I got this email from Elissa that I wanted to share:
This is so much bigger than teaching a language. I think that’s why I feel ignited about teaching Spanish in a way I hadn’t before. Its about bringing out the best in students and teacher, creativity, silliness….helping kids see their innate potential…. etc.! I used to get so nervous about teaching. Now I am experiencing these breakthroughs of having FUN, of really loving this. Your blog is really a great moral support in this. So much of what you write resonates with my basic view of education/people. I am a huge believer in the power of trusting the unknown (need to do it more though!) and being in the moment and in the power of love and all those good things. That’s how I try to live, so its such a great thing to apply this to teaching Spanish in such a direct way. I’m unlearning my thought that language learning follows a progression. I watched the keynote speech by Krashen at a Fluency Fast event (first time hearing him speak. I loved when he said that teaching grammar is like giving vitamin C vs. eating an orange. I also just ordered some of his books to read…) and that reinforced what you keep writing about. So, based on what you both say, it seems like there shouldn’t be a problem in forsaking a curriculum in which certain vocabulary words are worked on in each chapter where all build on each other and at the end of each chapter certain thematic words would be known…Right? But this seems a little “old school” in the sense that, if there is CI, kids are going to learn, so we don’t really need to stick to a curriculum.
My response:
Elissa, one would think that TPRS materials should present graded vocabulary that builds on itself in stories, but, if you really think about it, why should they? It’s old thinking. This is all as per Susie Gross and Stephen Krashen and Diana Noonan. I am so heartened to hear you say that, because I never knew quite what to think on this topic of introducing vocabulary at certain times in a conscious way until lately. Now, as we in my district have been feverishly focusing on, trying to align with, the new state standards, I realize that I don’t have to do any of that. I have found that if I just have a basic good teen interest script like Anne makes, with no particular structures except those that work with the story, that it works best – the CI is so much more comprehensible, and I am perfectly faced in the direction of and aligned with the task of rapidly getting my students up from novice low to (my own goal in my own program at East High School), intermediate low (a 3 or 4 on the French AP exam). I just do that. Allow me to expand on that:
If the assessment instrument that we are now writing in Denver Public Schools for level two languages is to properly align with our new state standards, it will definitely ask kids to understand the target language in general terms, and not in vocabulary specific terms. A child, then, will not have to know certain words, but instead should be able to merely decode the general flow of what is being said. Whether the assessment text is about a scene in a zoo or in a grocery store, 90% of the vocabulary in the assessment will overlap both scenes. The child, even if they know neither “zoo” or “grocery store”, will still be able to decode basically what is going on, because they have heard the language so much that they can follow along. This is in stark contrast to the old ways of testing, memorizing lists of words, verb conjugations, etc. where if a kid didn’t know one of those two words or related vocabulary or what a certain form of a verb is, they were SOL.
In the old model, kids exited four year programs being able to decode maybe 10% of the words they heard (explaining the massive national failure of foreign language study over the past decades in the United States). They could decode so little because they had focused on lists of individual words in class, day after day, month after month, year after year. It’s as if they had collected a big pile of bricks but the bricks had never been made into a house. Now, with narrative methods like TPRS, the kids not only hear the words, but see the house being built. Kids so trained are a lock to pass the AP exam, as we have proven so often in TPRS. I am especially proud of my kid who got the four on the AP French exam in level two, with no prior exposure to the language. The times have indeed changed.
Once again, trying to make a story’s structures conform to or reflect some kind of established pacing guide or curriculum map flies in the face of the new state standards/ACTFL proficiency guidelines. We don’t need to do it. You are so right, Elissa, when you say that “if there is CI, kids are going to learn, so we don’t really need to stick to a curriculum”.