Second Language Acquisition Lesson

Friday was such a fun day for me. After talking about my syllabus (for 5 minutes because it really bores me and the kids to tears but we as teachers are required to present it even though the grading policy is the same across all classes at my school) AANNYYY WAYY...  I moved on to my second language acquisition chat!


I followed Tina Hargaden's YouTube video and even practiced drawing out my little figures before I presented. In the description of that video she also includes a script to help drive your SLA chat. There is a lot of great information in that script and I sort of wish I had written out bullet points that I wanted to cover because I got to the end of my little spiel and realized in each class I had forgotten something I wanted to mention. Boo! If you do haven't done your SLA chat yet, I highly recommend it.

The bullet points I wish I had covered with every class were these:

  • Being human means we want to try to connect with others and express ourselves while getting to know them and who they are. This comes from the heart 
  • How I learned Spanish 
    • Notecards, Conjugation Charts, Grammar, Exceptions to Grammar rules,  Worksheets, etc. 
  • My LOVE of notecards (I pushed this so much in one lesson, a kid made his meme about it.. lol!) and grammar
  • Being unable to express myself when I got to Spain for the first time and feeling so sad and wondering why it was so hard for me (another kid told me I should have packed my notecards! haha) 
  • Taking classes in college because I loved Spanish so much and I was finally able to express myself
  • Changing the way I teach to match the research 
  • Your brain's Language Acquisition Device 
  • Still not being able to speak perfectly even though I have been practicing for like... 15 years! 


While I did this, I did my drawing almost exactly like Tina did and the kids were really engaged with what I was saying. I was surprised! 

Then, for the last 15 minutes, I had the kids make a meme that expresses the difference between learning a language versus acquiring one. 

If you don't know what a meme is, it is a picture or short clip of a video that can be copied and then applied to 1000s of different situations. ** Fun fact... the word meme comes from the Greek word mimesis which means to copy, imitate or mime. ** So a meme is basically a picture (or video) that can be copied and slightly changed to apply to a new situation. They often have words written on top or in speech bubbles to express the new (and often hilarious) situation. As you will see below, there are 2 examples where 2 students used the same picture but different text to explain SLA 

Here are a few examples of my students' memes that explain Second Language Acquisition:






We had to use our iPads for the creation of these but to have them create their memes, I had them look up blank memes (the kids will know what to look for) and then save them to their iPad's camera roll. We found it easiest imported the picture to Google slides and then typed on top of the picture. Then the kids took a screenshot and sent me their newly minted meme to Schoology! It was great. 

So that is my meme lesson! I did it on Day 4 of my Spanish 1 class and if you haven't talked to your kids about why you teach the way you do, I think you should! My hope for us is that it increases buy-in because we are kind of pulling back the curtain behind the science of what we do. 

I hope this was helpful! 

Hasta pronto,

Señora K

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