Q. If we don’t use stories to help teach grammar, then how will students be able to express themselves without these “tools” to communicate their own thoughts? They only hear us (teachers) speaking Spanish for 80 minutes/day, 5 days/week for a few semesters. How will students know how to compose high level essays for the AP Spanish Exam without knowing grammar? I really like CI, but I would love a good answer to my question.
A. This may not be a good answer, but it is my answer. Producing high level essays for the AP exam is not at the top of my own personal list of the most important things to do in language education. It is way at the bottom, in fact. I prefer to align with the research and with what I believe is best for all kids, not just a few of them. The AP exam is a frivolous waste of time. It’s very existence defeats people by skewing the concept of what “learning a language” even means, as if it is some kind of contest. I taught AP French language and literature for a quarter of a century and all it did was divide my the community down racial and economic lines while making me crazy.
Let’s admit it: such exams are for the few. It reflects a sad truth about our society – that we still live in a society that is built, increasingly, for the few, for people who for some reason feel the need to “be the best” a lot of the time. If we truly wish to call ourselves patriotic Americans, then shouldn’t the work we are doing not divide us but rather represent an attempt to bring together the hundreds of thousands of kids each year who feel defeated by the very AP/IB elitist four year program of instruction that is designed to merely coddle the few?
Of course, this is all just my opinion and I may be way off, but I feel strongly that the advent of the CI movement spells the beginning of the end of such wastes of time. Inclusion is seen now by a growing body of educators as counting more than how far a few privileged kids can trudge up toward the top of some “academic mountain”, one unfortunately made from the intellectual and emotional corpses of millions of “average” children because of the way the program is skewed in favor of the few.
CI is going to eventually suck the life out of elitism in language education. The process started back in the 1990s when Blaine Ray consciously and purposefully set out to apply Steven Krashen’s research to finding ways to actually reach all of the kids in language classrooms in ways that pleased everyone, retained students and brought real results across the board.
The reasons most kids who start studying a second language in American classrooms quit are all centered around the equity piece. They CAN learn a second language, without effort and without being pressured and without being made to feel stupid. So whom will we serve in our classrooms in America? The few? Not me. I used to. I don’t anymore. It is because I don’t want to be a part of separating our country down economic and racial lines. Been there done that. It never felt right. There is a new way.
Here is what Dana Miller-Kitch, who is a member of this group, wrote to me on this topic in an email this weekend:
Hi Ben,
We had some inclusion consultants come to our school this week as we are moving towards being a more inclusive international school. They played this video, “The Myth of Average” –
https://youtu.be/4eBmyttcfU4
When he talks about designing our curriculum so we teach to the edges, I think what you and Tina have come up with does just that. Kids of all ability levels succeed in our classes because we don’t teach to the average. We teach and they absorb what they can. We teach them to push themselves to be their best, wherever that is, and to know where they are at. We teach them to be self-aware as learners (I get them to self-assess with all the rubrics you’ve provided) and we talk about it with them. I can’t think of a better way to teach language in terms of teaching to the edges.
Dana