In August of 2020, I wrote 0 To 70: Five Years Of Latin Novellas. Two years later, the number of Latin novellas nearly doubled. Well, another two years have gone by and we’ve seen 40 more, which is an increase of 31%! Above all, there are now 38 authors out there writing different kinds of Latin. In this post, I want to celebrate that different kind of Latin while revisiting some findings…
Continue readingCI
Teacher Narratives + Student Self-Grading
Maybe having students collect, evaluate, and grade their work entirely isn’t for you. This post offers a slightly different approach with the same outcome.
Narrative accounts of student learning aren’t new. In fact, I just read about them recently in Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To) One thing I haven’t heard yet is anyone combining narratives with self-grading. This would eliminate a LOT of the issues teachers have reported, namely the time it takes to score them, and the consistency needed to score them well (Schneider & Hunt, 2023).
Narratives go back about 100 years. They were the next step in efficiency following the practice of teachers visiting homes of their pupils and presenting an oral report on how the child was doing. As high school enrollment skyrocketed, though, narratives were abandoned for even more time-saving percentages, with the A-F scale in place sometime in the 40s (Brookhart et al., 2016).
One way to resurrect narratives on a smaller scale by bringing them back into your classroom would be to a) look at students’ learning evidence, b) make a statement, and then c) have the student select a grade that they feel corresponds to what you wrote. For example, my Process criteria—one of two equally weighted categories/standards—was “you receive a lot of Comprehensible Input (CI).” That’s basically it; clear, and effective. When my students self-graded, though, I provided examples in a single-point rubric of what that could look like, as well as some non-examples to help 9th graders with some critical, evaluative thinking. Here’s a screenshot:
That worked well, but maybe you want to add a narrative account to the grading. To come up with a narrative from this criteria, let’s imagine a student missing assignments who doesn’t respond in class, and hardly ever asks Latin to be clarified. The statement could be “you’re missing learning evidence that could otherwise show you’re receiving CI. In class, you rarely show understanding, and hardly ever ask for Latin to be clarified.” Then, the student would select a grade on the 6-point scale (55, 65, 75, 85, 95, 100). If they say something like “85,” just follow up and talk about how missing assignments and rarely meeting expectations surely isn’t something represented by that number. If they say “75,” or “65,” that sounds about right depending on the degree of what is/isn’t happening.
This doesn’t have to be rocket science.
We already know that the more students think about how well they’re doing something, the worse they actually end up doing (Kohn, 1993), so limiting this exchange to once a quarter reduces any negative impact to to a minimum. Overall, this practice might be worth trying for teachers who want to retain a bit of control while still being in pursuit of getting scores and points mostly out of the picture.
Something Strange…
Before I started teaching in 2013, I joined the moreTPRS Yahoo list serve. Then in 2015, I joined Ben Slavic’s PLC. At that time, there were daily—DAILY—conversations about Second Language Acquisition (SLA), with really tough questions being asked, answered, and debated ad nauseam. Then Tea With BVP was launched, with weekly shows until 2018—here are my clips down to the nuts & bolts. N.B. That show was rebooted in a different iteration as TalkinL2 until just about a year ago. Needless to say, I learned a great deal in those five years; far more, in fact, than in my MAT program (no offense, just a result of SLA expert-lacking faculty nationwide).
I cannot overstate this enough when I say that those early years were simply *crucial* in the development of what we all learned about SLA, and teaching languages. Furthermore, what we now know has also been around for like 10, 20, 30, even 40 years beforehand! That is, most scholarship in the last decades haven’t really changed the game of what’s been discussed since the 70s. The problem? This stuff wasn’t (isn’t?) mainstream—at all. That “golden age” of my SLA development involved the constant interaction with perhaps 200, maybe 300 teachers, almost all of whom I can reach out to with a click. I also had direct access to researchers, their ideas, as well as teachers implementing and arguing about what is, essentially, “best practice” for teaching languages in schools. When we didn’t understand, we emailed and got answers. And we were fringe. Having been exposed to the same ideas over and over—not just Krashen & VanPatten—thankfully from a variety of perspectives courtesy of Eric Herman, a solid understanding of universal truths (as much as we can call them that in the field of SLA) was being discussed.
Don’t get me wrong. There was a LOT of disequilibrium that nearly everyone had to face (e.g. “wait, so you’re saying that…”), and it was not without major headaches. After all, teachers’ worlds were literally being turned upside-down (no, I do mean literally like what you thought was the cause was just a result). Even the researchers’ ideas were challenged—by “mere” teachers no less—and fruitful discussion emerged, like when Carol Gaab demanded a concrete response about whether co-creating a story was a communicative act (i.e. had purpose). N.B. Yes, it is; entertainment. There was significant growth at that time, but it wasn’t all roses. We could call a spade a spade, or at least all come to agreement that a heart was definitely not a spade, and then talk about how to make that heart into a spade. Granted, this was within the fringe group of hundreds of teachers who had that shared experience, but there was definitely some kind of “tell me if what I’m talking about is complete nonsense” agreement. Whatever it was, it now feels like he heyday of theory to practice and critical looks at each others’ teaching.
Then…
Continue readingEstablishing Meaning: Confusion
Step 1 of TPRS is “establish meaning” to show what a word/phrase means in the target language (TL) before using it to co-create a story. The most efficient and effective way to do this is by using a native language (L1) common to all students (e.g. “fēlēs means cat“). In TPRS, we write the TL on the board, underline it, then write the L1 below in a different color. We refer to this throughout class by pointing and pausing.
Establishing meaning is also Step 1 for anyone providing comprehensible input (CI), regardless of the method or strategy.
If this step doesn’t occur, teachers are providing input (I) that might not be comprehensible (C). Although there’s some role that noise in the input plays (Incomprehensible Input?), it’s clear that acquisition doesn’t happen with high levels of that noise. This is why no one—NO ONE—disputes that CI is necessary; it’s the sine qua non of acquisition, which is why establishing meaning is so important.
Still, there’s been confusion over establishing meaning, and that confusion has to do with purpose…
High-Frequency Verbs
Someone asked the “Teaching Latin for Acquisition” Facebook group for a list of the top 10 verbs in each of our classes—if we had to make such a list. There were only about 10 11 comments, but many teachers probably use similar verbs and just didn’t have anything to add. What I find interesting, though, is that across the lists from only 10 11 comments, there were still 38 44 different verbs in total!
The verbs that were most common between everyone who chimed in were:
be (6 7)
want (5 6)
see (4 5)
be able (4)
be quiet (4 )
CI Online: Welcome to a virtual classroom!
In my last post, I jumped ahead and showed some student work. Lets back up so I can welcome you to my Adobe Connect classroom and explain a bit about how CI Online is working out.
Latin…Online…3rd Graders (oh my!)
This is my first post about Teaching with CI Online, but I’m skipping ahead to showing some student work samples before explaining a bit about how CI Online is working out. That post will follow shortly.
So, here’s the context for the student work I’m showing you:
“School isn’t even close to an L1 environment:” Why reading is KEY
I’ve heard the argument that “it’s impossible to replicate a native language (L1) environment, so why bother with all this CI stuff in the classroom?” I used to counter this with “we’re trying to get as close to that environment as possible while lowering expectations to a realistic level given how little time (~400 hours) students have with a language in high school.” Sure, that’s all true, but we can do better.
Reassessments: NOT Retakes
Recently, I heard from a teacher who had a negative experience with reassessments (noticing no significant gains in student performance after implementing the system). Sadly, I question not only the procedure used, but also the focus of the class. My story with reassessing is very different, and quite positive.
Complete Standards Based Grading (SBG) Systems: Why not in a language course?
You may have read that my new “one grading system to rule them all” essentially has a single standard, Proficiency. This is because I am no longer convinced that students need to practice anything in order to acquire a language. If you believe students need to practice, SBG will work for you, but I don’t buy it, and neither does VanPatten. This concept is so utterly counterintuitive to traditional language teachers, you probably need to spend some time thinking things over before developing your teaching philosophy.
Magister P. 