Robert’s email discussing Scope and Sequence with his district World Languages representative continues:
4. In addition, receptive skills precede and outpace productive skills. My observation – and it seems supported by casual research and listening to others – is that the skills develop in a natural order: listening, speaking, reading, writing. Asking students to speak and write before they have had sufficient time listening and reading is counterproductive. Reading and writing are very different skills from listening and speaking and develop later.
5. ACTFL Performance Guidelines, the California State Standards, and Second Language Acquisition Research inform us that students will spend considerable time (often multiple years) in one stage of language acquisition, acquisition does not progress linearly, each person acquires at his own pace, and an individual will not be at the same stage or level of acquisition in all areas at the same time.