I wanted to make this comment from yesterday into an article so I could reference it from the Output category in the future. It’s how I genuinely feel about the topic of forced speaking output. It is a highly charged topic for me because I once got into such a heated and protracted and negative argument with a colleague over it that I felt it best to leave that high school (Denver East HS), since we taught the same language and shared the same students and because the principal didn’t get CI either.
In my opinion students should never be graded on their speaking. At least I myself don’t connect it to their academic grade. I think it would be a big mistake for a teacher to do that since we do not work on speaking all year in class, because that is just a waste of time.
I think it very odd that a teacher would work on speaking output in a high school class knowing what we now know that output can never be forced and that it takes thousands of hours to see authentic speaking output. Yet there are still 1950?s teachers out there who don’t think about that and keep on with their Berlitz routines, much to the great emotional detriment of the kids and their future as language learners.
If a kid can’t speak at the end of the year, it is not a failure. When doing a “speaking assessment” where the kids address a visual prompt, there are so many things going on when a shy teenager must approach the teacher’s desk with other students within earshot. They are more aware of those kids than we think, and yet we must watch our classes during these few minutes with each kid. So I expect nothing, and I only give the assessment because my district requires it.
When tested from a prompt in a one-on-one situation with their teacher, most kids at the end of level one, never having been coached on how to speak, just mumble a few words and go back to their desks and I bubble in a number and the hypocrisy of school data collection grows a bit more in those moments.
Such testing is just not accurate, nor are the children particularly motivated, which is a factor in testing that has always confused me. All those literally millions of dollars spent each year in testing in DPS on collecting data on what tons of unmotivated kids have “learned” that year. Language learning is a process and there is no place where a goal can be said to have been reached. And that is without addressing the impact of attendance on the data.
So what do other DPS teachers consider an acceptable speaking grade? I guess a 3 (see the Primer hard link above for the DPS speaking rubric), where they get up to describing a beginning, middle and end, even it is awkwardly done. I think a 2 is just fine in level 1 where they say a complete sentence in the TL, no matter how gnarly it is. But then I’m a hippy and how a kid feels in my classroom is much more important to me than what they know.
I will say that motivated kids do some AMAZING things on the speaking test. I’m talking about the kids that are there AND focused every day. I had to run out of the room once to keep from crying in front of one quiet kid. I wasn’t in awe of just the kid, but also the magic that happened, where we hadn’t worked on speaking once and yet BAM! there it was – instant proof of the power of comprehension based instruction.
In one moment that kid wiped out years of struggle, confusion, tiredness and depression (the depression of being a teacher) in me. Thank God for such kids, right? (And God seems to be on a roll right now, with some of the unique kids He’s been bringing into our classrooms lately – can anyone say fearless?)
Again, hopefully Diana addresses these excellent questions from you and Eric. She certainly has put some major work into these tests, and major district money for years now.
Diana is a freak of nature – there is no one better in the world on Krashen in my opinion, not even Krashen. Each time we talk, or she observes and critiques me, my respect for her as a true force in WL education deepens. Plus she works so hard all the time. And no, you can’t have her in your district. She’s not done with us yet. I think Diana Noonan is a karma yogi. (This blog would certainly not exist without the influence of her and Susan Gross, my two teachers.)