More Thoughts After ACTFL

It's amazing - I went to ACTFL this year feeling worn down and like TPRS and Comprehensible Input just can't fit into my mandated curriculum anymore.  After all, the absolutely wonderful novels are not on the approved reading list.  Free and Voluntary Reading is discouraged, and I am supposed to keep my students on grade level reading and writing Common Core standards, even if that means leaving the target language and reading and writing in English.  My storytelling has gotten lackluster, my questions are predictable, my students won't participate... and I wondered "why do I keep fighting the bureaucratic machine"

Now, here I am, a few days post-conference.  The difference is amazing.  I went to some great sessions.  (The trick is don't feel guilty, if a session doesn't seem to fit your needs, leave and find a different one that does!  Another trick is, if there is a time slot with no interesting sessions, hang out in the exhibit hall.  I think I set up camp at the TPRS publishing booth!) 

Randomish thoughts:

I went to a session on writing and the Common Core.  I figured I needed to see what other people are doing.  Well, they advocated staying in the Target Language and *supporting* the standards but by getting our students to be proficient in reading, writing, and thinking in our target language.  How refreshing!  Now if I can just communicate this effectively to the "higher ups"

I already mentioned the embedded reading and cultural reading sessions.  I keep thinking how much more accessible reading will be with the layers of reading.  Start small and build up.

The last session I went to, on Sunday afternoon (yes I got kicked out for last call) was about making homework meaningful.  

I have fallen into the trap of, I guess flipping my classroom in a way.  The high school teachers here all use traditional language learning models.  My students leave my classroom and have to take daily vocabulary and grammar quizzes.  No longer is it about acquisition or communication.  And I have struggled to find a way to balance my beliefs and research with the expectations of my district.  The final exam is also very much based on grammar rules and vocabulary memorization rather than acquisition in the language.  Some of the questions come directly from the student workbooks.  And so, since I do not use the textbook or workbook in class, I assign workbook pages as homework in order to familiarize my students with the layout and expectations of the book's author (and therefore the exam), as well as their future teachers.

Which brings me back to the session.  The presenter used backward planning starting with those "can do" statements in the program (My textbook says things like "students will be able to order food at a cafe") then planning backwards to figure out what instruction with actually be able to get the students to that point.  Her homework reflects that same philosophy.  Rather than assigning the grammar activities because they are there, and are expected, she has students prepare for the oral classwork the following day.  She asks students to "be ready to____" and such activities as "discuss three things you own" in this case, students will be using the verb tener (to have), but the homework focuses on the skill of using it in context rather than isolated lists of verb forms, and students are pressured into doing the homework because they have to stand up in class and speak.

I woke up at five o'clock this morning thinking about homework, my curriculum, and how I can get my pedagogical philosophies to match what I am teaching again..  (I am such a nerd!)  How can I get my students more involved in what they are learning, more vested in it, etc.  Also, if they are truly able to acquire this language, in theory they should be able to do as well on the test.  @martinabex.com @embeddedreading.com

TPRS in a non TPRS department

TPRS in a non-TPRS department


There are 9 teachers in my department. I am the only teacher who is trying to use TPRS. I have taken a softer, gentler approach this year. Meaning, I have not advertised my use of TPRS, nor have I chastised the other teachers for using the methods they do. Instead, I have sought to find places and times where what I believe can be shared in an open way. For instance, I shared a participation rubric that Ben Slavic posted on his blog. I have shared strategies for reading skills.

I discovered that in my case, it is not that my department is anti-TPRS, it’s that the bureaucracy of the district I teach in requires a high degree of lock-step teaching. We are expected, district wide, to be on the same chapter as every other teacher within a few days.

It is also a lack of familiarity. When I have made comments, such as referencing the top 100 words used in spoken Spanish, or that “even stupid kids growing up in Spain learn to speak Spanish” that my ideas are listened to. I even brought up the topic of homework not having an impact on learning. One of the teachers decided to try an experiment with her students – and she is the most traditional teacher in the group. Not everybody agrees with me, but that’s ok. I didn’t become a teacher to have everybody agree with me. It’s enough that we can all listen to each other with respect.



Now, I don’t share everything. In part because TPRS sounds so fuzzy and not well prepared if you don’t SEE it. I mean, telling other teachers that you aren’t too worried about grammar just rings all sorts of alarms. And it isn’t even true. But, it’s hard to put into concise words what we do. So, mainly I share in small bits and pieces.

Towards the end of the year I gave up and taught the old way. The kids had to have a certain amount of information in order to be able to pass the standardized exam, and I didn’t have enough time to cover it all in a traditional TPRS manner (we lost 11 instructional days this year to snow just for starters) and the amount of vocab and grammar just cannot be acquired in that time. So, I used all the time-worn strategies of language teachers everywhere. A lot more of my students failed the second semester than the first, and my exam grades were consistent with first semester grades.

Sooo... now that I am on break I am plannning to use Backwards Designing to map out my own personal TPRS curriculum that aligns with the district pacing guide by semesters next year. There is a rumor that we might be able to keep our students for the whole year, which would ease some of the stress too. I would have a whole year to get students to where they “belong.”

textbook vocabulary

I'm wondering exactly who it was that decided what was "essential" vocabulary for a Spanish I student to be exposed to. Amazingly, this list is almost identical from book to book and publisher to publisher.

I created a spreadsheet with the top 100 words in Spanish, a list of good TPR words, and the vocabulary from various textbooks I have used. Now I am adding the words from my new textbook, and there are very few words that I have to add to the list, mostly I am just noting where in this book they are found.

And who figured out it is vital to teach the word autito chocador???? (bumper car)

New Teacher Orientation

I am sitting here trying to wrap my brain around what was discussed during our New Teacher Orientation this week.

Apparently, Grammar Translation and ALM "don't work anymore" and the cutting edge theory is the Monitor Theory. So, we should adjust our teaching style to reflect this. We were also asked if we had ever heard of "the Natural Approach."

I am feeling like I have been in a time warp or something. Because, I swear, that the Monitor Theory is at least twenty years old, and that the results of Grammar Translation and ALM were never very positive, so to say they "don't work anymore" is a bit hard to swallow. Cutting edge is a 20 year old theory???

And then, when I mentioned a strategy I use to lower students' affective filters on day one, they looked at me like I had three heads. I thought for sure if they were referencing the Monitor Theory and the Natural Approach, they must be at least passingly familiar with Dr. Krashen's work. But, sadly, they didn't understand what I meant with affective filter.

We have pacing guides which spell out exactly how long each lesson should take and in which order we should teach them - 1 day to establish classroom norms; 2 days to teach greetings and basic introductions; 2 days for... etc. And we MUST have a warm-up activity because kids "thrive on routines." Great. I asked if my Free Voluntary Reading time could be considered their warm-up activity. The response I got? "That sounds like a private school thing." Because, obviously, public school students can't benefit from the thing that research shows is the best indicator of language acquisition? It isn't in my curriculum and it's a little dangerous for me to use it. I wonder if I show them copies of my books, which all have Dr. Krashen's name on them, if it might make a difference? See, here is the Monitor Theory, that was Dr. Krashen 20 years ago. Here is the Natural Approach. That was Dr. Krashen too. Here is what Dr. Krashen says about reading...

One other disturbing thought for me was when we were asked to be self-reflective and ask "what if" questions of ourselves, such as "what if I were to teach the subjunctive using TPRS?" At least I know they've heard the acronym.

let's hear it for meaningless work!

Here's a quote from Losing Our Minds, p. 272: "Teachers commonly complain that gifted students only show effort for what interests them, as though this is a terrible thing. However, when you stop to think about it, most of us exhibit little enthusiasm for repetitive or meaningless work. [...] Teachers will have better success if they discuss the overall goals of the assignment with the children and let them make choices for how they will meet those goals, as well as how they will demonstrate that those goals have been met."

Once again, I am amazed at how well what I have been reading lately about gifted education theory meshes with my views on language acquisition and with what I know of TPRS. Of course students don't want to pay attention to boring, repetitive, meaningless work. Only those high-achievers, internally motivated and authority pleasing students would put up with that. And yet, as teachers, we are constantly surprised by students' lack of work. I especially like the part that points out that as adults we don't relish boring work either. The difference is that as adults we are given the choice to be selective, while our students are not.

our toolbox

How often have I heard somebody say that TPR or TPRS are good tools to have as a classroom teacher but that we cannot use them exclusively?

Here's my translation of that thought: TPR and TPRS don't work. However, they are good buzzwords so we will say that we use them. We "use" TPR anytime we have a student move in any way, even if it is just their fingers for a few seconds. We "use" TPRS anytime we tell a story in our class. (In this translation TPR and TPRS are roughly equivalent except that in TPRS there are stories.)

The theory behind TPR and TPRS is now neatly swept aside. The research is dismissed as banal or inconsequential, and basically these teachers are saying that we should continue to teach as we have always taught, but now we have some cool new acronyms to use to show how literate we are professionally.

But, it isn't about the actions or the stories at all. It's about the theory of language acquisition. And stories and actions and personalization are all tools, yes, but tools to faciliate the language acquisition as the theories and the research have demonstrated is most effective. If we had to, we could probably remove the actions or the stories and still have students learn. It wouldn't be optimal, but we could do it and still legitimately say we were using TPRS and TPR because we could still honor the research about acquisition. Whereas, in some people's minds these methods are nothing outside of stories and jumping around like hooligans.

Seurat

I was talking to Ben Slavic about how children learn. The typical textbook breaks languages down into neat little discrete boxes of information. First you learn this box, and then you are allowed to go on to the next one. Students are not exposed to the language in any real, meaningful way because it is always broken down into these little boxes - literally and figuratively. I told him that I think this approach is a lot like teaching about Seurat's paintings.

Either, you can show the students the dots and then branch out and show them how all the dots connect and make a picture, or you can show them the picture, let them see the rays of sunshine and the people strolling about on the lawn, and then zoom in on it to show them the dots.

Which way will get students interested? How interesting are dots? If we start with the dots, how can we expect kids to care about what happens to them? If we start with the picture, maybe they will fall in love with it.

Seurat was great, not because he used dots, but because he created light on canvas, and he happened to use dots to do that.

Languages are great, not because they use grammar, but because they connect people and they communicate and they happen to use grammar to do that.

order of acquisition

More thoughts on Susan Gross' article "Order of Acquisition"

First to give credit where it is due, "order of acquisition" is one of Krashen's hypotheses. The article is explaining the hypothesis and talking about its practical implications.

Grammatical features of a language are acquired in a predictable pattern, although there is no way to list all the grammatical features of any language - there are too many!

In English, the order of acquisition for verb morphemes is -ing, regular past tense, irregular past tense, 3rd person present tense -s.

In Spanish, some uses of the subjunctive are acquired before some uses of gender.

The problem with this, as I see it, is that traditional classes don't allow for this natural acquisition process. We teach specific grammatical features each year, and expect students to learn and internalize these structures, even when they aren't in the natural order! For instance, we teach present tense in first year, but past tense is not until second year. Or, although we all know that young children tend to drop the verb in sentences, we fault our students heavily for doing the same thing.

The examples in the article are that first children do not use the copular verb at all. Sentences will be similar to "Tommy tall."

Second, there is a gerneralization of the verb. In English students will use the verb "is" for everything, in Spanish they use the verb "es" whether the sentence is in first, second or third person is irrelevant.

Although there is a natural order for acquisition, Susan reaffirms the fact that we should not shelter the grammar input from students. Which is, of course, what we traditionally do. We only speak or provide reading materials in the present tense for the entire first year. Only when students have mastered this concept do we begin to think about other tenses, and even then we stay in the shadow of the land of present tense, using complex verbs for future tense and recent past.

She points out the fallacy of waiting to provide input until a child is ready for the next stage. Young children would never acquire their first language - or at least not as quickly - if parents waited to provide input until their children were ready to progress.

In TPRS, we are urged to shelter vocabulary, not grammar. Although even that isn't as sheltered as in a traditional class. Or, rather, it's sheltered in a different way. In a TPRS classroom, students are not expected to memorize long lists of vocabulary words, but vocabulary is presented in the class through comprehensible stories. For the most part, we focus on the high frequency words of the language (duh!) but we also allow for student interest (like erizo - hedgehog, I never would have learned that one if a student had not wanted to talk about his pet in class.) Students are also exposed to many vocabulary words through their reading. I think the sheltering of vocabulary is more in what we repeat, and what we expect students to be able to learn.

I can't learn Spanish, French, etc.

One of my favorite lines is when adults tell me that they cannot learn a foreign language. Their brains just aren't wired that way. Usually they follow this comment with one of the following comments: I have enough trouble with English, or I studied for so many years in high school/college and I can't remember a single word.

How sad. Our educational system has convinced so many people that speaking is so difficult that only a genius can do it. And after years of study, the only thing most people have to show for it is a well-developed sense of failure.

I have a few standard responses up my sleeve. Often I tell people to come sit in my class, and then they will learn. :) I don't mean this as arrogantly as it sounds. It isn't that I'm such a fantastic teacher, but the way I teach is so different than the way most of us were taught. The other response I usually give is to tell the person I am talking to that they learned to speak their first language just fine and so I don't believe for a second that they can't learn another language - obviously their brain is wired for it.

Setting our kids up for failure

It surprises me what students are expected to have *MASTERED* in the course of a year!

No wonder student retention in language programs is such a problem. They are set up to fail from the very beginning.

In my district, by the end of the first year, a student is expected to be able to write an unplanned essay within one hour. The essay must be one page long on a specific topic. There can be no pattern of verb conjugation errors. The same goes for grammar and spelling - there can be no pattern of errors. Furthermore, they are expected to correctly and accurately use transitions, proper paragraphing, introductions and conclusions. And that's just the writing portion of the test!

There are four exams to be given and each exam allows for little to no mistakes.

The really depressing part of that is that the first year exam is easy compared to the second year exam.