Unlock with PatreonThe Problem with CI
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Curriculum Needed
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8 thoughts on “Curriculum Needed”
Thing is, proficiency levels are not tied to specific content. Controlling content, especially in a scope & sequence, is antithetical to how language acquisition develops. The best thing may be a minimal curriculum of 200 High Frequency words to orally try to acquire per year.
Yes Eric but what is Robert to do?
Robert, have you been following the thread over this year about how DPS basically has a 200 word frequency list as their Scope and Sequence and how that leads to teachers using CI to meet benchmarks that we wouldn’t be able to meet if we used a controlled content topic based curriculum devoid of CI?
I shared this Scope and Sequence document with Nathaniel. His school uses the textbook En Español as does our school. It is a way of on paper articulating that the textbook curriculum is followed along with CI based materials.
This is not perfect or great…it just is what it is. A document that helps others understand on paper what is going on.
If it is what Rob is looking for, he can plug in his own info when he downloads the MS word document.
http://optimizingimmersion.com/spanish-1-curriculum/
PS the school where this is used is called Desert Vista High School which is part of Tempe Union High School District in the Phoenix metro area. The document serves a school with a population of 32oo students. Just in case he needs details…
I haven’t done this yet, but how about picking out some of the stories and novels that you normally use at each level and you could pull from those “topics” and/or vocabulary that you “cover”, combined with 100-200 high frequency vocabulary words per level. If those stories and/or novels touch on cultural content then include that as well. I would also look at your district and/or national standards and weave those in.
For example, with “Le Nouvel Houdini” I would include that as a text and also say that we “cover”:
-expressing personal needs and desires
-transportation
-family
-navigating conflict
-relationships
-food
-modern means of communication (cell phones, social media, etc.)
-technology
etc…
Lists seem to comfort administrative types…
Rob this is exactly what we do in DPS. We take a novel and mention the cultural content, pull the structures we want to teach, teach them, and that’s our curriculum. Everything is based on the target vocabulary.
On a related note, Leigh Anne Munoz in Los Angeles just lists all the target structures in Matava’s books as her curriculum and she uses Anne’s stories to teach them.
So the concept of what a curriculum even is has undergone a huge shift with the arrival of CI on the scene – it’s when we pull target vocabulary and use PQA/stories/readings/songs to teach them. The old idea of a curriculum is to just copy the table of contents from a textbook, but that flies in the face of Krashen’s Natural Order of Acquisition hypothesis and makes no sense, and people are still buying that chapter by chapter design that works only in favor of the textbook companies and certainly not in favor of the kids.
Admin types also looooove backwards design, which is exactly what pulling structures from the novels is. Name it that in their own jargon. Link jGR & classroom rules with the Interpersonal Communication standard. Lots of TPRS novels have themes that connect back to standards like Culture, Comparisons, and Community. It all sounds quite impressive and official when you spell it out, but it has to be in their own admin-y language for them to approve.
Rob, do you need something specific to Chinese? There were 5 Chinese teachers who worked to compile a Chinese 1 high-frequency word list: http://tprsforchinese.blogspot.com/2013/08/beginning-chinese-high-frequency-list_30.html
I could send the original document by email if that helps.