The Olympics as #AuthRes

This year the Spanish 3 teacher and I are working together on our first unit, which is about the Olympic Games. During #AuthRes August, Madame Farabaugh posted about taking advantage of all of the current resources surrounding the Rio Olympics. We loved the idea and are even planning a mini-Olympics for our students to organize and compete in.

The official site for the Rio Olympics is available in both French and Spanish so that is one of our primary resources. There is a lot of opportunity for review of very simple language so that a review unit is not necessary, which I really like Allison Wienhold's thoughts about why she doesn't start with the classic review of verbs and vocabulary from previous levels.

When approaching authentic text like this website, I ask myself what do I want the students to be able to do with this. I don't want them to translate the page; the website already does that for them. With the click of a mouse, they can change the website to English. Sara Elizabeth Cottrell's post about the Babel Fish really got me thinking this summer about finding a reason for the students to need the page in French. The main reason that I can come up with here is that the articles and the biographies will be written by French speakers for French speakers. Therefore, they will provide a different perspective of the Games from the English page. So, I want my students to be able to find information on the page and to be able to understand at least 70% of what is being communicated. Then I want them to be able to talk about it in French.

At this stage, I am thinking I would rather them to have depth of HOW to navigate a single page so that they can then go on and explore other pages at their leisure. That leads me to ask WHAT are the high frequency words that are on a page that they will need to know. Fortunately, there are a lot of cognates in French, but there are some words that are nothing like the English. For example, the word for "events" - there are 16 events in artistic gymnastics. I also think about what are the common questions one has about a sport. For example, is this a men's or women's event? Who are the athletes? When are the matches? Who won? Other than a basic overview, people do not go to the Olympics webpage to find out the details of how a sport is played. Therefore, only the basic sport vocabulary, such as team, ball, and score, are needed.

With Level 3, I know that my students are very apprehensive about all that they have forgotten over the summer. So, after going over one sport page with them and covering the vocabulary, I had them create two Google Slides each for a different sport. One sport needed to be one that they were familiar with, and the other needed to be one that they were less familiar with. I wanted it to be like an infographic so that they could then use it to discuss the sport with a partner. Therefore, the information should cover the basics that come up in a conversation: what, who, where, when. Anything else that they choose to add is icing.

Grab a spoon!

I have a very active three and a half year old son who has taught me a great deal about language acquisition. From birth, he has primarily been exposed to English and as I have the energy and time for, I have exposed him to French. He has a good handle of English for his age and is at least able to do some French, which as a parent who is a non-native speaker I'm content with what he can do.

As a linguist, I have been fascinated and humbled by the way his language developed. My husband and I have never avoided using big words or altering our language when we are talking to him. As he went from forming sentences into joining them into paragraphs to tell stories, I have had to remind myself sometimes that he does not always know exactly what he is saying. He is repeating expressions that he has heard us use and trying them out to see if he can make them work. I think this is why adults find little kid stories so cute - the child is experimenting with the language that he knows, sometimes in ways that the adult had never imagined it being used.

How has this informed my teaching and my ideas of language acquisition? For one, it has really made me reflect on what I can expect from my students at various points along the ACTFL proficiency scale. When I first started learning French in college, my professors expected us to always respond to questions with a complete sentence. I was taught in my methodology classes that having students respond this way would teach them to form complete sentences. Even when I was teaching exploratory French at the middle school level, I tried to encourage my students to answer in complete sentences. When they didn't, I would say the correct sentence and have them repeat it. I always struggled with this, though, because real language is not always a complete sentence and just because they repeated the sentence back to me, I can't say that it ever stuck with them to reproduce at a later time.

Enter the real world learning scenario of my son, and I realized that 1) he was not able to even say a string of words no less a sentence at the beginning and 2) I did not naturally turn his one word answer into a full sentence. For example, I would show him a ball and ask what it was. When he responded with "ball," I cheered for joy and repeated the word not worried about whether he used a direct or indirect article. 

I started to ask myself why it should therefore matter when I am trying to get my students to identify a pen as a "stylo". The levels of the ACTFL proficiency scale suddenly came to life for me. Novice level students need to learn words first. Then, they will start stringing them together into phrases. Then, the phrases will become sentences. All along the way, there will be errors and mistakes, but that is part of the natural learning process. I have started to wonder if traditional language learning methods have been largely unsuccessful because it goes against how our brains naturally learn language.

Like other teachers that have made or started making this transition, I realized that I needed to have ways to explain this "new" approach to learning language. I frequently tell my Novice level students that they need to go back to their days of Kindergarten and First Grade. I'm not looking for the same high level work in their answers and eventual sentences that their other teachers demand. The challenge in my class, particularly in the beginning, is that they are having to use words in a language that they are learning. If they were doing the assignment in their native language, it would be super easy.

So, how do I explain to my students the difference between level 2 and level 3? This is the other major way that my son has helped me, this time with explaining language acquisition in simple terms. I do really well in making analogies with common experiences to explain more complex ideas. That is how my husband has learned so much about my job. I find a way to relate it to sports, which is something he is very familiar with!

For those who are familiar with ACTFL, you probably have heard that Novice students are like parrots. I say they are like babies who are eating solid food for the first time. I have a spoon with simple, easy to digest language that I am feeding to them. As they become better at digesting and using the language, I let them help me with the spoon. We both have a hold on it so that it stays level and the food doesn't end up all over the floor.

When my students become Intermediate level learners, I am now handing them the spoon, and they are to feed themselves. Therefore, I expect their work to be messy and to have errors. The first several times a parent hands over the spoon to the baby to feed himself involves a lot of baby wipes and a thorough cleaning of the kitchen! I want my Level 3 students to start experimenting on their own, to be creative, and to try new things but most of all I want them to be messy so that I can better understand where they need help.

In my mind, Level 3 is when my students are finally able to start asserting themselves in the language and to become independent learners. Yes, it will be messy and full of errors and that is ok. It is part of the learning process. While my three year old can be quite the conversationalist, he still makes mistakes and that is ok. It is only through usage and experimentation that he and my students will get better at communicating. On the first day, I tell my Level 3 students to grab their spoon, to experiment, to be creative, to be messy, and to make mistakes because that is how they will learn and grow.

Using ACTFL Levels to Improve Motivation

I am pretty certain that I am not the only teacher that has had the following conversation play out with a student in regards to completing an assignment.

"Madame, how much will this affect my grade?" I reply that it counts as an assessment which is half of their grade. 
"But how many points is this worth on my final grade?" I remind them that I am not a math teacher and cannot calculate that on the spot.
"Well, I'm just trying to decide if I need to do it." And my mouth usually just drops open with a look of do-you-seriously-think-this-is-optional? 

I grew up with the mentality that all assignments must be turned in. There was no other option. Yet, some of my students seem to calculate carefully just how much work they need to complete to pass the class. They select the assignments that they want to do and choose to take a zero on the ones that they don't want to do.

As a teacher, I have a reason and a goal for every assignment that I give them. If they do not complete something, then they will not meet that goal. So, how do we encourage them to do well when in their minds the question is whether they need to do it in the first place? Before I can worry about making them life-long learners, I have to give them reason first to do the work in my class.

One of the excuses that I get for incomplete assignments is that the student doesn't understand it or is afraid that they will get it wrong. Sure, we all know a quote or two about how important it is to try and that mistakes are how we learn, but with all of the current pressures in education with testing and curriculum jammed full it is no wonder that students are afraid of mistakes. Teachers don't have time to reteach, and the students' nerves are shot from not just teacher tests but now state tests that will affect their future, the teacher's career, and the school's status. Some of them may not think about the latter two issues, but the teacher that is working them does and her own worries will affect how she treats the struggling students, whether she means to or not. I digress...

My classes are a mix of students with different ability levels and different motivations. Not all of my students will make it to Novice High at the same time. Not all of them will be strong in Interpretive Listening and weak in Speaking. Some of them will be there just to get the credit for graduation. A few of them will change their future course in life to continue using French in some way. Using the ACTFL standards, I need to start focusing on meeting students at the level that they are at and keep in mind what their motivation is.

I am grading an IPA that I gave my students after our unit on clothes and shopping. Two papers ago, the student completed the Writing portion exactly as I was expecting with complete sentences and minimal errors. One paper ago, the student did not even attempt complete sentences but was able to cover the same information in a bullet format. While it was not what I asked for, it was understandable and correct. 

Both of these students completed the task. Both of them had minor errors but otherwise communicated their message well. The difference is their level of communication on the ACTFL standards for Presentational Writing. Their motivation in the class is also at different levels. The first student is the highly motivated type that will probably continue to use French in some capacity later on, while the second student just needs the credit.

Normally, the second student would be marked down for not being at the same level as the other students. But I started thinking if he did the best that he could for his level and his message was comprehensible and I give him a low grade for not performing at the level of the first student, then how well is he going to do next time if he even does the work at all? As long as he gets the grade that he needs to pass, he will have no other motivation to do any better. 

This leads me to ask, if he were graded at the level he is able to perform and his grades improve, then would his motivation improve because he is being acknowledged for what he can do? The fact is that he completed the work, it was comprehensible, and he did not just add in random French words to try to make it look better, as some of them seem to do. My feedback for him at this point would be to make writing basic sentences as his next goal. I would need to provide him with tools to work on that so that hopefully by the next IPA he will be able to do more than he did with this one. 

I can then change the original conversation and instead of being so focused on how an assignment will affect their grade, ask the student how the assignment will better help them meet the goals for the next level in the ACTFL standards.