The topic of thematic unit testing and the testing of vocabulary came up in a private email I got today from a colleague. My responses to her questions are in italics:
Ben,
Q. I recently bought TPRS in a Year! and PQA in a Wink! and they are great! While browsing your blog, I read about how you do thematic vocab tests from the curriculum.
A. I no longer do those. I did them when I needed them, for two reasons: 1) to make the kids and parents who “needed” homework (they exist) to have some, 2) to give the appearance to the school I worked in that I gave homework and tests (not just the quick quizzes that I rely on completely now for grades). Now, happily, I am in a fully TPRS/CI based school, with nobody including admin who even believe that those things help. They simply don’t. Nobody can learn from memorizing lists of words because language learning is an unconscious process and because the mind selects, during sleep, which features it heard that day to keep, the conscious mind does not and cannot do that, so such things as thematic unit memorization and tests on same are useless. So I don’t do them anymore.
Q. Does this imply that you do not do vocab tests on the words/phrases learned in class as well?
A. Correct. The mind cannot operate in rogue fashion to identify, on a test, a single word. That is not language. If we went around and said single words to communicate, maybe it might be a good way to test, but since we don’t, and the wiring of the mind isn’t set up that way, it makes it extremely frustrating for a student to hear or see a single word and be able to identify it. This is all my opinion. Word lists and vocabulary lists is a brutal way to assess kids. Once in a university class I had to assess that way and I just quit, because the department chair was French and didn’t get Krashen. Plus, she made me use French in Action, which was even more confusing to the students. University kids were thereby shamed into thinking that they were stupid by big long lists of words having little to do with anything, and by that million miles an hour video program that simply confused most students and screwed up their GPA’s. They had to memorize words like “the trunk of a car”. Useless and shaming.
Q. Is studying vocabulary the only homework they have?
A. They no longer do that as explained above. It’s a waste of precious CI minutes in class. Instead of talking about homework, as I am fully in Alfie Kohn’s corner on this, let’s talk about making use of the time we have been given with our kids in the classroom. Let’s respect their time with family, after school, etc. I really only have the time I have in class anyway, since kids just hate doing homework and since it doesn’t work at all for 96% of the kids. So, if it takes over 10,000 hours to reach fluency, and I am able in a four year Advanced Placement program to do about 125 hours per year, that is still only 1/20th of the time I need to get my kids fluent. For that reason, I don’t want to waste time doing things that are without any real purpose or show any concrete results in my classroom, just because someone with absolutely no awareness of Krashen or how we actually learn languages tells me I have to give a test. As Robert Harrell says, that would be professionally unethical, to do something in my classroom that I know is wrong for my students.
Q. Do you ask the students for any evidence that they are studying the words at home?
A. Again, that is one of the reasons kids hate languages in our country. I am not going to play a game of Gotcha. I respect my children, and need that respect reciprocated in order for us to take down the wall of mistrust and intimidation that other teachers have built around those kids. I need my students’ good will for PQA and stories to work. I am not going to run them around with a bunch of games that have no value, and when I do that they take down those walls and we start to trust each other and have fun.
Disclaimer: all of what I say above comes from my own classroom experience and what I have read by Krashen. It is through teaching in the classroom that I have come to the above conclusions. There is no way that I can say that my opinions are “the right way” re: testing of vocabulary. It’s just my way. I just need to make that clear.
Related: https://benslavic.com/blog/2008/12/24/the-rassias-methodfrench-in-action-vs-tprs/