When Jason Fritze was in town a few weeks ago, he quoted Marsha Wilbur about the new AP exams:
…if we want students to be successful on the new AP exams, there must be CI from the beginning of level 1, with lots of reading….
Jason’s energized follow-up comment to that was , “You gotta DO it!”
Talk about vindication. The AP exam is now a proficiency exam. All those years, feeling as if something was really wrong. Why wrong? Because whenever I had a kid get a three or four on the AP French exam I knew exactly how little French they had really acquired and how much mechanical thinking French they had merely learned!
Robert put this into crystal clear reality for us last night, lest we think that it’s just a rumor, or in my case a dream, when he commented on this dramatic change in a comment here to Drew:
“Drew, do you teach Spanish? If so, the AP world is going to change, just as it has with German and French. The German and French AP Tests are now designed around the Three Modes of Communication, and for the 2012-2013 school year the Spanish Course and Test will be re-aligned. Nowhere on the new test is there a single discrete-item grammar question. It’s all about interpersonal, interpretive and presentational communication. I talked to an AP Reader who took the training for the new test, and she they were specifically told NOT to grade down for grammatical errors <i>per se</i>, only things that indicated either a lack of understanding or an inability to communicate.
“At the AP Institute I attended last summer for the German course and test, a number of the teachers were extremely worried and uptight about what’s going on. I was saying to myself, “Finally! They are starting to get it.” Future years will refine the exam – there were a few “clunkers” on the practice exam – but if they continue as they have begun, things will improve. I did note that some of the non-native speakers in the course had difficulty with parts of the test because they were not used to communicating in the language rather than about the language.
“Once the revision has occurred, you should try to get together with your colleagues and discuss vertical teaming. Since the new test will concentrate on the Three Modes of Communication, everyone feeding into AP should be emphasizing them as well.
“The new Course is designed around the Six Course Themes (Global Challenges, Science and Technology, Contemporary Life, Personal and Public Identities, Families and Communities, Beauty and Aesthetics. You might be interested in viewing the German Curriculum Framework (the French is identical except for language-specific references):
http://advancesinap.collegeboard.org/CurriculumFrameworks/AP_German_LanguageCCFramework.pdf
Le Chevalier de l’Ouest has again hit the nail on the head. After those unending 24 years of teaching to the AP test in South Carolina, knowing full well that on some deep level I wasn’t really teaching French at all, but rather was merely training smart kids to memorize and manipulate (not the actual language but) an analytical version of the language that had nothing to do with actual proficiency, I can relax now knowing that there was a reason I felt so off base for all those years.
I feel in this post by Robert a true lifting of a burden from my shoulders. It is very dramatic and emotional for me. No longer is this mere heresay and no longer is it heresy to espouse comprehension based methods. We’ve been hearing about this coming change for years, but Robert was at the German AP institute last summer, and obviously was all ears for every session.
I can finally say, and I will, to my colleagues who have rejected true proficiency in their now fully bogus “eclectic” approaches, that what they are doing now can only work with a very small percentage of students and that if they want to actually teach all the kids, they are going to have to re-train themselves in terms of the link above and no time to lose.
Now, and this is a key point – the still unconscious traditional teacher who “uses a wide variety of approaches” can no longer do what they are doing. They know it and we know it. They must now employ only approaches that lead to fluency and proficiency. (This lets the book and the computer out the door, by the way – languages are a human thing.)
Said teachers can no longer say that what they do works unless their definition of the success of a program is to select out only the most intelligent kids from the rest and train them to memorize a bunch of rules. It used to work, but it won’t work anymore.
So-called eclectic approaches DO NOT EMPLOY COMPREHENSIBLE INPUT and DO NOT LEAD TO PROFICIENCY. That is why Timmy and his parents need to listen to Drew. The point about proficiency is the key to everything and any current old fashioned AP teacher who does not retool, and fast, to reflect the three modes will probably be out of job within the decade, if not a lot sooner, depending on how dumb their district and building administrators are.
I have to say it again, this is a true lifting of a burden from my shoulders, one that I have been carrying my entire professional life. Amen.