I mentioned in the last post that I only stop working with a verb when it feels “saturated”. Here are some more thoughts on that important topic:
I only add a verb to the list on the upper walls when I feel that roughly 90% of the students in each of my classes “is familiar” with it. The students don’t need to have “conquered” the verb in the sense that they “are fluent with it” in all its forms and tenses, which is quite impossible. To get to that level with a verb requires thousands of hours of input!
However, if the students feel comfortable with the verb when they hear it and see it and can readily respond to simple yes or no (or other one word answer) quiz questions, then we can add it to the list.
Besides the quizzes, it’s kind of evaluation by intuition. I know. Hippy talk. But can you not tell more after a long conversation with a close friend how much they got from the conversation? Do you need to quiz them on it? There will be more use of human intuition in the future in language instruction. It is time for teachers to grow up and stop relying on heavy testing to find out what our students know.
Besides, as the adults in the room, it is our job to know whether our students are grasping what we are teaching them or not. It’s a minute by minute thing, just like in a real conversation. If our students are giving us the deer in the headlights look, that is a signal to slow down! When our students don’t understand, we are not doing formative minute by minute assessment. That is not good.
Would we give our own children tests to find out how they are growing up? Don’t we just know?