Q. We have to submit a syllabus for each class. What do you suggest as a possible syllabus using your approach?
A. One answer and perhaps the best one is to hand in the same syllabus as your CI colleagues and teach it in half the time each class, which is easy to do and has the benefit of lessening the BOREDOM. This answer is for those caught up in departments where everybody wants the status quo to not change.
Q. But I want to do CI the whole period and make it work for me and the kids.
A. But you said you have to submit a syllabus.
Q. Well then what do I do?
A. Write the traditional syllabus or, better, “borrow” one. If you ask your colleages for theirs to use, they will be happy that you are such a reasonable person.
Q. But I want a CI syllabus.
A. That is a contradiction in terms. Do we have a syllabus for our children to learn how to speak their first language or does it happen naturally? The research is unequivocally clear on this point – we don’t need, and it is a bad thing, to plan out how we teach.
Q. But everybody will think I don’t have a plan.
A. You do have a plan. It’s the Star Sequence curriculum which is an incredibly tight and efficient taxonomy that, since it aligns with the way people actually acquire languages (in a non-linear way, and thus far more efficient than any linear curriculum/syllabus you could ever write.)
Q. But I have to hand something in.
A. Like I said, hand them what they want – something that looks like to them like you follow it. And follow it half the time and do pure CI the other half.. Why rock the boat? But don’t spend time wasting your time writing a “CI syllabus” because no such thing can even exist and be in true alignment with the research..
Q. This is confusing.
A. That’s what unreasonable requests of teachers that conflict with the actual research do – they confuse. Such requests for a syllabus make us despondent because the more expert we become at CI, the less we can align with ridiculous requests from ignorant people.
Q. Then what do I do?
A. Teach what is on the syllabus you borrow from somebody, the one that your department sorely wishes you would use bc your kids are having too much fun in class doing the StarChart and that makes them nervous. Just don’t waste your time writing a “CI syllabus” because when you do that, you create something monstrous in the original Latin sense of blending two things that can’t be blended.
Q. CI and a syllabus can’t be blended?
A. There are those who profit from your thinking so. But blending CI with existing curriculums and syllabi and all that nonsense WEAKENS comprehensible input instruction. It makes it more like school than the joyful thing it is.
Q. You are saying that the current CI community in blending CI with concepts and formulas that you find in schools, planning tools, etc. is all wrong.
A. Yes. Since 1999, I have seen a disturbing tendency to mix “school things” with CI to satisfy the ones in power in the school vs. to align with the actual research. This has the unwanted result of watering down the instruction. Interpret it as you will. That’s what I think.
Here are some articles on pacing guides from this PLC. If anybody is in a fight in their building over pacing guides, it may help to print them out:
Article 1:
The differences in philosophy between Comprehensible Input Instruction (CI) and traditional language education are:
• CI is a student-driven methodology. It responds to the linguistic needs of
the students at any given time. This makes it free-flowing curricularly.
• CI believes that grammar should be defined as “properly spoken speech” and is
learned over long periods – years worth – of listening to and reading the
language first. We all know how traditional teachers define grammar.
• CI believes that linguistic features are acquired in a natural order and that
the brain cannot be forced to acquire a feature out of sequence or before it is
ready.
• CI believes that each learner acquires knowledge at his/her own pace – that
no two students are at the same point in learning at the same time.
• In CI we believe that student output cannot be forced. Students need hundreds
of hours of repetitive input before they are ready for unrehearsed, spontaneous
output. Much like a baby hears his/her first language for thousands of hours
before being able to produce meaningful language. We believe that activities
practicing output before students have reached this point is counter-productive
and leads only to short-term learning goals, not to long-term acquisition.
• CI adheres to the Monitor Theory – we believe that direct instruction of
grammatical rules in not helpful until upper levels of instruction, after
students have acquired these grammatical features through context. At such a
time students can use the analytical rules to polish their understanding, and
to become truly literate in the language. Prior to this, overly strong focus on
the rules inhibits student production and acquisition – students focus on rules
rather than on meaning.
• CI believes that language instruction should be practical and focused on
communication in areas that interest students.
vs.
• The Pacing Guide assumes that instruction and pacing are based
on the curriculum, that they are not student-driven. This leads to a curriculum
that is not especially responsive to student needs.
• The Pacing Guide does not shelter vocabulary. It shelters grammar (properly
spoken language). Students are expected to learn copious amounts of vocabulary
for each chapter. Yet, students are exposed to one discrete feature of grammar
at a time.
• By sheltering grammar the Pacing Guide does not allow for the Natural Order
of Acquisition. It does not provide adequate exposure to late acquired features
early on and expects mastery of some late acquired features in beginning
stages.
• The Pacing Guide exists to make learning uniform across the district. Every
student in the district is expected to learn the same material at the same
time.
• The Pacing Guide and accompanying benchmark exams are filled with output-
oriented activities. The philosophy is that practice with output rather than
time of input produces accurate spontaneous output in students.
• The Pacing Guide, benchmark exams, and department teachers assume direct
instruction in grammatical rules. They assume that students will care about
technical terminology and will be able to discuss the grammatical features in a
metacognitive fashion.
• The Pacing Guide etc. assumes that language acquisition is an academic
activity that will result in preparation for college and perhaps eventual
communication in the language. Areas that currently interest students are not
covered if they do not fit into the long-term goals of academic study.
An analogy:
In a way, the pacing guide is like the old practice in manufacturing of ordering and stockpiling a bunch of materials on a rigid and pre-set schedule – it might sit there for a long time without being used. CI is like the more modern practice of ordering “on demand”. As something is needed, it is ordered and used. The second way is simpler, more efficient, and more economical. The pacing guide is an attempt to recreate the old style factory production line. Why try to do that when factories don’t even do it anymore? It is no wonder that students find much of their school experience boring, irrelevant, mystifying and unengaging; it is almost diametrically opposed to how they learn on their own. Early 20th-century methods in a 21st-century world leave everyone behind.
Article 2:
I think that pacing guides, in general, prevent any real instructional freedom and any cogent alignment with the research of Dr. Krashen. I experienced this in Jefferson County before I came to DPS. Now that the new state standards have been adopted, this oppositional pull is going to be played out over the next years in countless districts. At the state level (at least in CO, CA, OR and the other states that have now fully aligned with ACTFL), wording of new standards will have to align with the categories of novice low through intermediate mid (ACTFL), but the people who make decisions about foreign language curriculum at the district and building levels will likely balk at that and stay aligned with the pacing guide approach, especially with current budgetary limitations. The kids who drop out of language study will be the kids who are labeled incapable of going through to the higher levels of study, even though we know perfectly well that they can succeed just fine in the right setting, as proven by the fact that many of them are already fluent in two languages. Rarely will one find a district coordinator like Diana Noonan who will fearlessly align a district like ours in Denver Public Schools with the state and national standards simply because she knows that it is the right thing to do. I asked Diana about the monumental refusal by districts to align with national standards and ACTFL. My question was about who is going to hold the set-in-stone districts accountable to the new national changes. She said, and I think that she was referring to our own district but it applies across the nation, that it is up to the principals. If a principal is aware that the foreign language teachers in his or her building are not aligning with the new state standards, they can either investigate it and demand that change occur, or just turn away. Many will turn away, because the lack of involvement of principals in foreign language curriculum in general terms nationally is well-known – they just let the department do things that result in nine of ten kids dropping out after the second (required) year and shrug their shoulders. Thankfully, that is not the case at East. But student attrition will only worsen as the new rules governing language requirements locally take hold. The problem at the building level is compounded by the failure of the foreign language people at the district level – thankfully not in DPS – to axe the use of such anti-ACTFL curricular instruments as pacing guides, a failure based in ignorance that language acquisition is different from any other kind of learning. VanPatten, for example, suggests that the brain treats language differently from normal human cognition and therefore should not be studied cognitively, which is how it is typically taught. The pacing guides used in Maryland, that are used in Jefferson County here in CO, and elsewhere around the nation are not best for teaching languages – they are seriously flawed curricular models, but who is saying that, who is talking about that? We cannot let go sight of what we believe is right and best for our kids.
Article 3:
It is evident that our new district pacing guides are welcomed by CI teachers but not by teachers still tied to the book. I have been on our district’s vertical team for over a year now helping to develop the guides, with lots of meetings, and I can say the above with a fair degree of accuracy. Why?
Because when we do stories, it is an easy thing to incorporate required district vocabulary into our speech, but when we teach from a book, it is nearly impossible, because book activities naturally exclude large amounts of L2, presenting little pieces of language only. The book presents the ocean to students in little cups, as it were.
The pacing guides are not to be feared as long as the teacher, the teacher of the future, can incorporate them into a non-lecture, non-book-based format. The instruction will link to the curricular demands/pacing guides seamlessly, and the students will not even be aware that the curriculum is being delivered.
The teacher as “deliverer of instructional services” will be a thing of the past, and all the passion for learning that can occur in a free Socratic open-ended discussion will be the dominant visible quality of the classroom. Class discussion in L2 will naturally and effortlessly and elegantly flow up the taxonomy, making each class interesting, because the same content (the words of L2) will be delivered in new and spontaneous ways each class period.
How wonderful that minutia required by districts can be presented to children in a way that it doesn’t look like minutia, and in a way that the kids really want to be a part of learning it, just because it is fun.
Article 4:
1. Kid-centered comprehensible input instruction is of interest
to kids. Textbooks are not. When required by my school to use a textbook, I
decided that I would try to use readings from the textbook. Then I read it. It
was boring. I was bored so I knew the kids would be bored. I closed the book.
2. There is an inverse relationship between eyelids and textbooks. The wider we
open our textbooks the tighter we close our eyes.
3. There is a new phone app called World Lens which is a point and translate
app. This makes obsolete just about anything except face to face interaction.
4. The textbook chops up language into parts; CI treats language as a whole. CI
is like leading students up a staircase to fluency; the textbook is like
carrying the kids up a few steps and then giving a test. Since you can’t go
anywhere from there, you go back down and go up another “staircase.”
5. Using textbook listening exercises does nothing for student listening skills
because the textbook writers take a whole class of listening time and expect
the kids to be able to understand based on memorizing vocabulary and grammar.
There is no sense of the enormous amount of time/work necessary to sensitize
the student’s brain and ear to spoken language.
6. Focusing on textbook grammar leads to a lot of English in the class. Using a
lot of English in the FL class is like talking baseball in the history class;
it is off task.
7. Focusing on grammar divides students into cans and cannots. This requires
homogeneous grouping. Language and CI unite the class. Grammar has a way of
marginalizing the majority.
8. A lot of work goes into modifying textbooks for any approach. Why pay all of
that money if it is not going to reduce your workload? And why pay all that
money in the first place?
9. We used to say that at least the textbook is a good resource. With the
internet resources online, a textbook is at best an obsolete, overpriced
resource.
10. Presenting material in thematic units or in pacing guides destroys the
confidence of students and is boring. They can’t remember all the words in the
lists. Rather, we would do much better to introduce expressions of time, etc.
in very small doses, sprinkling them lightly into our instruction throughout
the year, rather than confining them to one chapter in a book, to be forgotten
after the test.