Foundations: A Natural Approach to the (Transition) Year

Chapter 5: Introduction to the Stepping Stones Curricular Framework and an Overview of the Foundational Instructional Strategies In proficiency-based teaching - especially with beginners - our only job is to exchange messages that the students understand and find interesting enough to attend to. If the messages can reach the level of compelling, that is ideal. But it is important to remember that simply hearing messages in a new language that they can comprehend effortlessly actually feels quite magical to most students. So, even the most basic discussion of the calendar or weather can feel quite compelling when the language is skillfully used in a calm, slow way, with copious visual support. The strategies outlined below have helped me achieve compellinginput status more often.

Are my students always, constantly listening with rapt attention? No, of course not. 180 days is a long time and I cannot always provide compelling experiences. Sometimes I am tired, or I have a cold, or the kids are not “with it” for whatever reason. Life happens. So we learn to go easy on ourselves. We strive for “interesting” and bask in the times when we hit “compelling”.

Providing understandable and interesting spoken and written messages to students is the backbone of proficiency-based instruction, especially in lower-level classes. There exists an unlimited number of activities that we can use to deliver these messages. This book presents what I consider to be the very best best bang for the buck in a sequence of instruction that builds upon itself, leading you from one activity to the other in a progression that helps you develop your skills. The activities I have chosen, therefore, are not simply good activities - they have the added advantage of providing you, the teacher, with a program of professional skill development. As you deliver an engaging, personalized, colorful instructional program with time-tested activities like One Word Images, your students will be developing their language proficiency and you will also be growing as you strengthen your language delivery skills. It’s a win-win for everybody.

You will work your way up through activities that increase in complexity through the course of the book. What follows in this chapter is a brief overview of the year-long curricular framework and the activities in the order in which they appear in this book, where they are described in step-by-step detail.

Please note that the Stepping Stones curricular framework is a framework, which means that it is a “container” or “organizational system” for strategies and content. It is not the content itself. Once you internalize this framework, you will be able to select from the wide array of strategies and content that is out there for communicative language teaching. There are so many excellent ideas! But without a framework or organizing system, these ideas can overwhelm us. Where to fit this cool new strategy? How to assess it?

Stepping Stones was designed to be larger than any specific content or strategy. You can think of it like the Dewey Decimal system versus a specific book. The curricular framework is the Dewey Decimal system. It tells you where the specific book “fits” into the whole system of the library. Stepping Stones can show you the natural place to “shelve” the specific strategies and content (the “books”) in your curricular plans.

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