I’ve been struggling all year with a level four class that I had never taught before and that had done largely grammar from the beginning of their study of French – virtually no CI. I just assumed that the kids knew basic verb tenses. I assumed that they knew a lot more French than they did. These were wrong assumptions. If I ever inherit a class again that has basically been doing grammar all along, I won’t assume anything. Instead,I will do the following from the beginning of the year until I felt that they were all up to speed with free flowing CI:
1. I give each student a half sheet of paper and start each class with a short dictation. I start with texts in the present tense. The goal is to give the kids an anchor in the grammar that they just spent three years learning. It is something that they can relate to – a way to give them some confidence by going back to stuff they know. I can sneak the CI in later. I now know that I can’t hit the CI full blast – they don’t know how to react, how to play. Susan Gross told me often, when referring to grammar based classes, that “They forget the grammar.” She is so right. They forget the grammar! We know that Krashen has called into question the grammar based syllabus on the grounds that the brain has its own natural order of acquiring grammar which has nothing to do with the way it is presented in grammar books. But Susie is simply stating that kids forget the grammar that they have learned. She said that they forgot it within three months – long enough to pass test test and maybe a final. Then, poof! This certainly happened this year in my fourth year class. Again, my point in writing this is to show that I made assumptions about what a fourth year grammar based group of kids should know, and I assumed way too much. I am just figuring this out now, to show how slow on the uptake I have been this year. It has been very very emotionally difficult this year to try to convert a class from grammar into properly speaking the language – which is real grammar.
2. After that quick five minutes of dictation, during which they have been doing no CI but have been able to learn in the way they have been taught and so are familiar with, I have them flip over the half sheet of paper and write a text of four to five sentences in L2 about someone who had a problem and then solved it. I tell the kids to write at the level of grammar they feel confident about. Of course, this fourth year class has great difficulty in doing that, but, keeping positive, I write one of their texts verbatim on the board, praising it but then going to work to make the corrections in another colored marker. We talk about the grammar together. So far all of this is in English – it feels so far like the kind of French class they have known for years.
3. Once the corrections are done on that first text, sufficient praise meted out, with the reminder that in the successful communication of ideas in another language the student has aligned with the new CO state standards, and that is good, I then go into CI about twenty minutes into class. I ask background questions and we make up a story or just start doing some regular old CI using SLOW, Circling and Point and Pause. What does this do? It kind of ramps up the class into CI. The mistake I made before, all these months, was to try to teach stories to a class that did not know how to play the game. It was so foreign to them, and some still have not gotten out of the grammar/mechanical analysis parts of their brains. Bless their closed hearts. There are six advantages to this approach in dealing with kids who are at advanced levels but never experienced any CI based teaching:
– their grammar gets attention first and they feel that all is right with the world.
– the story line that we eventually build, because it emerges from one of their texts, is at a level of grammar that actually reflects their knowledge of grammar, and so is within their ability to grasp. This is the huge mistake that I made this year (having taught AP French for 24 years, I just assumed that these fourth year students would be at a higher level than they were – after all, these were the 4%ers who survived four years – and I was wrong).
– the text, being from them, is easy to personalize when the CI starts.
– the fact that they know that what they write may find its way to the whiteboard makes them work harder to write accurately.
– we have a physical version of the text on the whiteboard, which gives us a nice visual representation as we create CI from it.
– by ramping up into the CI slowly, the kids can learn to play the game of CI more easily, instead of starting out with a difficult story, as classes trained from the very beginning (in level one) in the art and fun of CI can do.
Of course, there are still kids in the class who are convinced that learning French by speaking it has nothing to do with learning it. For them, I offer a choice. They can do one of these three things in class:
– read a novel and, each class period, write a three quarter page synopsis of what they read, to be handed in as a ticket out of the classroom
– write three quarters of a page of French, also for a ticket out of the room.
– work in the Amsco grammar book on grammar, and show me the blanks that they filled out for an exit ticket.
One of the twenty two students has chosen the grammar book option, and seems content to work in that book during class, far across the room, but the rest just do the regular class, or act like they do, so that they can get out of the other work. But I like making the offer. It gives them a place to bail out to. Those whose hearts are open to the CI, who “get” it – there are about eight of those – have earned my deepest respect for having been able to learn to ride the bike facing forward. If a child is spaced in class and not showing the social skills that I require in all of my CI classes, I just suggest to them privately that they take one of the other options. That request puts them in the position of having to actually show up as a participating human being for my CI class.
I’m sure I am not the only one who has inherited a grammar class and had to deal with it in the gut all year. Anyway, this is one answer to the dilemna that has worked for me (only recently) regarding the dilemna of how to teach an advanced class that is, in fact, not advanced at all. Any other options you may have please share.
The damage that teachers do when they only teach kids how to manipulate the left brain shadow world of language is so substantial. Why those teachers – bless their closed minds – cannot see the nature of that damage will always be a mystery to me. I wouldn’t complain so much, but kids are suffering, so I have to speak my mind.