This and the next few posts are follow-ups/rewrites/recollecting of previously published posts on the topic of the new AP exam format. I just wanted to revisit and update them. The blog queue is really jammed right now, but I have decided not to put too much up here at a time. There is Robert’s Chapter 4 waiting, and also Jim has some articles in the queue.
Anyway, for these next few entries, for background, you may want to first refer to:
https://benslavic.com/blog/wp-admin/post.php?post=16320&action=edit
This first post is basically a republishing of various comments by Robert:
If you look strictly at what the AP Exam is now designed to test, it is extremely TCI/TPRS oriented.
First of all, it is designed around the Three Modes of Communication.
There is a section of Oral Interpretation, a section of Reading Interpretation, and a section of Mixed-Media Interpretation.
There is a section of Written Interpersonal Communication (e.g. an e-mail exchange) and a section of Oral Interpersonal Communication. I was very impressed with how this one was put together. It is a series of utterances on a tape/disc/computer interspersed with silence for the student’s replies. If the replies speak at all to the prompt, it will make sense – no matter what the choice of specific vocabulary might be.
– There is a section of Oral Presentation and a section for Written Presentation.
The Course Framework gets very detailed with what a response at each level would or should look like. While I understand why the College Board is doing this, reading through all of that is part of what prompted me to adopt the idea that since I teach for proficiency, I need only to define that – anything above it is advanced, anything below it is basic, below basic or far below basic.
Because ACTFL holds copyright on its terms, the College Board uses different terminology for the same things. Once you figure out what the new terms “really” mean, you’ll find you are on very familiar ground.
As we have noted on here before, we need to work on getting people to stop paying lip service to the Standards and ACTFL’s position statements. Now the College Board has handed another point of leverage. Since AP is seen as the “Holy Grail” of high school language achievement, having it align with real communication enables us to show that what we are doing is what is being tested.
As I noted elsewhere, there is not a single discrete-item grammar question on the new German test; there is no instance of verb conjugation, not even subject-verb matching. You do have to be able to read and hear the language, understand it, and respond by answering questions that show Interpretive Competence, Interpersonal Competence or Presentational Competence.
I would say that the AP changes should spur significant change in a grammar-driven program. The new Course is designed around the Six Course Themes (Global Challenges, Science and Technology, Contemporary Life, Personal and Public Identities, Families and Communities, Beauty and Aesthetics. You might be interested in viewing the German Curriculum Framework (the French is identical except for language-specific references):
http://advancesinap.collegeboard.org/CurriculumFrameworks/AP_German_LanguageCCFramework.pdf