The Struggles of Object Pronouns

Object pronouns--direct and indirect--have been a sore spot for my Spanish students ever since I first started teaching them a decade ago.  I think part of the problem is that they just don't get what they are in English.  I originally approached this grammar issue by trying to teach my students what object pronouns were in English.  We would spend a whole day on practicing the concept entirely in English, not even considering the Spanish.  Still didn't help.  I came up with a checklist of questions to ask (what is the verb, who is doing the action, what is being given/mailed/seen/whatever the verb is, etc).  Didn't work.

This year I tried flipping the order that we approach the pronouns when we reviewed in Spanish III.  I still wasn't sure if focusing on indirect object pronouns first was best but without having to worry about masculine vs feminine, I decided to stay with that approach when the time came to use this concept in Spanish II for the first time.

We spent basically a week with each idea (other vocabulary and culture in there too so not five full days for the concept).

Overall when the two concepts--indirect and direct--were kept completely separate, the students got the idea.  Unfortunately when we combined them (just using one or the other in a sentence not both in the same sentence--that is coming this week), things got hairy.  A lot of kids just didn't know which pronoun to use (and some even forgot to get rid of the word the pronoun was replacing).

I then spent the beginning of a class teaching the students how to diagram sentences.  I know that is very grammatical and not how we think about language when we are forming sentences but it gave them a visual way of approaching sentences.  I haven't tested them since but I did have several students tell me that the diagramming helped.  One kid even said he wished we had done this earlier.

I am still frustrated with object pronouns.  I think I need to start sneaking them into sentences students will see earlier in the year so maybe there will be a tiny bit of subconsciousness understanding before we focus on the concept.