In every department somewhere there is probably a list of standards that the teacher is ostensibly teaching towards. Here are the ones in my current school, which obviously need to be changed since 3 of the 4 teachers in our (middle school) department are now using comprehensible input methods.
I apologize in advance for the vulgarity, but I don’t know how else to say it but to ask WTF? I must be wrong on this, or dreaming and these really aren’t the standards from…. where do they come from even? I don’t know but I think they are foreign language standards. Please help me with this if you know where they come from.
If they are real, the thing that I notice about them is that they must have been written by people at the national level who are supposed to understand how we acquire languages. But if you read the standards below, most of them are totally whacky and have nothing or little to do with what students can actually do after a year of language study. It is because almost all of them have to do with output.
Just read them and think if a student in a level one class is capable of doing any of these things. I sense the stinking hand of the textbook companies on these standards. If the hand is not actually on there, then I sense the hands of teachers who think that textbooks are necessary to teach a language on them, at the least. To meet them you need some kind of product. But I won’t go there.
Few of the standards for level 1 students have to do with input. These standards really make no sense in terms of the way people learn languages, and yet are probably in use in some form in 99% of the schools in America.
I put the verbs in red that ask, against the research, for output:
1.1.1 Understand and use basic age-appropriate courtesy expressions. (These are not simple!)
1.1.2 Ask and answer simple questions. (These are not simple, either, even the simple ones!)
1.1.8 Exchange basic descriptions with each other and group. (not simple to do authentically!)
1.2.1.Comprehend main ideas in narratives.
1.2.3. Comprehend brief written narratives.
1.3.4 Produce and present illustrated stories and posters.
1.3.5 Write short messages.
1.3.6 Deliver short oral messages.
1.3.8 Write short well-organized compositions.
1.3.9 Write personal letters.
1.3.13 Present opinions.
1.3.14 Prepare an oral or written summary of a plot.
1.3.15 Write organized and original compositions and reports.
1.3.16 Prepare and deliver oral presentations.
1.3.17 Perform scenes from a play
So, beginning kids either in middle school or high school across the land are supposed to be able to do the above things in their first year of study of the language. Again, I have to ask where these came from. Are they from some English standards somewhere? What have I failed to understand?
Note that all but two (1.2.1 and 1.2.3) ask the child for output. That doesn’t align with the research. Most people can’t do them after five or more years of study. Maybe ten.
There are two in the list that actually do (1.3.4 and 1.3.17) align with what we do in comprehension based instruction. However, they do those two tasks in our classrooms because they have a teacher guiding them along step by step in how to do it. But in these it is expected that the children do those things by themselves.
