For six years now Diana Noonan has been working on aligning Denver Public Schools WL with ACTFL and what then turned out to be, in December of 2009, the new Colorado State standards (novice low, etc.).
She trained teachers (those interested) in TPRS, who then worked together over recent years to design assessment instruments that align with those standards. Two levels are essentially done, and with incredible attention to detail (the writing and speaking rubrics are works of art if you really look at them). Upper level assessments and rubrics are in the works. Those assessments and rubrics can be said to be spot on with the expectations of the new standards.
What this has done for teachers in our district who use comprehensible input methods cannot be overstated. My own style is to hit the first year students with massive, massive amounts of CI, especially in listening. This year in particular, maybe because I was working with slightly more intellectually mature ninth graders instead of eighth graders for the first time, all of that CI has transferred into writing samples that I could not have predicted, and that are essentially ten times better than anything I have seen from my middle school students.
Aligning those samples/free writes with the writing rubric that all teachers in Denver Public Schools will give to their students this month has really reinforced my belief in the idea that input really does precede output, really really really.
In the same way, with speaking, by sheltering my level ones from any kind of artificial or forced verbal output this year, I am now seeing the spontaneous emergence of speech and it is a joy to be a part of in class.
I did less reading than I should have, it has always been a weakness with me because I just want to do all the speaking CI I can with my students, it’s just my nature. But I also know that when my students do start reading more and more and more at upper levels, because of all of that listening CI from this year, it will be effortless.
Recently, in preparation for the exit tests (we do pretests/posttests on every kid in the district on a district wide level), I have been putting some of the kids’ free writes on the white board so that we can fix the grammar in another colored marker together as a class.
The way that works is that we fix the grammar – the kids love it because now grammar makes sense to them in the context of the speech that they have heard – and when we do that I am all about praise. I am able to marvel, and it is genunine marveling, at what they can write.
I ask them if they pulled that writing out of their composition notebooks or off of the walls or where did they get this ability, and they tell me, to a student, that they pulled the words from the French words that were there “banging around in their heads”.
Yesterday, one student sitting next to where I was standing whispered to me in English, “I bet you are very proud”, and I said that I was. There is a difference between fake praise and real praise, and when I looked at the white board, because we didn’t do a lot of writing until lately in preparation for the writing samples, I was full of a kind of spontaneous praise. Like, inside I was thinking, “Where the hell did they learn that?”
The idea of FINALLY getting to look at some grammar seemed to make a few of the grammar heads (those kids who had tapes in their heads from conversations with their parents who told them that they learned languages – riiight! – by doing activities and exercises, not by just reading and listening and writing) feel better.
There were so few errors! That must be because of the reading that we did do. I would have expected a lot more errors of grammar. But maybe it was because, during all of the auditory CI, I did a lot of writing on the white board, clarifying verb conjugations and the like.
When the kids write, I tell them to always ask themselves if they are writing in such a way that a French person could understand, and to not worry about spelling – to just do the best they could and then move on.
One kid asked me if she spelled the word “oiseau/bird” as “wazoh” would that be all right, and I said yes of course, because it is a correct phonetic representation of the sound that she knew.
However, since we had SEEN the word “oiseau” in class a lot in the overall CI process of whiteboard point and pause and in reading, she would never spell it “wazoh”, and I usually see some variation of “oiseu” or “oisau” or something like that, and then, over the years (they sign up for the next level because they know that they are good at French), the spelling all cleans itself up like it did for them in English. The fact that the kids had HEARD all of that French made them great writers. Their own pride was evident.
So this is to publicly thank Diana for all her perseverance in putting together those assessment instruments that align with the new state standards. It is such a joy to know that all the teaching that I did this year, every minute of it, was actually aligning with something real, and that I didn’t have to skew or twist my work in TPRS to align with some kind of instrument that doesn’t align with the new state standards.
That is to say, the work of
learning to listen first
learning to read because we listened
learning to write because we read and listened
learning to speak because we wrote, read, and listened
is something that, now in my first year in DPS, has allowed me to know the freedom of really teaching to standards. What I believe in (CI/Krashen), what I taught, what my kids learned, everything we did in class, the way they will be assessed this month, the state standards, they all align. It is a good feeling. Thank you again, Diana, for all of your hard work on this and, even more, for your uncompromising vision and refusal to compromise.