I hope maybe you or Eric could email her with our questions.
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Original Message:
Sent: 10-17-2014 15:55
From: Ben Slavic
Subject: Why thematic units? Why authentic resources? Show me the research
...In a city school system with 3 high schools and 7 middle schools all teaching world languages, there has to be some standard....
This is an almost irrefutable point. It destroys Mr. Herman's argument, really. We must arrange our instruction based on efficacy across the district. How else could a district function without
......an exam for each level written using a pacing guide and, yes, textbook content....
One nagging thought about the topic of pacing guides (which are usually based on thematic units), however, has stayed in my mind throughout this excellent discussion. I keep returning here to see if Mr. Herman has gotten any research-based answers to his research-based questions and he hasn't. And if it turns out that there is no research to back up the use of pacing guides/thematic units (it is looking more that way every day), then it concerns me that the pacing guides may be being used at the expense of how children actually learn languages. I am all in favor of efficacy in teaching, of course, but when it comes at the expense of children's self-esteem, well, that gets me thinking.
Pacing guides based on thematic units separate kids out from who is willing to do the work and and who is not. That is not a good way to determine advancement through four year language programs. I am not in favor of having lazy kids in my advanced classes, but some of them are really pretty smart, and who can compete with cell phones these days anyway? I realize now, as well, after Mr. Herman first raised his questions in those first few posts, that pacing guides/thematic units may actually have caused me to have lower enrollments than was possible if I hadn't have relied so much on them during those 30 years when I based my instruction on pacing guides.
Of course, it was easy to report really high scores at the upper levels because most, up to 90% of my students, were gone by the time they got to the AP level, naturally selected out not because they couldn't learn a language, as I realize now, but because they just didn't want to study for those tests on thematic units and the other lists that I gave them to learn. Oh well, it only took me 30 years to figure that one out, but job security was greater then, and enrollments are playing a key role in our job security with each passing year these days.
It is true, however, that those lazy kids really frustrated me. They shouldn't have been in my upper levels because they didn't work hard enough in the first two levels and shouldn't have been allowed to go on. Most of them couldn't conjugate their way out of a paper bag when they got to me in level three. I felt that all those lazy kids slowed everything down because they were so lazy. Or so I thought then.
I do think about those kids who quit sometimes, or the ones I wouldn't let continue because they didn't study. Some really wanted to learn French. I remember their faces in the first two weeks of the first year, or in those eight years I taught middle school, when it was all so new and fascinating to them. But then fairly quickly their eyes started to glaze over. Mr. Herman really has me thinking about this. I did notice that they were pretty fluent in English, and that some of my Latino kids were fluent in two languages, so why couldn't they learn French? Maybe they weren't so stupid after all, and maybe they weren't that lazy. Memorizing lists of words makes me lazy just thinking about it.
So now I am starting to think that arranging instruction in terms of thematic units, pacing guides and some textbook content, which involve so much memorization (repetition is better, as I see it now) was bad for the kids I taught all those years. After all, I went into teaching to be able to share my love of French and the world wide French culture, which is so cool, with my students, and not make them feel as if they are stupid.
If you think about it, we have only this one planet, and if we make our students think that they are stupid and don't know the language of some major culture here, then that is not good for anyone. Failing kids because they refuse to learn a bunch of words in a list is not what a second language teacher should do.
So where is the hard research on thematic units? Do they work or not? Did I do it wrong for all those years? Are pacing guides the best way to arrange instruction or not? If pacing guides based on thematic units have nothing to back them up in the research, then maybe we can look around for something that is actually based in research. Don't people agree that basing instruction on research and not pacing guides might have been important to those kids who ended up dropping my classes, or failing them, when I used thematic units? That is the question that Mr. Herman has me asking. I'm feeling like I did something wrong now. If thematic units really do not have any basis in research, then what are they even doing in all those textbooks? It's a valid question to ask. We don't need any more kids who hate school here in Colorado, with our track record on guns.
Maybe we should recall textbooks if they are flawed, if there is no proof that they work. The auto industry does that with cars. Is it too extreme a statement to say that when you base instruction on something unproven, you put the students at risk? If you think about it, we are in the self-esteem business, and we don't want millions of kids walking around thinking that they are stupid at languages because they can't memorize a bunch of words off of a list for a test. If I am a kid with a cell phone and a word list to memorize, I'm probably going to choose the cell phone that evening, right?
Plus, how is memorizing the list going to help me in Mexico? When I get there, I probably will have forgotten the words in the list even if I had memorized them for the test and earned an A in that class. I might be able to count to twenty while standing on some street in Paris, if I look down at my feet, or maybe I could engage a French person and tell them what color some building is, but the French already know that. I wouldn't be helping them and I would leave France without having actually communicated with any of them. And I probably wouldn't even have the courage to use the only Spanish I learned in school, "Can I go to the bathroom?", in the streets of Juarez.
I think we should just go to the top. We should just ask Helena Curtain. Or, better yet, the people who actually publish the textbooks. They are the ones who arrange the thematic units in their books. I have always been impressed how they arrange that stuff in those books - so nice - and I have always assumed that it must have been arranged there in terms of order of acquisition and other research, right? Can you imagine, a textbook not based in how people learn languages? That's what I am confused about now in this discussion about the use of the pacing guides.
We really don't need to waste this much time on this. Helena Curtain or the textbook companies probably have our answer while we are sitting here getting all philosophical about it. This is why we have leaders. I was a classroom grunt. I don't know any of the research because I never had time to read it - I had classes to teach. I used the book for so long as a teacher of AP French language and literature and then finally gave up on that because it was so hard, so grueling. Look at the faces of the AP teachers in your building. You will see stress. Being an AP teacher was really hard, especially when all those kids came to me from middle school and their lower level classes with scrambled eggs for brains.
So Mr. Herman's two original posts here have really got me thinking. Who knows Helena Curtain's email address? Let's get this thing resolved - it's getting kind of stupid, professional people in a field talking about something as basic as what we base our instruction on, and not being able to say so in crisp and clear fashion. When answers are provided to the questions posed by Mr. Herman, I can go back to thinking about the stuff I was thinking about before Mr. Herman asked his questions, like what time to go walk the dog, since I am retired now from the wars. Does anyone have Helena Curtain's email address? Or an address for, say, Realidades? Someone must have an answer on this thing!
Hey, what are those "rating" stars in the upper right hand corner of our posts? Are we rating each other here? That seems so odd. Can't we just talk? I don't think I'm going to get many stars for my comments here. You should get stars for reading all the way to the end of this long post, for which I apologize (its length not its content).
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Ben Slavic
benslavic@yahoo.com
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Original Message:
Sent: 10-16-2014 08:11
From: Luann Smith
Subject: Why thematic units? Why authentic resources? Show me the research
I have been reading this thread for days now and I finally feel compelled to reply. Textbooks are not the be all and end all but they are a source. Some structure is needed and if a textbook offers the scaffold then so be it. In a city school system with 3 high schools and 7 middle schools all teaching world languages, there has to be some standard. Since our district is not all OPI trained, we cannot fully assimilate this methodology. However, we can use the concepts toward developing proficient speakers and writers. Our district has recently gone to common exams for modern languages. This was not my choice, but I have to deal with this. I believe that our high school generally instructs to a higher level than some of the other schools, but we are not the only ones teaching world languages. Therefore an exam for each level was written using a pacing guide and, yes, textbook content. The exams are not bad, they just do not measure all students' abilities. They are, if you will, similar to the SOL exams in that they measure the median ability in the language. it is my and every other teacher's responsibility to enable the students to achieve as much as possible beyond the median. That is where individuality in instruction plays the biggest role. I still submit plans that are congruent with the other schools in the district but also reflect my personality and standards. Isn't this what being an effective teacher is all about?
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Luann Smith
luann.smith@pps.k12.va.us
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Original Message:
Sent: 10-15-2014 11:14
From: Ben Slavic
Subject: Why thematic units? Why authentic resources? Show me the research
I so agree with this:
...a dynamic and creative teacher will take the good elements from many sources and create a successful program, thus it is more important to have highly trained and effective teachers in the classroom than to require any particular teaching method....
I would like to add, however, that by this line of reasoning a teacher of mathematics, as long as she was highly trained and highly effective, could teach math in any way she wanted. I would ask if this is really a good idea. I would personally rather see a highly trained and effective math teacher teaching math in ways that reflect how the brain actually learns math.
It seems to me that this is what Mr. Herman is getting at with his questions about thematic units. I'll keep following this thread. I am sure that there are very good reasons to explain why language instruction is so often based on thematic units. I can't wait to read them!
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Ben Slavic
benslavic@yahoo.com
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Original Message:
Sent: 10-10-2014 13:45
From: Robert Morrey
Subject: Why thematic units? Why authentic resources? Show me the research
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Robert Morrey
rmorrey@pacbell.net
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In my 32 years as a very successful high school German teacher I focused heavily on word frequency as a design concept for the materials that I developed to supplement the basic course materials. I currently have a four-year German curriculum online that is based on a 2500 word frequency count with the most frequent ca 600 words as the basis of material for the first level, the next most frequent ca 600 words added in the second level and so forth. On the basis of my own tests, the National German Exams, and AP tests in German, my good students were very successful. In my career from 1970 to 2000 several approved methods of instruction came and went. I believe a dynamic and creative teacher will take the good elements from many sources and create a successful program, thus it is more important to have highly trained and effective teachers in the classroom than to require any particular teaching method.
Robert A Morrey
PhD Foreign Language Education
Stanford University - 1970
USDE Christa McAuliffe Fellow - 1991
German teacher - Cupertino High School 1971-2001
Currently tutoring students using online materials and Skype
Original Message:
Sent: 10-09-2014 22:53
From: Eric Herman
Subject: Why thematic units? Why authentic resources? Show me the research
This message has been cross posted to the following eGroups: High School Educators and Language Educators .
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2 Questions:
In the ACTFL 21st Century Skills Map (p.4) it says this about Today: "Use of thematic units and authentic resources." ACTFL promotes thematic instruction and authentic resources to be used for instruction and for assessment. I want to know: Why?
1) Why does ACTFL think instruction should be theme-based? Where's the research that teaching in themes is more effective than a syllabus organized by a different principle, e.g. structures, functions, situations, tasks, or texts?
Full disclosure: I teach with CI (TCI), e.g. TPR, TPRS, MovieTalk, FVR, Natural Approach, and I organize syllabi by texts, more specifically, by stories.
Vocabulary acquisition researchers write about the dangers of teaching together words and grammar of similar form and/or similar meaning (vertical instruction). It is less effective, which is explained by interference theory (Higa, 1963; Laufer, 1989; Nation, 2000; Tinkham, 1993; Tinkham, 1997; Waring, 1997). Read quotes from this research at the bottom of this message. It should also be clear from word frequency analysis that teaching words in related sets means teaching words with very different frequencies, too often words of mid- and low-frequency.
For example, the first word listed in each set below is one of the highest frequency words from that set and the second word is one of those lower (often really low) frequency words that still traditionally gets taught:
Set (Rank Frequency) word
Animals: (780) horse (4,945) elephant
Body: (150) hand (2,407) ear
Clothing: (1,710) suit (4,427) t-shirt
Colors: (250) white (8225) orange
Days: (1,121) Sunday (3490) Tuesday
Family: (166) son (5,071) niece
Food: (787) meat (7602) carrot
Months: (1,244) August (2,574) September
Sports: (2,513) soccer (28,388) hockey
Weather: (989) heat (5493) breeze
Another example: Why do we care so much in a level 1 course that someone knows all the numbers? Only the numbers one and two are in the most-frequently used 100 words. There are more than 300 more frequent words than the numbers 6 through 10, and the numbers 13 through 19 are not in the most frequently used 1,000 Spanish words.
Source: A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish (2006) by Mark Davies
* If developing proficiency is the #1 language goal, then what curriculum content develops this best? What vocabulary is most useful? What vocabulary (and how much) is to be mastered in level 1? level 2? etc. Vocabulary acquisition researchers define the top 2,000-3,000 words on a frequency list as the "high-frequency" words, because it is knowledge of these words that will give you 95% coverage of the outside world, which in studies shows the subjects achieve moderate comprehension. To avoid interference, to teach the most useful language, our curriculum content should be based on word frequency lists and include the flexibility to personalize the content to the students.
2) Why does ACTFL think authentic resources should be used in instruction and in assessment? Again, show me the research.
If authentic is taken to mean that it is material created for a native speaker, then most of these resources have incomprehensible language to novice and intermediate students. Research also supports that 98%+ coverage of a text should be the goal, because it is when subjects know 98% of the words in a text that they achieve adequate comprehension scores. At less than 98% coverage, then the students are not relying on the language anymore to ensure comprehension, but rather extra-lingual support, i.e. clues from the pictures, etc. And if the student can't understand the language, incomprehensible input, then how does that help the student acquire?
I have a feeling that the answer to #1 and #2 is the assumption that themes and authentic texts are supposed to be "motivational." ACTFL thinks this is the best way to motivate learners. Anyone believing that themes and authentic resources is the best motivation ought to observe a good TPRS class. ACTFL has to acknowledge the success of TPRS to develop fluency and motivation and admit that there is another way, besides themes and authentic resources. And then not make such narrow recommendations!
By making these statements about theme-based instruction and authentic resources they are making it unnecessarily difficult on TCI instructors who work within departments that are trying to align everything with ACTFL. Or worse, for teachers working within departments blindly following a textbook curriculum.
On the risks of teaching thematic units of similarly related vocabulary, here is the abstract of Waring, 1997:
"In this journal Tinkham (1993) in two experiments found that learning words grouped in semantic sets interferes with the learning of words. Tinkham found that if learners are given words which share a common superordinate concept (such as words for clothes) in list form, they are learned slower than words which do not have a common superordinate concept. This finding suggests that we should not give wordlists to our learners which have words that come from the same semantic set, but should be asking them to learn words semantically unrelated to each other. The present study, a close replication of Tinkham's, used Japanese words paired with artificial words and found a main effect against learning semantically related words at the same time, replicating Tinkham's findings. It can be tentatively concluded from these two papers that presenting students with wordlists of new words in semantic clusters, rather than in unrelated word groups, can interfere with learning. Following a discussion of the research design and some of its limitations, there is some comment on current research methodology."
http://www.robwaring.org/papers/various/Sys2_97.html
And this from Nation, 2000:
"This research shows that learning related words at the same time makes learning them more difficult. This learning difficulty can be avoided if related words are learned separately, as they are when learning from normal language use. . . The criteria of usefulness (frequency or need) and avoidance of interference (ease of learning) are more important than aiming for early completeness of lexical sets. In addition to the criteria of frequency and avoidance of interference, course designers need to apply a criterion of normal use, meaning that words should occur in normal communication situations, not in contrived, language-focused activities."
http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/publications/paul-nation/2000-Lexical-sets.pdf
I really hope someone can answer my questions. Please, show me the research.
Thank you.
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Eric Herman
eric.herman.pchn@gmail.comSpanish Teacher
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