Students Say What?!

8th Grade Columbus School students are learning to improve their English by paying closer attention to the way they talk in order to avoid having their errors written on the class word wall for everyone to see.    

Since the start of the school year, 8th grade English teacher Clara Quintero realized that many of the mistakes students made speaking English in her class were repeated over and over again. Most of the errors were Spanglish, a mixture of Spanish and English that creates funny words or sentences students repeated as easily and fluently as if they were proper English.

“I noticed it was happening often, so I started writing them on the board but I was running out of space so I decided to make a wall of “Students Say the Funniest Things,” Quintero said.

Quintero made a word wall because she thought it would be fun to keep track of the way students spoke. The surprise came when keeping track of the incorrect language students used, and posting it on the wall, caused students to become more conscious of speaking correctly.

“I decided to make a wall of “Students Say the Funniest Things” and what has happened is that now students don’t want to be on that wall because they are embarrassed, ” Quintero said.

Although the Word Wall was created to be funny, students became embarrassed to have their name on it because both the error and name of the speaker were posted and everybody knew who said it.

“The wall has its educative side and it’s funny side because sometimes we genuinely think they are real words but end up understanding they aren’t,”  Lola Martin-Vera, 8th grader, said.

Students who have been up on the wall find this method a fun way to learn to speak properly.

“I have been on that wall, I said ‘farration’ instead of a party, it was really funny, we all laughed about it,” Escobar said.

Quintero has taught at The Columbus School for over three years now, she has gone all over school previously teaching 3rd, 9th and 10th grades,  but this is the first time she has taught 8th grade.

“It’s been great, teaching in eighth grade, I have liked it,” Clara Quintero, eighth grade English teacher, said.

According to Quintero, fewer and fewer made up words have been said during class time, which results in a better English and a better English grade for the students in her class improvement.

“I think this wall is good, because it really makes them think before they speak, it’s just a fun way to keep track of them, and I mean, it’s interesting because that’s how language emerges, by making up these words and there are tons of languages that have started that way,” Quintero said.