The Curriculum Should Align with the Instruction

2 thoughts on “The Curriculum Should Align with the Instruction”

1. Alisa Shapiro-Rosenberg

   November 7, 2018 at 8:35 pm

   What about the “common experience” argument? Today someone at a dept mtg said that they’d like to know what the students have heard in the TL before they come to that next grade level – a juncture where we pass off kids from one school to the next. I said, that if they know we all read XYZ novel, then the glossary should help them know what words the Ss heard (when we front-loaded) and read, but that ALAS! a certain percentage of the kids would seem as though the’d never seen those words before, cuz SLA is just like that.
   My tongue in cheek point is that when we’re good at this kind of instruction, we oughtta be able to extrapolate a bit. Our students have around 200 hours of Spanish total in grades 1-4. You can’t assume they can output much, but you certainly can assume they’ve heard lots of permutations of sentences using the Super 7 w/lots of cognates, places and proper names.
   A colleague said maybe it’s be nice to know which rejoinders the different feeder building teachers used. I noted that depending on the emergent stories and scenes we were creating, we needed and used different rejoinders at each building. But that whichever rejoinders she needed, she oughtta just use ’em, and with any luck some of the kids will already know or recognize them, but not everyone.
   The assumption is that having everyone apace is a good thing. And in general our kids are apace – some remember this, others that, other teachers exposed them to this or that. Apace to me means everyone is comprehending input of roughly the same complexity, for about the same amount of time. Do we want to take the time to inventory all the words, or insure that my group hears “grabs” at the end of 3rd grade – even when it happens not to emerge naturally? Imagine the time and tedium trying to catalogue who knows what and when. What an absurd and useless task. Or would it be helpful? What am I missing? I don’t think this is the direction our dept is going to follow – and I sincerely hope it is not. I will discourage it if I see it going in that direction.

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2. Ben Slavic

   November 7, 2018 at 8:51 pm

   Alisa asked above:
   …imagine the time and tedium trying to catalogue who knows what and when. What an absurd and useless task. Or would it be helpful?….
   Not helpful. A useless task. Period.
   Unless the last fifty years of SLA research is wrong.

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