When we use the StarChart™, we do not require kids to memorize anything, the students are not bored , and yet we are able to collect grades, which we can’t avoid doing since we work in schools.
When the Star is used, the students know that they can get a good grade in the class without memorizing, without being bored and knowing that all they have to do is simply listen, which is all a person has to do to acquire another language .
The students fill out their four quiz templates as the class goes around the Star, and when they have finished those very easy quizzes, we have collected 4 grades for the grade book, for a possible total of 80 grades each month, not counting the ACTFL Interpersonal Skills rubric grades that we collect separately from the quizzes.
This makes admins, parents and most importantly the kids happy.
One of the things that the kids do in the quizz process is copy (the Phase 3 Writing Quiz). We allow mistakes when they copy. We do not count points. We do not use red ink.
We do not expect the kids to be experts at the language. Moreover, testing children when they are learning a language is not pedagogically justifiable – it doesn’t even make sense.
Why don’t we ever discuss this? Why don’t we ever talk about how human beings are designed to never need to be tested when they are learning a language and that testing even has nothing to do with learning a language?
The unconscious faculty does its thing, the conscious mind is not involved, time passes and the more the language is absorbed into the deeper mind’s Language Acquisition Device (Chomsky), the more acquisition occurs.
Language acquisition is a function of time, not intellectual effort.
Then what is the answer to the question about why we test kids in language programs in schools? Oh, it is because the instruction is happening in schools and not naturally in regular life.
Schools depend on testing and can’t function without it. In other subjects, testing may be justifiable because of the need to force kids to learn that kind of material. But in languages, this is not true. Why?
It is because language acquisition is completely different from other school subjects in that a totally different part of the mind has been put in place to “learn” them.
Hence, it becomes clear that testing students using the quizzes of the StarChart™ curriculum makes a lot of sense. The students are only asked to answer simple, almost ridiculously simple yes/no questions, or copy a text that they were just immersed in for 20 minutes, or translate a text that they have been exposed to in a spiraling, expansive and recurrent way (vs. memorization).
That is why I have chosen in the Star curriculum to test in a way that does not require memorization and is enjoyable. Both of those factors – no memorization and pleasure – provide the students with confidence and a feeling of “I can do it” when arriving in your classroom each day.
Thus, we provide our students with something that many of them don’t experience in other classrooms – that they are equal if not more capable at languages than the college-bound kids.
The quizzes also reveal to our students and any observers just how much language they are learning. Looking at the written text of even a simple tableau and being able to read it is impressive. Why does it happen?
It is precisely because the students have not been wasting their time by memorizing lists of words and verb conjugations for stupid tests. Nor have they been wasting time by trying to read boring chapter books before all in the class are ready to do so.
The focus in the early years and especially in the first year of any program based on comprehensible input should be on listening, not reading. Who needs boring lists and boring chapter books when we have interesting contextualized spoken language to offer our students, and easy quizzes that make them want to come to class every day?