Deal

[Unkotare]

Well, we are just about at that time of year when it is increasingly difficult to get students to apply themselves to their studies since grades are essentially closed. I am fortunate to have good students for the most part, so they are grudgingly keeping on with their work. However, there is much more whining around this time of year. The seniors have already graduated, and the classes are getting smaller.

Some of the craftier students sometimes try to negotiate down some of the rather lengthy exercises I create for my classes. It is a fun back and forth that ends up with them using more English in novel ways than they anticipated. This happened today when one class was complaining about a long-ish writing exercise. The end result of our "negotiation" was that the students would write half the exercise in English and half in Spanish (everyone in the class today was a native Spanish speaker). The students were happy because they thought they had gotten one over, but it actually worked out better than I could have hoped. Directed use of the L1 can be an effective tool in second language acquisition. The students focused on writing in English, and when I questioned them about what they had written in Spanish they ended up using more English in different sentence types than they otherwise would have.

Just the kind of thing that pops up from time to time.