I got this question:
Ben:
So I was sharing your Zoom course (ed. note: The Ultimate CI Books/Star Sequence approach) with someone who works with the curriculum in our district. I mentioned that it is not planned, no prep, just using student input to “teach” the language. They were a bit shocked and asked how you can plan to help students that do not meet your goals for that day, week, unit, year, etc.? I let them know that this focuses on the Communication Standard for World Languages and checks off a lot of the “I can” statements for students. Our district PD has been focused on unpacking our standards and making “I can” statements for our curriculum.
How do I answer this question? I think the goal of Communication is too broad to grasp for others who do not teach a language. Advice?
I responded:
Do people still do “I Can” statements in WL instruction? Wow! That went out with the Edsel and the Yugo. Why?
Let’s look at the way you put it above:
“Our district PD has been focused on unpacking our standards and making “I can” statements for our curriculum.”
Let’s unpack that. If we read it carefully and reflect on the research, we see the flaw in this is all loaded up in the last three words of that sentence:
“…for our curriculum…”.
That’s where the true problem lies. For the vast majority of schools whose “curriculum” is a textbook, and not the language, which is the real curriculum, “Can Do” statements are bullshit, for precisely that reason. Teachers who, when told to plan and submit a curriculum, naturally grab the table of contents in the textbook they are using and start copying. That’s a curriculum?
A textbook is not a curriculum. It’s a rather hideous misinterpretation of the research about how people actually acquire languages, and every textbook ever written on language acquisition has divided and split and dismantled and brought into the confidence-destroying arena of language acquisition a kind of stench that one can smell in the hallways of the dismal and tomb-like classrooms of second language classrooms ,where kids just want to become invisible instead of remembering words from boring lists and rules like “in the past tense ,when the helping verb is avoir, the past participle agrees with any preceding direct object, including relative pronoun objects”.
“Oh really? I absolutely love that!,” say five kids in the class….
“Oh really? Well that is a snoozer!” say the other thirty kids in the class….
and off they go to sleep.
Why do they not care? Because it’s not interesting! The “curriculum” (the textbook WAS NEVER MEANT TO BE A CURRICULUM is not a mind-boggling concept. THE CURRICULUM IS THE LANGUAGE. The textbook draws the learner’s mind out of the place where language acquisition happens and puts it in the place where it doesn’t happen, in literally the WRONG PART OF THE BRAIN.
Here is what Noam Chomsky says about it:
“Grammar [is] acquired by virtually everyone, effortlessly, rapidly, in a uniform manner, merely by living in a community under minimal conditions of interaction, exposure, and care.”
And let’s make sure that when Chomsky says “grammar” we understand it to mean properly spoken and written language, not the freakish thing that it has become under the index finger of the textbook companies.
Humans learn languages not by studying them (a conscious process) but simply by absorbing the message (an unconscious process). When that occurs, all our students should really have to do for real proficiency is absorb the message. But, for that to happen, we have to teach in a way that allows them to focus on the message and not the form of the language. So that they can acquire and not suffer on Memorization Street.
Teachers of languages must give up the Big Lie that students can learn a language from a textbook. That is a very profitable lie ($10.3 B according to Krashen) but a shitty one, because its end result is kids who feel stupid. Is that what we want in our profession. It’s the Big Lie, over and over, year after year, decade after decade, and the Big Lie – the idea that teaching grammar involves teaching chapters in a textbook, high frequency verb lists, semantic sets, thematic units, isolated vocabulary from chapters in those ineffective little “novels” – beats on like a tired old car engine….
One thing is to not expect people in education to actually understand the research. It is different. It’s not one-size-fits-all and so if can use Can Do statements in math and science classes, then you can use them in language classes. That’s now what it is.
The entire topic raised by this question comes from ignorance (really it should be called disrespect) of the tandards and the research.
So the shocked response of that person who still believes the Big Lie, i.e. the textbook belief that in languages can be divided and pigeonholed into goals and objectives and this and that, it is all a violent (bc of the effect on students’ lives) affront to the research. This topic is one of the most frustrating to those who know the research. Most language teachers, I have found in my own travels, don’t.
Most language teachers the world over are under the spell of a Big Lie.
On the Can Do statements, if you search that term here on the PLC, you will find articles about them. I will publish them in subsequent posts to this one. The bottom line is that the research talks about INPUT PRECEDING OUTPUT BY YEARS. SO A CAN DO STATEMENT THAT A CHILD CAN OUTPUT SPEECH OR WRITING IN LEVEL 1 OR 2, IS NOT CONSISTENT WITH THE RESEARCH. IT IS LIKE BUILDING A FOUNDATION OF A HOUSE WHERE THE ATTIC IS AND THEN EXPECTING THE HOUSE TO STAND.
If those people you are speaking with would just read the research and study the ACTFL pages, they would see the lie. Their hubris is located in their desire to use “curricular goals” (the textbook approach) that apply well to fields like math and science but then in cavalier fashion applying them to our work. It amounts to trying to drive a car down a road with square tires. Hasn’t that been going on long enough? Are we ready for a change in favor of the students and teachers and not the textbook lobbies?