This was posted a week ago, but for those who may have missed it here it is again. It is far too important to miss, as we further redefine what the word curriculum even means:
This, from Michele Whaley, is part of mounting evidence that the end is near for the old guard in language teaching:
This morning at the AFLA 2015 conference, Scott dumbfounded our curriculum director by saying that he spends five weeks on a unit that is organized around the Super Seven verbs. Our director asked whether those five words can constitute a unit.
Yes.
Scott then demonstrated, through assessment samples, that he is covering all the required “themes” that our director wants to see. He just doesn’t organize his lessons that way.
And, by the way, Bill Van Patten has been to our conference (he’s still here in Alaska, visiting Girdwood with Betsy Paskvan). I’ve blogged a bit about it, and Martina Bex has too, but here’s the big news: he said, “TPRS is absolutely an appropriate method to use in the classroom context.” He has a colleague who uses TPRS, and he has “been to several workshops.” We were all beside ourselves (we being the CI/TPRS side of the fence).
If our director were already not unhappy enough about that, the next keynote Bill gave, he said that we have no business grading language classes. He said it’s really hard to get lower than a B in his classes at U Michigan. Language acquisition is complex and messy, and we can’t actually teach language. People acquire it by hearing input that they understand. Some people acquire faster, but we don’t really know why, and some people get to higher levels in the language; seems to be connected to cognition. We can’t explain that either, but their L1 level gives us some correlation.