The little brother of the thematic units thread, largely ignored up to this point in the explosive discussion that Eric started and Robert and others have fueled for almost two weeks now on the ACTFL mega list, is the argument about reading authentic texts.
Nobody in our community really focused on it except Eric and Catharina, and we owe them both for their persistence in keeping the topic alive. Catharina has discovered that the idea of students reading authentic and not simple texts, something anathema to what we believe should happen in reading, is firmly supported by ACTFL and tied to names who have benefitted greatly from their ties with the book industry, in particular Dr. June Phillips and, of course Helena Curtain and, as I know first hand and have related to this group on a few occasions, Miriam Met.
Catharina I would ask you for those just starting to try to understand your massively important point to restate your point so that a brand new teacher, or someone like me who doesn’t do much research, can understand. I never like to have that feeling of not quite being exactly sure on things that are important. So when you wrote that comment to Robert this morning, what was your purpose, expressed in a few words?
Another reason I want to understand this point perfectly clearly is so that any of us who want to address it publicly, as well as addressing the thematic unit point, can go to the ACTFL site and say something intelligent about it.
Let’s all understand that the point about authentic texts that Catharina is keeping alive here is no minor point on pedagogy. Catharina realizes that this is hypocrisy on ACTFL’s part. So Catharina please clarify, Robert and Eric do your usual clarification as well, if you have time (no pressure, things are more intense than usual in schools in October anyway!), but let’s try as best we can to focus on this this week, because we need to, because it is the right thing to do on behalf of children.
This is actually in my mind bigger than the thematic units point in a way. Both are egregious and misleading to tens of thousands of teachers. Both are hurting kids. When Robert and Eric return here from their brief breaks this week to get ready for their workshops coming up later this week, I fully hope that BOTH of those threads are still going on over at ACTFL next week.
As I said in a comment here last night, I fear that the thematic units is mushrooming into a non-descript cloud and that until Catharina wrote her comment this morning we almost lost the point about reading authentic texts altogether. We can’t let that happen, because of the kids.
Our point – please correct me if it is not clearly expressed here – is that we learn to understand and read languages when we hear and read flowing and free and slowly presented, in bounds, simple speech that is highly contextualized and personally interesting to the listener. This is an unconscious process that leads to real acquisition of the language by the learner. It does not lead to mere learning, with all it’s obvious blemishes, even in AP students. Acquisition happens when the learner is in no way focused on the language when listening and reading, but is focused on a message that is interesting or even compelling to her. How can one acquire mastery over a language by focusing on the words used to bring the message – the person cannot focus on two things at once! In reading this text, are you focused on the words or the message? If you are aware of the individual words, then you cannot be aware of the message. When the focus is on the language in a classroom, we call that learning. Neither the thematic units approach, nor the authentic text position of ACTFL, lead in the direction of true acquisition. The thematic units approach leads to forced and therefore unnatural and therefore flawed learning because it lacks genuine context that is truly interesting to the listener, and the reading of authentic texts, texts that are way beyond the ability of even highly motivated students to understand, is just stupid because the texts are so complex that the brain MUST revert to conscious analysis of the text in order to deconstruct it because that is how the conscious mind does everything. Except acquire languages. To restate, learning is a conscious process and therefore not reflective of how the brain even processes languages. It is robotic and based in conscious analysis and memorization – which is to say, it is based on nothing but boring shit.
I will publish Catharina’s message to Robert as a second article in this thread, in hopes of the group embellishing and illustrating it, so that we can create a position statement on authentic texts, from which we can then publicly challenge the current ACTFL position statement on this topic.