In our department we have been wrestling with the question of what to require when in the curriculum. Do we agree that first-year students should only be asked to demonstrate comprehension? At what point can/ should we require output, at what point should we assess it, and by what means?
I suppose we could refer to research on the subject, but I prefer to conduct my own. To that end, I have done 2 output-based activities with my first-year students recently, and analyzed the results carefully. Here are some of my conclusions:
1. Some students can demonstrate close to 100% listening and reading comprehension and yet still produce very little in the way of spoken or written language.
2. Any one student’s spoken or written language can in one moment be breathtakingly good and in the next moment breathtakingly bad.
3. Asking students to write or speak before they are ready makes them feel stupid and inadequate.
4. Asking students to write or speak when they do have some skills is a huge self-esteem booster.
5. In any given class, there will be a wide variety expressed in terms of vocabulary repertoire: some students will have acquired phrases and words that were hardly used in class, depending, I suppose, on their interest in the phrase or their relative level of engagement on the day it was used in class. In other words, reading their papers, it would not be hard to believe that they came from different classes.
All of this points, of course, to the idea that language acquisition is highly individual, both in terms of the rate of acquisition and the specific content acquired. My conclusion is that I can not in good conscience make output any part of a first-year student’s grade, except perhaps to award extra credit points to the superstar who doesn’t really need them but would appreciate them.
This is not to say that we can’t have output activities, but even here I have to be careful (see #3 above.)
I need to put this in words and to hold myself to it. To do otherwise is to spit in the face of my professed philosophy of meeting the students where they are, and being responsive to their developmental and emotional needs.
Feel free to challenge this. I welcome other viewpoints.
[ed. note: Hanna W. – this is your chance to argue for the other side of this argument]