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AP Situation – 3
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7 thoughts on “AP Situation – 3”
Thank you to all of you for keeping this discussion going for so long, I truly appreciate it. It will be my little summer project to rake through all the entries on this topic and come up with a plan that I can live with.
Brigitte just keep in the back of your mind, the bottom line so to speak about this whole forced job transition, is that you are a teacher who uses comprehensible input and that it, not the AP Exam, forms the launching pad for all your professional decisions for your “AP” kids in terms of deciding on strategies, etc.
Natural speech and reading that is participatory and reciprocal (early VanPatten) trumps everything. If their eventual scores are not high enough for the people, you’ll know you’ve done your best. If they want you to get higher scores and to worry about that all the time, which seems to be the script most AP teachers buy into, tell them to pay you more money and you will think about it.
Amen Robert!!!
Robert said:
…most will be tourists and talk to friends and family; that does not require academic language, but it does require interpersonal skills….
This is such a damning statement about those who write the exam. They, being academics, think that language tests should be about what THEY know. But what language is not about academic details at all, rather it is about interpersonal communication of a broad nature that all people can use and enjoy.
This tags back to what Teri Waltz said on the list about how giving college credit for reading this blog as being wrong. It’s not wrong.
Here is my vote for Sentence of the Year on this blog, from Robert:
…to use the jargon: I am trying to help my students acquire Basic Interpersonal Communication Skills (BICS), not Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency (CALP)….
Seriously folks anyone who really gets that sentence and still thinks that the AP exam is a needed and valuable summative tool for language teachers would have to rethink their positions. That is a crushing statement. A student who can go into a café and converse but cannot answer a prompt having to do with global warming is the goal, and not the reverse.
There was a little discussion about the OPI test here a while ago. I don’t enjoy the OPI and it was in part because I was asked, in the course of the interview, to explain my views on what the Chinese government should institute in policies to prevent pollution (any and all types). Ok, now that’s a challenging language topic on the one hand, but also a huge political discussion. Do I explain to the interviewer any of my political views and believe the OPI when they tell you interviewers are not allowed to dock you for your opinions? What if I really don’t want to discuss Chinese politics with an interviewer who is obviously from the People’s Republic? The whole thing was uncomfortable.
He probably asked it because I was better able to handle more personally-connected topics: school and work, daily life, family, hobbies. Yep, safe to say I never had a discussion in Chinese about political policies related to pollution before that or since. The interviewer sets you up to speak until you break down, then they score you based on where and how you broke down. Maybe this is what the AP is trying to do. Find the breaking point of the student and then assign a 1-5 score?
I can also say that the WPT did not seem to have that kind of gotcha topic. Written, presentational communication didn’t have the give-and-take aspect at all, but the topics were broader in my opinion.
They broke me down when I took it (whatever it was called back then) as well, Diane. I had to explain what I would do if I were on my way to a job interview and I noticed a small stain on my sport coat, on my sleeve. I bungled it. I had never been on my way to a job interview in France with a stain on my the sleeve of my jacket. The University of South Carolina professor who administered it definitely had that smug look that you also sensed from the interviewer who had you cornered on unfamiliar ground. And your point about the politics is also really well made. When I took it, I just felt stupid. And yet I speak French ok, almost as well as the interviewer perhaps. I just got cornered and nervous and she had the upper hand. How primitive!