Comprehension

• · We obscure students understanding by including too much information

  · I thought it was really interesting how important prior knowledge is.

• Activating prior knowledge is so important for comprehension.
• It's easy to teach language without culture, but it is very important to connect culture with communication and to connect communication with culture.

• Bottom-up: starting with the mechanisms and then deriving meaning out of them. It focuses on discreet skills and the mechanics of decoding a discreet word. Ej.: first starting out with memorizing the vocabulary, then learning the grammar, and then doing anything creative.
• Top-down: background is so important, so it's important that kids have the background. We're going to do creative things, like reading texts, and then after we've figured out what it means, then we will focus on form.
• We need a combination of the two methods to provide an atmosphere where students are most likely to succeed.

• Thematic units - La guerra civila espanola
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