Russ and Alisa made a couple of points that would be well go ponder before we give our next assessment on a story:
Russ: “I think we need to differentiate between language and content. The students create the content; the teacher provides the language. Just don’t think you can assess the kids on the structures. Because you don’t know if that’s even what they acquired. I think the real change needs to be in assessment and not instruction.”
Alisa: “Little kids can’t really do word for word simultaneous translations – when the scene or story is chopped up like that they lose their ‘grip’ on meaning. They get the story but not the (de-contextualized) individual words – I see this all the time. Definitely the targeting keeps us narrow and in-bounds. It also helps with the sound/cadence of the TL (and later, matching that to the reading). But who knows what’s really ‘acquired?’ So the assessment needs to reflect comprehension of the whole thing, not each fragment. The storytelling/asking format tries to insure that the structures and all the other parts and pieces are contextualized.”
Consider a grove of Aspen trees. They are richly connected below the ground, more so that above the ground, as per:
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141111-plants-have-a-hidden-internet
Scientists are starting to see an information highway going on between roots systems of trees, below the earth, that is far more intricate (one could say contextualized) from what is going on above the ground (decontextualized, as the leaves are not connected in the way that the roots are).
The image fits in Krashen’s theories about how the role of the unconscious mind (the root system) is the force that acquires language and not the pieces of language that can be seen on the surface at the level of the conscious mind.
This point alone brings full validation to Claire’s consistent point that it is through portfolios and rubrics that we best and most honestly assess our CI students.
Think of what Alisa said. Why analyze the living tree system above the ground when there is so much going on below the ground? Why analyze what our students can do in the decontextualized world above the ground (discrete translation events, memorization of lists) when one can learn so much more about what they know by testing in a way that looks at what is going on below the ground (contextualized assessment via portfolios and rubrics), as per this sentence by Alisa from above:
…when the scene or story is chopped up … [the kids] lose their ‘grip’ on meaning. They get the story but not the (de-contextualized) individual words…
Above ground, we see the beautiful shiny Aspen leaves rustling together on a crisp fall day in November in the mountains, but the”decontextualized” leaves are not at a level of contact that can be compared to what is happening at the (contextualized, cannot be broken into pieces, richly connected) level of the roots.
I might add that this image serves to express what I see as the critical difference between targeted and non-targeted comprehensible input in CI classes. Except in story scripts that are proven to hold interest because of the craftsmanship put into them, I see the best teaching and assessment possible being of a non-targeted nature, as per the root system analogy above. I will continue to fight for this position into the future.
Languages do not exist in lists of words. They need context to work. We should teach and assess that way. And if we have a choice between making it really interesting to our kids (untargeted) or only mildly interesting or downright boring (targeted) then we should choose the former. I know that Russ supports this position if no one else. Of course Anne Matava does because she is able to produce extremely high interesting scripts that work and just happen to have a few targeted words in front of them – there is big difference.
The fact is that targeting words from lists of thematic units or chapters in a novel produces a much lower quality of knowledge (compared to the shiny but unconnected leaves) than when stories are created in the untargeted way (where it’s all about our students hearing things in the richly connected way of the roots.)