When teachers complain about their certain practices that create more work for themselves and take time away from students acquiring the target language, my response is usually “well then, don’t use them.” Follow the logic below to arrive at why you need to wrap your head around changing Assessment & Grading practices so that you can use your prep/planning time, and personal life, for more useful and enjoyable endeavors…
comprehensible input
Active Latin vs. Acquisition of Latin
**See this more-recent post on “Active Latin”**
Justin Slocum Bailey has just written an excellent article about speaking Latin. Though related, my post is about the implications of using the term “Active Latin” as it pertains to classroom practices.
I’ve long felt weird about that term. After synthesizing my thoughts, I now believe that most teachers who use the term to describe their teaching (as informed by Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research) are actually using something closer to “Productive Latin,” which might not lead to language acquisition at all.
Tea with BVP Episode 43: Mind Grenades
Spring semester Tea with BVP starts up again this week, but before the winter break, Bill VanPatten dropped what that weird keynote speaker at ACTFL 2016 would call “mind grenades,” and he dropped quite a few. If there’s one episode to listen to, it’s Episode 43. Among others, here’s one gem that sticks out, and sets up this week’s episode:
“In fact, nothing in a textbook is psychologically real” (click here for a psychedelic treatment of the audio)
Others followed:
- “The problem we have is textbook materials…if you look at them closely they’re probably not input-oriented, or meaning-based…here at MSU, for example, all of our homework is input-based (e.g. sentence-level).”
- “I think we need to do away with seat time requirements, and we need to do away with grades.”
- “As a profession, we need to start making the argument that language is not like other subject matter. We gotta stop treating it like that.”
- “One of the questions [aspiring language teachers] asked was ‘how can we study so we can do better on our state proficiency exam?…what tenses should we be studying so I can pass this?’ and I said ‘well you CAN’T study for a proficiency test’…you’re a language teacher, what have you been learning about language and language acquisition that you don’t know the answer to that question yourself?!”
- “Output is a byproduct of acquisition, it’s not really necessary for acquisition…there are some people who claim it is, but there’s absolutely no research that shows that it is!”
- “There was work that came out in the 70’s showing that actually your knowledge of grammar emerges from interactions with people…it’s about participating in conversations that you gain accuracy in knowledge about a language.”
- “Any of us can open a textbook, open a page, and memorize a page and it winds up in our conscious knowledge, but what actually is in your head is something quite different…the fact that you can conjugate a verb doesn’t mean that’s what you access later on.”
- “That’s the problem we have in SLA—there are facts, but people just don’t want to believe them.”
- “Talking doesn’t make you learn anything…you do not have to talk in order to learn language, language will get in your head by just listening and reading and watching and seeing.”
- “Getting input into your classroom is not my idea of SLA—that’s just SLA. input is necessary, so the consequences is that we need constant exposure to input for our student.”
- “The people who were videotaped interacting improved, but then another group that just watched the videotape (and weren’t students themselves) improved just by watching the interaction…and this wasn’t grammar class, just interaction…the group was listening in on other people’s conversations and acquiring some language at the same time.”
- “If your classroom is interesting, I could be talking to Angelika but if Walter is listening (because we’re doing something interesting), he’s gonna acquire language.”
- “Sometimes slipping an English word is the fastest way to get that meaning across…if your focus is on communication and you spend all this time going around and around and around and people still don’t know what they hell you’re talking about, you could’ve had 10 more min. of Comprehensible Input and interaction because all you needed was one word.”
Syntax Synonyms: Don’t Fear the Subjunctive
The subjunctive is usually regarded as a more advanced grammatical concept, the very mention of which can give students crippling anxiety, but EFF that—it’s not.
To begin with, in a grammatical syllabus, the subjunctive is simply unnecessarily delayed. In Lingua Latīna per sē Illustrāta, for example, it doesn’t appear until chapter 28 of 35, and in Ecce Rōmānī not until chapter 42 of 68. Given enrollment figures, it’s clear that most students don’t even encounter the subjunctive before dropping Latin in conventional programs! The reality of language and communication (yes, reading is a form of communicating—interpretation), however, is that the subjunctive is much more frequent, and can actually be less difficult to process!
What the…?!
“Hybrid CI/Textbook”
Teachers who use this term mean well, but at the theoretical level it’s absurd.
The reason for a “Hybrid CI/Textbook” program is that teachers aren’t yet comfortable doing something radically different, or have external constraints that prevent them from having a “full/pure CI” program. In both cases, they are tethered to the textbook in some way.
Tea with BVP (9.1.16): Teachers with Low Proficiency
It’s clear that non-idiomatic language (hopefully not with structural errors) has an effect on the mental representation of a student. It would be silly to deny that. Although Bill VanPatten advocates for teachers to have high proficiency levels in this week’s Tea with BVP, he also mentions that we don’t know for certain what the negative impact of exposure to low-quality input is over different periods of time (e.g. K-12 Spanish vs. 4 years of Latin). Regardless, I think we should be asking this:
Does the negative impact of using non-idiomatic Latin outweigh the benefits of an improved experience and inclusion of ALL students in the Latin classroom?
If the answer is “yes” in a catastrophic way, an extreme suggestion would be that all Latin teachers below X proficiency level should immediately resign, or at least refrain from creating and/or publishing materials for students. These teachers should attend the available immersion events (e.g. conventicula, rusticātiō, Living Latin in NYC, etc.), listen to Nuntiī Latīnī and Quōmodō Dīcitur, read as much Latin that they understand as possible, and then get back on the horse when they’re up to speed. A less-extreme suggestion would be that they should simply not teach Latin communicatively.
If the answer is “no,” or “yes” in a non-catastrophic way, then the teacher should still definitely seek out those same ways to improve proficiency, but perhaps with less urgency. They should certainly keep teaching, and we could certainly use the published materials.
Personally, I feel that ANY mental representation of language is more beneficial than what has been going on with Grammar-Translation, and my hunch is that the negative impact is nowhere near catastrophic. Thus, it’s only a matter of time until the teacher’s proficiency improves to a high level, which means that each year students will be exposed to richer and richer input.
Note how the most effective solutions to improving proficiency become an issue of access—the immersion events aren’t cheap, and not everyone has a local Latin conversation group with highly proficient speakers. Teachers with more money and time have greater access to understandable Latin. Note, also, how the issue of access brings us right back to the classroom. A CI classroom is about extending access to Latin to all students—students typically left out in the grammar game. Realize, too, that most Latin teachers, themselves, have been denied access to communicative proficiency, and are doing what they can to improve it.
A New Curriculum Map
**New iteration of the Curriculum Map as the Universal Language Curriculum (ULC) Updated 2.4.18**
**More recent post on USING the New Curriculum Map**
As stated in its introduction, this New Curriculum Map is designed to reconcile Second Language Acquisition (SLA) principles with planning demands that exist within the current educational landscape. It is part theory but 100% practical. I hesitate to call it a “CI Curriculum” because I agree with Bill VanPatten from Episode 23 of Tea with BvP that some people think that CI is a strategy used to teach the stuff they’ve been teaching all along (e.g. explicit grammar rules, cultural facts, purposeless paired activities, dialogues, etc.). This is wrong…totally wrong, in fact. In an age when educators prefer an “eclectic” batch of “tools for the toolbox,” CI can’t be considered one of them along side others. CI is an absolute requirement for language acquisition. The only thing that’s debated is exactly how much of a role output plays in language acquisition, and for some, it’s null. No theory of language acquisition disputes the need for understandable messages (= CI).
Furthermore, a call from Ellie Arnold during this past week’s Episode 24 of Tea with BvP was right on topic, and Bill confirmed that a curriculum based on targeted structures (i.e. phrases that contain parts of the language’s grammatical structure) will lead us “off track.” That doesn’t mean we can’t plan for a class with targeted structures in mind; it means that we don’t want to write ourselves into a corner by prescribing targeted structures as part of a curriculum.
Without further ado, you can access the New Curriculum Map here. If you have another idea for the organization of Latin vocabulary Tiers, either based on frequency or preference, treat the document as a template and add your own vocabulary. If you teach another language, use your own frequency lists and/or the English equivalents as a guide. Enjoy!
CI Program Checklist: 3 of 13
Classroom MGMT
✔ Rules (DEA & CWB)
✔ Routines (Routines, Student Jobs, Interjections & Rejoinders)
__ Brain Breaks
CI Program Checklist: 1 of 13
I have an upcoming workshop at CANE’s 2016 Annual Meeting on how to continue Teaching with CI. My abstract reads:
[…] Despite the success and enjoyment of experimenting with CI, many Latin teachers tend to abandon CI methods and strategies after a brief yet blissful period of refreshing change in favor of familiar ways. This workshop addresses how to continue using CI after the honeymoon phase ends by establishing routines, maintaining engaging activities, and having assessment systems in place to support you and your students.
These next 13 blog posts form a CI Program Checklist (emphasis on “a“), which serves as the basis for my workshop. The checklist is organized by words that begin with the letter C…they’re all the rage right now.
The Cs
Classroom MGMT
Comprehensibility
Camaraderie
Counting
Community
*Compellingness*
Let’s get right to it:
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.
Magister P. 