Good news about Embedded Reading from Doug
Just wanted to tell you how thankful I am for that video/embedded reading and how successful it was. I made a few changes in the Spanish text to fit my classes and created a few materials to go with it. My 8th graders were absolutely riveted by the text which is such a cliff-hanger—then watching the video was just icing on the cake. Keeping my 8th graders (who just want to get out of middle school) engaged and in the language is quite difficult. Alma came around at just the right time.
I have been doing embedded readings across the board with my students. I don’t have time for elaborate preparations (like taking on something that has no text), so I am taking the stock stories I use each year and creating three or four versions. In the end it has been a fair amount of work, but well worth it.
I make one easier version perhaps only to a certain part of the story—use TPRS with two structures in that part of the story, then make a second version which has the next two structures and the rest of the story, but with less detail—TPRS that part/those structures—then they get the third version which is the most detailed and has the most sophisticated language—sometimes I create one more version if appropriate.
I‘ve been just using the quizzes I created for the original text and am getting good results. It is difficult to say exactly how good those results are as I am just getting started, and juggling so many students, I just don’t have time to reflect on my results.
What I do know is that it is giving students much richer stories in terms of language than ever before. With my 6th graders we have actually only done two stories (the TPRS steps) in one quarter, but I have been able to give them many more reps of more structures in those stories than any class before at that level—and they can handle, in general, much more complicated readings on their own (of course there are a few who are still working with gist with the last reading, but in the end, everyone is getting way more depth of language.) They’ve gotten much more in terms of language depth than ever before.
Sincerely,
Doug
Embedded Reading 