Foundations: A Natural Approach to the (Transition) Year

Chapter 2: How to Use This Book The Stepping Stones curricular framework is backwards planned from student proficiency outcomes and cross-curricular literacy goals, and not from grammar points or wordlists. ACTFL provides us with curricular goals that are based on using the language, not learning about the language, and the Performance Descriptors and Can-Do Statements give us a roadmap to proficiency and guidance on how to assess student progress in listening, reading, writing, and speaking performance.

Thus, our national professional organization - and SLA research - recommend a whole-language approach, and does not recommend that students study certain word lists or grammatical constructions. ACTFL’s guidance focuses on communication over form: taking in information and making oneself understood, interacting with increasingly complex text, and deepening thinking skills and habits of mind.

The General Trajectory of a School Year The cyclical nature of the academic term is one of the great joys of the teaching profession. The school year has a life of its own. It is full of fresh starts, of chances to reinvent ourselves. Every term, the wheel begins its great turn again, and we fasten our seatbelts to see what kind of ride this one will be.

This book is organized to help you navigate the realities of how the term tends to go. It will help you establish a routine in your class and also to keep things fresh and novel by introducing new activities and new twists on old activities as the term goes on.

This combination of novelty within the routine is key to good classroom management. When students know what to expect, but also learn to expect novelty within the familiar structure of class, they are comfortable and engaged. Comfortable, engaged students are generally much easier to manage than uncomfortable, confused, or bored students.

The curricular framework is organized to help you bring freshness and novelty to your instruction, to keep the students engaged throughout the term. We all know that engagement waxes and wanes depending on the time of day, the month, the season, and the year. Everyone’s energy and enthusiasm is high at the beginning of the term: pencils are sharp, erasers pink, apples polished, and back to school clothes are pressed and fresh. At that time, we usually do not need to work too hard to captivate their students’ attention. In the first weeks of class, typical students will listen attentively to the most mundane utterances, mesmerized by the fact that they can comprehend a new language, or pleasantly surprised at how much they can do with the language after the break.

As the term goes on, and your students need novelty to help them maintain their enthusiasm for listening to the language, the strategies shift and provide new activities that build upon the routines you have already established. By the end of the term or year, when your students’ attention spans have waned from months of Page 16