Chapter 1: Introduction

Introduction

There is currently a paradigm shift happening in language teaching, led by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) and a vibrant, growing community of teachers engaged in implementing practices derived from Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research findings.

For the past few decades, this community has been hard at work developing and refining various proficiency-based language instruction methods. Many teachers are now shifting the focus of their programs away from conscious study of language and towards a communicative, holistic approach designed to build acquired competence, true and lasting language proficiency. The work of this wave of early adopters and brave pioneers and innovators, and the enthusiastic community that has grown out of their early successes, accounts for this shift.

The profession is moving away from instructing languages as if memorizing a verb chart, learning a word list, or filling in worksheets could result in true language proficiency. The ACTFL standards guide us to use the whole language in meaningful ways, ways that align with SLA research, in order to build true, lasting proficiency, for all our students, not just the few. Further, the Seal of Biliteracy requires students to develop a higher level of proficiency than is most people will achieve through conscious study alone.

The Promise

The community of proficiency-oriented teachers is growing at an ever-increasing pace. The internet has accelerated this growth, as colleagues are able to easily share ideas, successes, and samples of student work. Proficiency-based teaching has spread from one happy teacher to another, as teachers taking up this new paradigm have been happily surprised at how their students’ language abilities have soared. In many cases, first-year students from proficiency-based classrooms are able to comprehend, write, and speak at levels far above what traditionally has been expected of beginning language students.

Teachers also find themselves working smarter, not harder, able to leave school while the sun is still up. They can leave work at work and significantly reduce their grading and correcting time.

Teachers are often motivated by the substantial increase in student engagement they see. When communicating about interesting topics - and not studying parts of language - becomes the curriculum, most students are naturally more engaged in class. Many teachers report that proficiency-based instruction has helped them to reconnect with the joy of teaching.

Their students are more engaged, and able to do more with the language, and feeling more successful and accomplished. Engaged, successful students usually feel more motivation. Teaching people who are internally-motivated is - for most of us - much more enjoyable than working hard to make grammar and vocabulary interesting.

It is a testament to the power of proficiency-based teaching that most of the growth in interest has come horizontally in our profession from word of mouth, and not from top-down mandates. It is a grassroots movement inside school hallways, from one classroom to another, from one building to another.

At the time of this writing, districts and departments that offer a fully proficiency-based program are few and far between. The change is still happening mostly at the level of individual teachers. In fact, many teachers are bravely shifting their programs to align with standards, research, human nature, and true communication despite their district requirements.

These teachers are heroes, in my estimation, brave fighters on behalf of students, who often suffer greatly at the hands of district and building administrators and colleagues who have not yet made the shift to standards- and research-based proficiency-oriented instruction.

I know that my own journey with this kind of instruction has not always been lined with cheering unicorns tossing rose petals at me in ticker-tape parades thrown in my honor by grateful colleagues and bosses. It has been joyful…yet challenging.

I developed the Stepping Stones instructional framework in response to the challenges I faced in fitting student-centered, proficiency-oriented language teaching into the expectations of my colleagues - making this natural, effortless way of learning a language “look and feel like school.” It’s an all-too-common problem for so many teachers.

The research shows that exchanging meaningful, interesting messages is the path to language proficiency. However, many teachers who wish to align with the standards and research find themselves unable to do so in their day-to-day instruction, because they are pressured to have their students consciously learn certain language parts. Many teachers thus find themselves in a difficult professional situation, as they work to implement the following important ideas.

The difficulty comes when teachers who want to fully align their programs with the standards and SLA research are required to teach word lists, follow a textbook scope and sequence, or prepare students for assessments of grammatical accuracy and linguistic knowledge. These requirements are thick heavy cords weighing teachers down, tethering them to ineffective practices and impeding their ability to provide the building blocks of language acquisition through comprehensible interactions in the language.

Year after year, generation after generation, students show up in language classes eager to use the language, but the vast majority of them leave at the end of the year with their heads full of unconnected words and rules, and worse, a feeling that they are “not very good at languages”.

The feeling is of having participated in something resembling a mathematics class, learning formulae to manipulate parts of the language they never even knew existed - definite articles, indefinite articles, the partitive, past participles, etc.

Many pacing guides and curriculum documents still reflect the structure of the textbook, its thematic word sets and grammar points. Some districts have cobbled together the new, research-aligned proficiency goals with the old textbook-driven word lists and grammar points. Many documents now delineate proficiency goals for each year of study alongside word lists and grammar constructions to be learned at that proficiency level. These documents only partially align with the research and our national standards.

The Curricular Framework You Hold in Your Hands

The proficiency-oriented Stepping Stones curricular framework offers an alternative. It connects our national standards to the way languages are actually acquired: by comprehending and processing language input through listening and reading, and allowing speech and writing to emerge at the Novice level, which is to say at the level of one-word or phrase-length utterances, and then the Intermediate level, which is to say beginning to use connected strings of sentences, and then at the Advanced level, using well-organized, more formal discourse styles.

It aligns with research and standards, not with the financial interests of for-profit textbook companies. There is not a lot of profit to be made in selling a simple curriculum whose goal is to put student interests at the center of the material to be covered and to foster true communication in the language.

Stepping Stones is cost-effective, requiring only a trained teacher to lead the class, basic art materials, and a classroom library of interesting reading material.

In fact, educators who implement a truly research- and standards-based curriculum will most likely find themselves dramatically reducing the materials expenditures in their buildings each adoption cycle. Instead, they can use some of that budget to train their teachers in speaking comprehensibly to their classes and also to purchase high-interest, level-appropriate reading material for free-choice reading, to support true literacy in world language programs.

The Simplicity of This Work

Teachers who have a firm grasp on Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research and who understand the intent of the ACTFL standards will want to provide their students with opportunities to interact with comprehensible messages – linguistic data that builds a mental representation of the language, which leads to true proficiency.

This is the work of building acquired competence. It is an unconscious process that happens almost by magic, in an immutable and unknown order, in a part of brain that works on such intricate levels that the conscious mind could never hope to match it, and on each individual student’s unique timeline.

The students’ mental representation of the language is built from spoken and written messages that they have comprehended. All that is necessary is that the students focus on the message and not concern themselves at all with the language that is used for its delivery.

Thus, the whole language that encodes the messages is the ingredient for language acquisition. We can literally talk about anything, using any words that come up, using comprehensible language, and students will build language proficiency. They will develop acquired competence, the kind of competence that allows them - after enough language input - to effortlessly use the language.

They will never acquire this ability through conscious study, or building learned competence. This I know from personal experience.

In the lesson on Second Language Acquisition (SLA), in Instructional Session 4, you will learn more about my own experiences as a whiz-kid grammar grinder and vocabulary machine in high school Latin and French, and my subsequent fall from the precarious heights within my own self-estimation as a Real Good French Student, when I found myself lonesome and awkward, unable to do much with all the plus-que-parfait and Vandertramp Verbs that I had dutifully laid by in my brain for just such an occasion (and Xavier, if you are reading this, I wanted to flirt with you!).

I was a whiz-bang grammar learner, a straight-A French student, but all I was left with at the end of the day was learned competence. And that wasn’t what I needed, if I was going to have any hope whatsoever of seeing if Xavier was flirting with me, or if it was all in my o’er-French’d head.

What I needed was acquired competence. Acquired competence, and willing conversation partner, that is! So, looks like my lack of ACQUIRED competence pretty much ruined my chances of potentially acquiring a dashing and sparkly French boy as a boyfriend, or at the very least, a summer fling! What is the difference between this alli-mportant, and potentially life-altering, acquired competence and learned competence?

Conscious learning of grammar rules or vocabulary leads to learned competence, which is an entirely different process from language acquisition. Conscious knowledge can help students to edit and refine their speech and writing. But, in order to comfortably produce that speech and writing, students must first build acquired competence, so they can actually express themselves in the language.

Processing comprehensible messages builds acquired competence, which leads to true language proficiency. It is the only path to the students’ being able to use the language.

What About Required Word Lists and Grammar?

Despite the copious findings of SLA research and the communicative focus of our standards, many districts or departments still require conscious learning — grammar rules and lists of words. In other situations, some teachers have given themselves the goal of purposefully targeting high-frequency words, the most common words in their languages, with the worthy goal of providing their students repeated exposure to useful elements of the language so that they can begin using words like “has” and “is” and “wants” and “big” and “small” to build messages that express their own thoughts.

These word lists are unnecessary, however, as the natural, comprehensible use of the whole language will embed high-frequency words into the growing language system with no pre-planning. The only pre-planning that is truly necessary is your learning skills and strategies that enable you to use the language comprehensibly as you deliver experiences to your students. This book will lead you to learn and practice such skills as speaking slowly and comprehensibly, and using images, visual aids, voice intonation, gestures, body language, and realia to support the entire goal of communicative language instruction - student comprehension and interaction in the language.

Working through this book, you will learn and practice instructional strategies to deliver experiences that are conducted in comprehensible language.

Activities such as creating characters, discussing the day’s schedule or weather, listening to stories - even singing songs like Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes - can be used to deliver comprehensible messages to the students.

Until our district documents catch up with the research, we must separate our proficiency-based instruction from pre-chosen wordlists or grammar rules that might be imposed on our practice by others or by our own desire to “cover” or “teach” certain words or structures. Comprehensible input is the driver of language acquisition, but it is the wrong tool to teach specific elements of the language, word lists, etc.

It is a heavily-researched fact that comprehensible input doesn’t need any extra help to do its work of building acquired competence in students’ minds, and that it is easiest and most engaging when unfettered by wordlists and pacing guides.

If we are required to teach certain wordlists or grammar points, however, then comprehensible input is not the right tool for that job. Communication works best when it is not constrained by the “grammar rule of the day,” as Dr. Stephen Krashen has called it.

We can simply use the language we teach in a supported and engaging conversational environment, so that each student can take from the stream of language the elements that they need at that particular time, to feed the growing linguistic system that they are unconsciously building in their minds.

Then, in order to focus on required wordlists or grammar, we can use “Language Study Days” as explained in the Appendices, or perhaps a Word-Off or other conscious learning strategy, as explained in End-of-the-Year Option 2, to teach the conscious mind these conscious learning goals.

The instructional sequence in this book is designed to provide a logical, engaging sequence of scaffolded, comprehensible language interactions whose goal is genuine communication in the language, not on using the language interactions as a vehicle for teaching the “grammar rule of the day.”

Some of the most common problems with teaching the “rule of the day” are:

(1) Maintaining interest in repetitions of the pre-selected language can be a struggle for the teacher. Further, the great effort required is not necessary, because the national standards do not require certain words or grammar to be acquired. The standards require only that students be able to comprehend and produce texts of increasing complexity as they progress through their language acquisition journey.

(2) Dr. Krashen’s Natural Order Hypothesis (explained below) states that students progress through a “natural order” of grammar points, and the order cannot be altered. Therefore, any specific elements we “target” in a given lesson will likely fall outside many students’ range of acquisition.

(3) Focusing on language elements can inhibit student interest in the messages.

(4) The effort required to sustain student interest in oftentimes unnatural or stilted language can take an emotional and energetic toll on teachers, who have jobs that are demanding enough without attempting to use the required structure “wanted to go,” or any other “rule,” enough times in the lesson, while also managing behavior, checking for comprehension, and keeping kids engaged.

For these reasons, it is recommended that class discussions not be used as a vehicle to teach certain language features. It is often difficult for the teacher and since students’ language acquisition devices might not be ready to uptake that particular “rule,” it could very well be a waste of time, anyway.

If you need your students to consciously know things, it is generally much better just to go ahead and call in the conscious mind, so it can do what it does (memorize and analyze). This leaves the language acquisition to the unconscious mind, which is the only place where it actually happens, anyway.

If your school requires students to “know” or memorize certain features of the language, I strongly encourage you to simply take time away from the instructional sequence in this book to do so, perhaps using the suggestions on “Language Study Days” in the Appendices and End-of-the-Year Session 2, the Word-Off.

You can address required vocabulary and grammar without having to fit certain words or structures into the day-today input…while at the same time thinking about what you are going to say next.

The Research

Stepping Stones is based in large part on the research of Dr. Stephen Krashen, whose simple yet earthshattering hypotheses have not yet been disproven - after almost forty years - and to which I hew as closely as possible in my work. These hypotheses are explained in my own words below:

Conscious learning about a language, including memorizing and learning and manipulating grammar paradigms, is a separate process in the brain from unconsciously acquiring a language. In order to build long-lasting proficiency, where using the language to communicate is the goal, teachers must teach for acquisition, not learning. Acquired proficiency comes from our internal mental representation of the language, a linguistic system we build in our minds, not from learned facts, lists, and formulae.

Understanding comprehensible messages (in spoken and, for literate students, written form) is the cause of language acquisition. There is no other way to feed the Language Acquisition Device (posited by linguist Noam Chomsky) the data that it needs to build a mental representation of the language.

The Monitor is our self-editing, or self-correcting function. It is useful for helping us produce grammatically-correct writing or correct speech. However, the Monitor can also impede our willingness to take risks and try using language.

In the beginning stages of language acquisition, teachers should focus on communicating, not accuracy, and avoid correcting students’ attempts at output.

Language is best acquired when students are relaxed and focused on something interesting and pleasant. A classroom environment that keeps affective filters low, thus, is key for optimal language acquisition to occur.

This suggests that we need to make all our students feel as comfortable and successful as possible, celebrate success, smile at them, and cultivate a warm, relaxed, focused, and stress-free environment.

Grammatical features of languages are acquired in a natural order that cannot be changed by instruction. Students can learn about features of the language (e.g. the difference between the verbs ser and estar or how to form the past tenses) in any order, but true acquisition of the features is not under our conscious control. Students progress along the natural order in the same order, but at different paces.

We should thus provide our classes with the most complex language that they can still understand (which in the beginning is provided at a very slow pace, with lots of scaffolding such as pictures or translations or visual aids), so that students at all their different stages along the natural order of acquisition can all take linguistic data that helps them to grow their mental representation of the language.

The Vision

Dr. Krashen’s vision of comprehensible input - whole-language, meaningful, interesting instruction for world languages - aligns with our national standards. That information can empower us to work within our systems to shift the local standards more into alignment with the type of input Dr. Krashen recommends as superior - input that prioritizes communication and whole language over specific language parts.

With ACTFL leading the way away from the ineffective form-focused language instruction of the past, and with local teachers helping to shift the conversation towards our national standards and the research on how we learn languages, eventually we will become free of faulty standards and gain the unfettered ability to teach in a natural and much more enjoyable way, by providing comprehensible, community-building, and creative experiences to our students. This book lays down a suggested roadmap for that type of instruction.

Here you have a scope and sequence for a year of uncluttered, proficiency-based language instruction and assessment of students’ acquired competence, their proficiency in using the language for communication.

If teachers had the full freedom to align only with the national standards, this could change language classrooms into community-building creative spaces more resembling a Montessori or Waldorf or Dewian school - those visionary radical education reformers of the Progressive Era - than the form-focused classrooms that most of us inhabited in our school careers as beginner language learners.

Advocating for Change

My sincere hope is that professional language educators across the nation will begin to feel emboldened and compelled to educate their administrators, communities, and districts about best practices in world language education.

In many programs, the students themselves see the results of a proficiency-based approach and begin advocating for change in their later language courses, where they see less-effective and less-engaging teaching methods being used. It is my hope as well that teachers will begin harnessing the power of their students and their parents to advocate shoulder-to-shoulder with them in pressuring the districts and states to rewrite their documents to support and even encourage a completely proficiency-based approach.

This is a fight worth investing time, toil, and energy into. It is a question of aligning our practices with the research on language acquisition. It is also a question of equity.

Many students, especially our most academically-vulnerable students, do not find success with traditional grammar-based approaches.

Who can blame them? Filling out a worksheet to learn to manipulate a certain grammar rule is not inherently motivating to many people. Several districts that have made the switch to proficiency-based instruction have found that students from historically-underserved backgrounds have begun making higher grades and are continuing on to higher levels of language study than they were with traditional grammar approaches.

Until we change our district or state requirements, many teachers who are joining the growing ranks of proficiency-based instructors will need to pursue dual goals in their classroom - fostering language acquisition through devoting as much time as possible to exchanges of comprehensible messages at the students’ level while also preparing their students to succeed on grammar-based district assessments and align with their traditional colleagues.

We are in the midst of a historic time period in world language education.

Interest in proficiency-based teaching is at an all-time high, and . There is currently a proliferation of ideas on using more of our languages in the classroom. Even the most staunch traditionalists are becoming aware that they need to incorporate more language interaction in their instruction.

We teachers who already have made the commitment to providing our students with the ingredient for language acquisition - the actual language itself - are in the first wave of change.

This is a privileged position. We owe it to tomorrow’s teachers, and especially to their future students, to advocate for, and strongly, a more equitable, joyful, heart-centered, and effective approach to equipping our youngsters for global human communication. We have been given a gift. It is the gift of awareness, of vision, of inspiration.

As John Dewey himself has said,

Every great advance in science has issued from a new audacity of imagination.