3 Mistakes I Made Teaching A Spanish Novel

I just finished teaching the Spanish novel “Las sombras” by AC Quintero. First semester we read her novel “El armario”. These 2 books are easily some of my favorite material I’ve taught. I learned a lot the first time around. Here are 3 lessons I learned teaching these Spanish novels.

Mistake # 1: I Didn’t Control The Pace

I taught both these novels to Spanish 3 and 4 this year (COVID made things weird). Spanish 3 took their sweet time and didn’t focus very well. Spanish 4 barreled through the books, focused on understanding the story and discussing their own conspiracy theories. 

The personalities of these two groups are very different and that contributed. Obviously Spanish 4 had a higher proficiency level and this was their second year reading novels. They had skills that Spanish 3 was still learning and refining.

The takeaway: I’m moving faster with Spanish 4 and adding in more supplemental activities to challenge them to write more in Spanish. Spanish 3 I had to impose a faster pace at times to get them to focus and do the work. Other times I had to slow them down. I asked very specific questions to make sure they were fully understanding the key plot points. I should have monitored and controlled the pace better with Spanish 3. 

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Mistake #2: Students Needed Way More Support Than I Had Planned

Some of my Spanish 3 students struggled with the level (grammar/vocab) of the novel. I didn’t do a deep dive into any grammar with the novel but trusted that after enough exposure, they’d figure out some of the constructions. Some students did, others didn’t. 

Half way through teaching the Spanish novel I began making what I called “one-pagers”. For each chapter I gave a brief, no-spoilers summary at the top followed by questions (and the page numbers). The summary and questions served as an outline to help students develop a schema of what would happen in the chapter before they read. At the bottom of the page, I had a table with vocab and the page it appeared on. 

I had to teach students to read the summary and questions before reading the book. As a class, we talked through what might happen in the chapter before they read. Student feedback was overall positive that the one-pagers helped them comprehend the text better.

For some chapters, I did preview activities highlighting all the cognates in the chapter to help them build confidence and recognize them when they saw them. I’m hoping to get a few of my artistically gifted students to draw some summaries of the chapters that I can use for preview activities next year. 

Matching activity in GoFormative. Getting students to slow down and think about cognates. This was a pre-reading activity with words they would see in the chapter.
Mistake #3: I Deviated From My Main Focus

I decided that my focus for Spanish 3 would be on the interpretive mode. The goal was, did they understand what they read. All of the quizzes I gave them along the way were questions about key plot points and characters in English. Also, I asked them to respond in English.

For the final assessment, I wanted them to write in Spanish. Yes, I know, this was not my best move.  I should have included more supported Spanish writing throughout the novel. I could have had a lesser focus on being able to express opinions about the novel in the TL.

What I ended up doing was asking them to write mostly in the present and preterite tenses (they are comfortable with those). For extra guidance, I provided them a support sheet adapted from Bethanie Drew’s which you can find here. 

On the rubric for their assessment (see below), I weighted grammar very low and their ability to use facts/details from the book much higher. This way they were ultimately assessed on their knowledge of the book and not their TL output.

Next time around, we’ll do more supported writing in Spanish, summaries, and character descriptions during the book. I plan to implement this activity (again from the amazing Bethanie Drew).

I could talk about more than 3 mistakes I made teaching a Spanish novel but those are my main takeaways at the moment. If you want to see and hear more about how I taught this Spanish novel, head over to this IGTV video. You can watch it even if you don’t have an Instagram account!

UPDATE 4/20/21: Here is the entire summative assessment and an example answer I gave my students.

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