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:
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.
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.
Despite the obvious physical barrier, teaching CI online is not very different from the brick and mortar setting (e.g. use words students know, establish meaning of new ones, talk about compelling things, don’t force speech too early, etc.). The format for online teaching, however, typically involves an element of asynchronous “independent work” that most closely resembles traditional drill and worksheet exercises, which we know does very little, if anything for language acquisition.
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.
Following the initiative of Chris Stolz, Mike Peto, and Mike Coxon, I’ve scanned some student work to share. These 10min timed Fluency Writes are all from Latin I students with anywhere from ~20 to ~100 hours of Latin. The word counts range from 41 to 117, though aren’t necessarily all linear with respect to class time in Latin.
Since I began teaching a language, it’s been pretty hard letting go of the graduate school generic UbyD planning mindset, and spending less time working on administrator-desired posted Objectives (see Terry Waltz’s answer for this). These and various other educational processes sap our time that otherwise should be spent on honing our craft, and really, really getting to know our students and their needs. The hardest, but perhaps most fruitful thing to let go is the Lesson Plan, and just discuss something non-targeted in Latin. I know, it sounds crazy, right? Read on…
Despite holding a B.A. in Classics, it wasn’t too long ago that I failed to read Latin with any remote sense of fluency. I’m not being self-destructive either, that’s just an accurate statement. This is unsurprising since my experience was mostly translation-based (just like nearly every other Classical language learner), and we had very little time to read anything, much less for enjoyment. That all changed in 2010 when I stumbled upon Oerberg’s Lingua Latīna, the Latin textbook written entirely in Latin. I vividly remember exclaiming to Ken Kitchell about how I had just read more Latin in those 35 chapters over the course of a month than I did with him over the course of my entire undergraduate study! I hope he was not offended. Is Lingua Latīna high-level literature? No, but my translation speed of the classical canon wasn’t exactly anything to tout, either. So if Lingua Latīna wasn’t the best work of Golden Age Latin literature, what was it?
Magister P. 