What exactly is our job? What happens if we don't do it?

What exactly is our job? What happens if we don't do it?

     Foreign Language teachers, today I start with something you don't often hear from other consultants and advisers who visit you, talking about how one might develop our profession and our students. A dear friend once opened my eyes to the fact that at the end of the day, teaching is a JOB. We get paid, which is to say, we are not volunteering. We do not wait for disaster, then swoop in out of a spirit of community service, but instead mind the store every day.  Passion and a commitment to helping the community are definitely part of what make us special as teachers, but one can only run on adrenaline so long.

     When I was a full-time teacher, I got tired of being guilted by whoever was supervising or consulting as they tried to question my willingness or intention to make every student successful.   For various years while I was a teacher, we were during that particular year “in a crisis” that would culminate in late May if we didn't achieve monumental changes.  Those changes asked of me in my classroom almost always took me away from my gut and SLA research.   At times it felt like “Lean on Me” mixed with “Groundhog Day.” If the requirements for teaching fry a teacher like an egg on a New Orleans sidewalk, those requirements only help the few kids who got the benefit of the overdrive, high-burn period. Whatever we discuss as a better method of and purpose for FL teaching must be sustainable so that you keep wanting to teach and the school can leverage your experience as you get better.

Getting Them to Step Outside Themselves

     Why are you a FL teacher? What motivates you to try to convince those outside of your language to attempt to learn it? I suspect you have a passion for the “beyond” of the student's immediate world. I taught students who were both surrounded by and also themselves members of an incredibly diverse, worldly community. I had students from west Africa, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Russia, Brazil, and Mexico, and their descendants, all sitting next to each other.  You probably teach in a somewhat more homogeneous classroom than that, but I can safely tell you that both you and I have been surprised at the oversimplifying, ignorant (no pejorative intended), stereotyping language and behavior of our students. My students would speak vapidly and erroneously about a people who were in fact only a few feet away. Being around people who are not like you is a great first step, but unless and until a student is asked to set foot outside the comfortable, questioning his assumptions, positive change is mere luck and not part of achieving an education.

     Do you like that part of your job?  I do.  I LOVED it, for example, when a student said, “Why don't 'Spanish people' have a word for 'like'? Why don't they just talk like US?” A ha!   Not everyone is like you, young one!  Not everyone is even like everyone that you know!  This leads to conversations about how others have different, valid points of view, that one cannot take for granted that presuppositions are shared by all parties, and to suspending judgment; all marks of a worldly person.  This is my first “favorite thing” about our job.

     Other courses teach these principles, as well, of course.  That in a foreign language class you can actually teach them to talk and listen to those who differ in their worldview makes ours the greatest job in the world, and is my second “favorite thing” about our job.   That they get to see how difficult it is to do well leads to empathy for those who must do it more than the 48 minutes a day they spend in your classroom.  Getting a young man or woman to imagine and pretend to be a visitor when they are used to being host is my third “favorite thing” about our job.

     This is worth preserving, dear reader, I tell you.  So, how's it going where you work?  Are these three critical skills the ones that are climbing in prestige year after year while you march towards retirement?  Are you laughing out loud right now?  During my tenure, I was approached repeatedly, nay, I confess that I even volunteered, to try to use foreign language class time to try to BOOST SCIENCE AND MATH END-OF-COURSE TEST SCORES.   I was there, I was told, to teach the “whole” student, and if I did not care about helping them in these areas with these particular skills, then I was in the wrong profession.

     We are not in the wrong profession, but sometimes I think we cede parts of our identity as a profession to others because we lack a cogent definition of what we expect, as well as, significantly, the success rate to show that our expectations produced value.  The choices we make as FL teachers must make FLED memorable and relevant for the students by leveraging their cognitive processes, and not in fact working against those processes.  

Working Against the Current is Tiring

     It is the second part of this point that informs my concern about teacher burnout.  Working against the students' psychology and natural growth processes is a recipe for exhaustion and disillusion.  If we do a good job of defining what we expect of our students, others will have less of a chance to do so.   If how we define our expectations in a way that addresses how second language learners proceed through the learning process, we will develop more enthusiasm via success, less dropout after second year, and greater advocacy in the future.  Further, we ourselves may feel more refreshed in the process and churn on for more years.

     Around what flag do we rally, then?   You could write this paragraph, too.  What is clear to me is that students must be able to use the language in a level-appropriate manner after taking my course, and want to do so.  Whatever distracts from that, no matter its tradition, ease of administration, or its complementary nature to other departments, must be cast aside.   Later on I'll examine the research that tells us exactly what that means.

     Next, the “cognitive” component.  We must assess students in ways they can be successful given what their brains go through in the time that we are with them.  Give them, their parents, and anyone else an alternative to the idea that we are principally in the business of helping them to understand English grammar (the age-old classic) and getting them another crack at multiple choice questions about math and science, but in a different language.   These things are important, but if a fraction of those who had taken FL classes came away from the experience with a skill they could use and get nowhere else, I feel we could fight this idea that our job is to help the “important” subjects.   If 5% of state legislators had received a critical, unforgettable experience from their FLED, what would be different today (1)? Would there be more FL classes in elementary schools, for example, like there are in the classrooms of rising nations?

They Vote With Their Feet

     Why the alarm?  I'll tell you.  You are already feeling the pressure of a shrinking tax base for the last several years (although things here in my state seem to be coming around, if slowly) and increased pressure from NCLB, along with its temptation for “step-to-the-beat-of-my-drum” administration from stressed-out, pressured officials.   I felt it, too.

     I do not feel that our profession is safe, but not just because of the inflated importance of students' test scores.  My fear stems from the fact that those outside our profession, including and especially our graduates, overwhelmingly vote with their feet, stating emphatically that what we do is not particularly valued or understood in most schools.

     I will never forget that night years ago walking to my FLED class at Kennesaw State University and seeing the newspaper clipping on the bulletin board.  In it, the reporter detailed how our governor at the time was proposing to save money by absorbing two sets of preparatory courses into one requirement.  The courses that would be lumped together stunned me, and still do.  Because they were both “languages,” he wanted to allow foreign language courses to substitute for computer programming, or vice versa (2).

     Are you laughing, crying, or perhaps whimpering right now?  Can you imagine the vacuum of information that must have been present for him to think such a thing?  But, I ask you with utmost respect, would our students have felt the same jolt or disgust upon hearing his suggestion?   I hope so.  What might we do that we don't do today to present a clear alternative to his interpretation?  Opinions and experiences differ, of course.

     I feel like a pastor asking us to open our hymnals, but I refer you to the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines for some opportunity for reflection. Here are the proficiencies that a level II student should achieve for listening and speaking, in the state of Georgia:

Listeners at the Novice-High level are able to understand short, learned utterances and some sentence-length utterances, particularly where context strongly supports understanding and speech is clearly audible. They can comprehend words and phrases from simple questions, statements, high-frequency commands and courtesy formulae. At this level, students may require repetition, rephrasing and/or a slowed rate of speech for comprehension.

...(Novice-Mid) Speakers at the Novice-Mid level communicate minimally and with difficulty by using a number of isolated words and memorized phrases limited by the particular context in which the language has been learned. When responding to direct questions, they may utter only two or three words at a time or an occasional stock vocabulary or attempt to recycle their own and their interlocutor’s words. Because of hesitations, lack of vocabulary, inaccuracy, or failure to respond appropriately, Novice-Mid speakers may be understood with great difficulty even by sympathetic interlocutors accustomed to dealing with non-natives. When called on to handle topics by performing functions associated with the Intermediate level, they frequently resort to repetition, words from their native language, or silence (3), p. 2 (italics mine).

The ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines are not a foregone conclusion, but merely a suggestion. Students may achieve what they may achieve in our classes. What does the record suggest, however, regarding where students fall at the end of the classes that so many of them take?

     The evidence is astounding that the “prescription” on my state's website is highly represented in research. You may have seen this evidence back when you were in school. In Shrum and Glisan (2005) (4), the authors summarize six studies (well, they present a table from Tschirner and Heilenman (1998) (5) that does so) that all assessed students' Speaking proficiencies at course end. After 2 years of German, French, or Spanish, the various authors found the mean proficiency for speaking (via the OPI) to be either Novice-Mid or Novice-High (4).  After three years, which is often the pinnacle of the motivated students' language experience, the four of these studies that measured their proficiency returned means of Novice-High, Intermediate-Low (2 studies), and Intermediate-Mid!(4)

     Do we teach to these proficiencies in the 2^nd- and 3^rd-year courses?  Do you emphasize memorized phrases and two- to three-word utterances?  Only you can answer that for your classroom.  But if we don't, we are asking for students to feel dissatisfied.  For what it's worth, here are three sets of suggestions for higher retention that I would like to submit for your discussion at your departmental lunch table.   If I came to your school to talk about retention and growth, here are the main points I'd ask to be pondered:

Slow Down Enough to Keep Recycling

     I was always amazed as I compared myself, my department, and other departments in my county with regard to pacing.  Some teachers flew through the curriculum (from my perspective), covering new vocabulary and of course new grammar at a pace of 2 or 3 chapters faster per semester than I was.  To what end?  It is possible, to their credit, that the teachers who do this are more rigorous, have higher expectations, and are preparing students for the next class in a superior fashion to those who aren't.  The main advantage that I see, however, is that the handful of students who go on to take a Clep-like test at the university might be able to get more multiple-choice/cloze/conjugation questions correct and therefore skip a freshman- or sophomore-level class of the FL.   Do students who are pushed to learn faster want to continue to learn the language, build more friendships with those of the TL community, and go on to use the language as adults?  Do they have a better understanding that the entire world is not like theirs and more often do they readily try to see things from others' points of view?   Not in my experience, but you are invited to cite research in the comments below in disagreement.

     The tradeoff for rapid pacing, I submit, is that you lose the time to recycle older concepts in the classroom due to the numbing, rapid emphasis on the new.  Do your students forget how to communicate in the present tense around November or December of their second year?  Mine did, sometimes.  What tense will they use if they make friends from the other culture, immediately?  Commands?  The Imperfect Subjunctive with the Conditional?  No.  The present tense, and eventually the simple past for some, with some subjunctive for others (but eventually everything, and beyond, of course!).  If we rarely recycle, mixing in the new vocabulary and themes we encounter via new chapters, those skills not only “get lost,” they never get to develop to begin with.  The student is not comfortable with the tenses she needs in almost any conversation, even as her more advanced grammars are developed, and when she see opportunities in the lunchroom or at the bus stop to take risks and to try to communicate, I submit that she is more likely to leave the affective filter up and therefore then either freeze or avoid altogether.
     In an ideal class, then, what would that recycling look like?  I do not mean that old tenses get re-conjugated and re-drilled, although that might be a good warmup.  I mean that students are asked to think, speak, and write about newer topics and themes using older grammar and themes.  If a student in year three has learned camping and nature this month, in a grammatical context of the past perfect, ask her to talk about meeting some new friends (a theme from year one) while sitting around a campfire, and describing what they will do the next day (a grammar from year one and two).  Permit the neural and dendritic networks of the brain to bridge new connections between the old knowledge and the new.  

Give Value to What is Valuable!

     Spanish is my area, which uses a Latin-derived grammar and orthography that your language may not.   What message do we send to the students about what is important in Spanish?  At times, it is the cold importance of accent marks.   Tic, tic, tic. Minus 1, minus 1, minus 1.  Other times, the gravity of choosing a “c” instead of a “z" (which are not pronounced differently in the cases where they are confused).  And, most commonly, I see that we (and our curriculum developers) value the ability to conjugate in a context-free environment for any of six “persons, ” using prompts with a most tenuous connection to real life ( “Yo / empezar a / la escuela a las ocho.”   Very familiar to all Spanish teachers).  Can you communicate and enjoy Spanish without mastering these things?  I believe that you can.   What if students communicated confidently and freely, full of these kinds of errors, but took more risks?  If you learned English as your second or third language, is that not what you did when you were growing accustomed to it?  Assessing students in an authentic, yet lighter, scaled-down manner to how an actual listeners perceive actual speakers is something worth pursuing.

Reading, Listening, and Performance

     I was always amazed at the discrepancy between what my students could understand versus what they then could say and write. This is well understood in our discipline, but inside the bubble of the “semester crush” that we all have felt, it is easy to forget.  What if we assessed reading and listening at a higher standard than speaking and writing?   Is that not prescribed by SLA research?  How much reading and listening do you get a chance to evaluate in your week?  For many, I'm betting it is a fraction of what is expected to be produced.  It is hard to stratify these expectations between r/l and s/w if the bulk of our work is spent in premature production.  In Spanish, that often means tons and tons of practice on context-free conjugation.

     Recall from my intro that I hold in high regard our ability to transform the student from host to guest, and to ask her to think outside of her own perspective and comfort zone.  If this is a goal in my (and perhaps your) classroom, what kind of production do we assess?   Conjugating verbs for all six persons is not likely to foment this transformation all by itself.  I was lucky enough to work in a county that provided a high-quality, useful alternative to the "context free,", and it changed the way I taught and tested.

     In Fulton county, GA, USA, we worked to create a set of common assessments for the entire system, between 17 high schools!  In heavily debated sessions, we demarcated that a certain chunk of that assessment be evaluated via production-oriented, contextualized tasks. We wanted our students to be able with little rehearsal time to speak and write in various scenarios, mimicking what might happen to them when having to speak or write in real life.  We set about to create those scenarios in a way that was tied to the curriculum.  In the end, we tried to place value in assessment on what we valued about being in a FL classroom.

     I don't want to stray off topic too much by talking about these assessment tasks in detail, but I commit to developing an essay about them in a future blog.  These "Performance-Based Assessments" have been researched and published since the last century, and you likely do some of what we did already.  It was fascinating to learn how to create them well (and thanks, in no small part, goes to a well known FLED consultant named Greg Duncan for showing us the way).  What I will mention is that these assessment tasks allow a student to focus on his strengths because they have no one single right answer.

     How do you then score something like that??  I benefited tremendously from this part of our collaborative development, as we department chairs and other interested parties sat in meetings well ahead of the common exam date, with an overhead and a Word table, and hashed out how to score these performance tasks via a multi-component rubric.   Passionate debate flowed as we discussed pronunciation, grammar, risk-taking, use of idioms, and the like.   In my store (“He has a store?” Yes, yes I do.), I have developed rubrics that heavily leverage my experience doing this, if you don't want to wait for the ensuing article and care to see them now (see end of article).

     To close this section, I'll put out this hypo: We all learned in school to do the kinds of things that I mention here, but we don't consistently incorporate them into our classrooms, although you as an individual may. Why not?

Certainly, I Like Certainty

     I think the answer is complex, but I'll address one issue, ease, here. Teaching is not easy, and grading is in my opinion its hardest and most daunting task.  We instinctively search for certainty, comfort, and process in what can be overwhelming and hellish at times.   Each status quo practice above, however, can be accompanied by its own seductive form of ease.   It's easier to teach lessons every day when the material keeps changing rapidly, because the lessons write themselves.  Just keep putting the new conjugation or vocab list on the overhead and chug on.   Recycling takes more effort, because most textbooks don't encourage it beyond a quick review exercise at the beginning of a new chapter.  Novel combinations of more familiar forms and themes mixed with new can be hard to create.   Further, it is relatively simple (in Spanish) to spot accent marks or context-free conjugation errors, and it is certainly easier to give value to error than to give it to proficiency when grading a stack of tests.   Students don't conjugate well at first, so more practice appears almost certainly necessary, and is then implemented.   Listening and reading, therefore, get relegated to levels that do not mimic our behavior in the acquisition of our first languages. This is all reinforced heavily by the focus on good “test-taking” strategies that we can rehearse with our students as they prepare for the battery (double entendre intended!) of tests they take outside our discipline.  It's a perfect storm.

     What is the effect of all this? I think we peel off from what we know to be good SLA practice, and most of the students, who have no interest almost to a person in the technical fineries of our craft, become both bored with it but also frustrated, because the emphasis on those technical matters doesn't foster well their ability to talk with new friends or relatives in the new language.

Hold on a Second, Greg!

     I am not suggesting, by any means, that no one should ever drill, use cloze, count off for technical errors or try keep pace with colleagues.  However, I feel that if we do not create courses that complement the process of the young human brain, that then we are going to have more and more “important” skills from other courses thrown at us as part of our job and continue to lose bright students who started off in first level because they were curious about speaking the language but stopped as soon as they were permitted to because they wanted to take dance, do science fair, take research methods, etc.. As I witnessed in my own state legislature, there will be few outside of teaching who remain to advocate for us as bilinguality (even a rudimentary billinguality) will not be the common result of our practices.

     What is more, I return to my introduction here, that we want to teach in such a way that we our ourselves feel refreshed and are able to soldier on for many years, doing the “job.”   Slowing down, recycling, and stressing contextual communication yield less “pushback” from the students themselves based on what we know about SLA and the four proficiencies.  Keeping out the test-taking pressures in favor of creating basic communicators will also produce less exhaustion for us.  Everyone wins.

     In the end, it is not fruitful to get a bunch of short-term memory crammed into my students' brains so that they can finish the pacing guide and “do better” on stuff outside our walls, and in the process lead us to a burned-out, angry, exhausted state.   Instead I would ask that as a profession we listen to what the students and the research are telling us, for generations now.   Going too fast, grading legalistically, and forcing premature, bloated, and context-free production, even when these practices are perhaps mentally easier or more comfortable for us than doing what comes naturally to the young ones, are not good for either the students or the teachers.   Like you, I want students and colleagues who wish to continue!  Thank you for reading, and for trying to make the world a better place via your FL classroom.  I invite your comments below.

Greg Sanchez is a FLED consultant and vendor, as well as a former department chair/Spanish teacher at a Title I school in metro Atlanta.  Contact him at CobbSpanishTeacher@gmail.com.

This blog is located at FLEDFocus.blogspot.com
To see my store, visit www.TeachersPayTeachers.com/store/PicantePractices
To stay in touch via Facebook, hit Like for https://www.facebook.com/PicantePractices
     I'm running a sweepstakes to give away some of my teaching tools, assessments, and songs.  Apply here.

Works Cited:

1. For a blunt assessment of how we are doing, read http://voices.washingtonpost.com/class-struggle/2010/04/why_waste_time_on_a_foreign_la.html, and the comments below it.
2.  I am embarrassed to say that I cannot find a citation for this. I really tried!
3.https://www.georgiastandards.org/standards/Georgia%20Performance%20Standards/Modern%20Languages%20Level%20II.pdf
4.  Teacher's Handbook, Eileen W Glisan - Judith L Shrum - Boston - Janet Dracksdorf - 2005 - 3rd Ed.

5.  Tschirner, Erwin, and Kathy Heilenman, L. (1999)  Reasonable Expectations: Oral Proficiency Goals for Intermediate- Level Students of German. The Modern Language Journal, 82.