Foundations: A Natural Approach to the (Transition) Year

Chapter 6: Your Gradebook Sadly, many teachers today end up with students who have not gained much in the way of language proficiency even after years of language study, and whose grades have communicated to them that they aren’t really cut out for this whole language learning thing. It’s time for those days to be over.

We can and must do more for our students. We want them to gain true proficiency and happiness while they are with us. We want them to leave our classrooms wanting more of what we have given them during our time with us, wanting to keep finding ways to interact with the language and gaining further proficiency. Above all, we want to communicate that they are smart people, whose brains are amazingly well-suited, as all human brains are, to slipping almost magically into the ability to use our languages to express and understand real, authentic communication.

Dr. Krashen has said that the goal of our language programs should be to equip the student with a proficiency level that allows them to to make the world their classroom, able to take in input from the real world and continue to build higher proficiency when they exit our programs. We want our grades to build students’ selfconfidence so that, when they leave us, they are motivated and eager to continue their language learning journey, as Krashen suggests.

This book is not offered as just another book on second language acquisition. It is written as a challenge to world language teachers to make a strong decision to make a break with the kinds of instruction that have come before us. We can now seek the new.

The Messages Your Gradebook Sends Everyone can effortlessly achieve proficiency in the language they are studying with you, just as they did in their mother tongue. But to fully absorb that truth, and communicate it to students, teachers must finally begin to look at their work with their students through the lens of how people actually acquire languages. If we do that we will know that the only factor preventing all of our students from achieving is really nothing more than our own mindset and commitment to their success.

That bears repeating.

The only reason that all our students are not achieving is us.

Our instructional practices.

Our assessment practices.

Our mindset.

Our expectations.

If we have the right instructional and assessment practices, mindset, and expectations, all of our students can achieve. This is a powerful, and humbling truth. It means that the buck stops here, with us. We can set up Page 69