This is anecdotal, with no hard data, but still is worth a short blog entry:
In the past three or four years, We in Denver Public Schools have been pushing to allow with new standards and proficiencies at the national (ACTFL) and state (Colorado State Standards as revised in December of 2009).
To our knowledge, we are the only school district in the country to be in the process of creating a complete set of assessment instruments that directly align with those standards. As we are now through the piloting phase for lower level testing, an interesting result recently came out of one high school in the district.
That high school showed good writing gains two years ago in one of the pilots, but did not, that year, focus on writing much, choosing instead to align with Krashen’s concept that writing, as an output skill, should not be the focus of the first years of instruction.
Last year, however, due to a school wide push on writing, the foreign language people of course did the same. The result was that their writing scores went down from the previous year. The extra time spent looking at how the language is formed on paper did not lead to higher writing scores.
Carla there has to be some place in Krashen’s writing where this kind of event was predicted. If you know where I would like to read it. Basically, the idea is that the study of discrete grammar and focus on the language and not on its meaning leads to paltry, at best, gains in writing.