students' engagement level with Spanish or how much time they're willing to spend with the language, I'll be there with ideas to help them want to push their own learning to the next proficiency level.

With all of this in mind, here are some of my initial ideas for Spanish in Mosaic:

• We'd start the year with an intense immersion program to get them the basics. I would use a mixture of storytelling and other techniques to help them learn greetings, question words and other language necessary for basic interaction. I would also include a lesson on circumlocution to teach them how to talk around words they don't know while staying in the target language, and we'd create a circumlocution "map" to live in our Mosaic space as a reference. I hope to include some of the other Mosaic teachers in this training so that they can support my content as I hope to support theirs.
• I recently asked our librarian to purchase a few copies of each of the leveled novels in Spanish available on TPRStorytelling.com. These are great because they generally include culture, many have fewer than 200 unique words, and all have lots of repetition of high frequency phrases necessary for novice level learners to master. There are a lot of novels to choose from, so I will let my students read any that they want to and aim for completing at least one a quarter.
• I am trying to get professional development dollars to try out Rosetta Stone online for a language new to me to see if this might be something we could offer for self-motivated or struggling learners. There are free online programs for students to work through as well, some of which are very good, like BBC's "Mi Vida Loca". I am open to any and all resources that help my students increase their Spanish proficiency on their own terms.
• Once the students have been exposed to the basics, I'll start seminars for which they can sign up based on interest and need.  I will level seminars and create them with the language needed to discuss current projects and interests in mind. Students will be encouraged to challenge themselves with seminars by attending those above their level. 
• Culture-rich lunches and movie/program screenings will increase engagement with the language and inspire ideas for travel and service projects abroad.
• Frequent "Paseos", emails/notes between the students and myself, blogging, reading groups and/or any other medium in which students wish to use the language will support the repetition necessary to increase proficiency.

As you can see, I hope to increase engagement (and therefore input and speed of acquisition) by providing lots of choice and individualized instruction so that students want to expose themselves more to the language.

Mosaic is a pilot program, and I think we're all expecting to stumble at least a few times along the way. This isn't going to be easy, especially starting with students that have had little or no exposure to Spanish, but as Barney would say... challenge accepted.

Image by "Oliver Wunder". Licensed for noncommercial reuse under Creative Commons. 

Painting by Farbklex Spencer based on CBS's "How I Met Your Mother".

Language teachers: in a project-based program free of a bell schedule, what other ideas do you have to increase input and help students move quickly from the novice to intermediate level?