Month: February 2023

In my grandparents’ day, we’re talking the 1930s, students who took world languages in high school were really aiming for a reading knowledge of the language. College-bound students of that era would be ready to read sources in their original language perhaps, and not so much ready for travel. In the hand-wringing self-criticism of the 1980s and 1990s, there came a growing concern that world language courses were not “communicative” enough. Students lamented that they took four years of such-and-such language and couldn’t actually speak it.

So in the spirit of reform, when I was being trained as a language teacher in the early 1980s, we were baptized in the holy water of communicative proficiency and realia.

I wish to demonstrate that teaching culture using the target language is an effective means of getting students to communicative proficiency.

But here, decades later, I have to seriously question this focus for students after the second year in a high school world language course. My reason is pretty simple: despite the great reform of those decades and the sincerest efforts to produce good communicators in the target language, world language high school alumni still rightly complain that they cannot really speak any of the language they learned. The criticism still stands.

We all seem to just accept this and the way it goes. World language teachers have lobbied for years, successfully, to promote our stock and trade. Among the benefits we can tout are an enhanced understanding of other peoples, possible career opportunities for those who develop proficiency, improved reading and writing competency in their own language, and so forth. What we cannot say is that our charges will retain the skills we taught them. Even my French four students came back years later to visit with their once-honed language skills dissipated completely. The fact is, one cannot develop linguistic proficiency in the traditional classroom.

The main reason to do this is that learning culture will stay with students longer and enhance their overall education more profoundly than learning a language they will most assuredly mostly forget.

I want to promote a way to teach world language in high school years three and four that makes learning another language highly satisfying while at the same time achieving whatever basic linguistic proficiency is possible in the traditional high school classroom.

Click here to shop for French civilization units in my store.

Everyone includes culture studies in their world language classes, especially at the higher levels when the language skills are enough to make many authentic culture forms accessible. May I propose to make this culture study the centerpiece of year three and four studies and that it is indeed possible to do this at level three with the right scaffolding techniques. The main reason to do this is that learning culture will stay with students longer and enhance their overall education more profoundly than learning a language they will most assuredly mostly forget.

The correlation between the quarter marks’ average [in a culture course] and the French Regents Examination [a measurement of communicative proficiency] average score was 0.70.

In the early 1990s, I renamed my French III course “French Civilization”. I made culture studies, with thematic topics determined by students, the centerpiece of the lessons.

Can you really teach content and still get kids ready for the Regents?

Let’s look at the data. I taught French from 1991 to 2004, then a few courses from time to time, and finally again in 2022-2023. I saved my final grade sheets since 1993. I wish to demonstrate that teaching culture using the target language is an effective means of getting students to communicative proficiency. I think the data backs up my claim. I have analyzed my students’ grades in French Civilization (what I had entitled my third-year course) from the 1994-1995 school year through the 1999-2000 school year. During that six-year period, I taught 86 students third-year French as a civilization course.

The data support this method.

The class average on the Regents during that six-year period was 80. The average of the quarter marking period grades for those students during that time was 82. The correlation between the quarter marks’ average and the French Regents Examination score was 0.70. The spreadsheet is available below. This strong correlation supports the idea that you can teach culture and build language proficiency. I submit that this method is better because of its long-term benefits to students in teaching them content much as they would learn in a social studies course. This is a life-enriching educational practice that still meets the communicative goals measured by world language examinations such as the Regents examinations in New York State.

How do you teach language and content?

Scaffolding lessons designed to make authentic culture materials accessible to students are in the wheelhouse of every language teacher. A complete training program is beyond the scope of this article. But a few worth mentioning are these: easier versions of classic texts, pre-teaching key vocabulary, training programs to help students construct meaning in a sea of unknown words, and surely coaching in the native language as students tackle the tasks. A culture course where the class chooses its topics of study will enjoy some motivation from interest alone. Good scaffolding lessons let teachers bring resources to accessibility and help students build confidence.

Student interest becomes a driving force.

Most students who advance to this level of world language learning are interested and usually are academic-minded. The freedom afforded to choose their learning seems ideal in a way Rousseau would appreciate. They’ll need to be brave to tackle plays written in the target language or try to understand a classic film. But my experience has been that interest and choice are really strong motivators.

Students who have complained that they don’t really end up very fluent from high school world language courses have found little comfort in the rationale provided by adults around them. It’ll get you out of college courses. It’ll make your transcript look good. It’ll help you order a meal at that French restaurant in town. Your English gets better. You’ll learn about other cultures. You’ll learn grammar. And the list goes on… But emperor has no clothes, and the band keeps marching him through town.

For third and fourth-year students in high school language classes, the data support the idea that culture classes lead to the level of communicative proficiency measured by standardized tests like the New York State Regents examinations. The level of proficiency students can actually achieve is fairly limited and maybe we should be more up front with students about that; set more reasonable expectations. Culture and civilization classes enrich a person’s education, a person’s life, in ways that just teaching them to ask when is the next train to Madrid won’t do.

So let me go way back to my training to be a French teacher in the late 1980s. My sponsor teacher was Mr. Tom Ham at Potsdam High School. He was instrumental in teaching me techniques for developing conversation skills by “scaffolding” students up into more sophisticated expressions that had an element of improvisation within the proximal zone of development of the class.

Jump to The Scaffold Dialogue Package

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French poses some difficulty for complex expressions that students of, say, Norwegian, don’t face. French has lots of silent letters, for example, and the sound that the letters represent is more alien to English speakers. “What’s this?” is “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” which, if you don’t speak French, sounds like “KESKUH-SAY”. Holy cow! Lots of extraneous letters. Languages like French are best learned when students have a lot of repetition in these difficult structures. The listen-record task seems to fit the bill.

The Listen-Record Task

Mr. Ham used a lesson that didn’t have a name so for lack of a better term, I call it the “listen-record”. Students are presented with a few model sentences with parts missing. The missing parts are improvised by using our current vocabulary list and prior knowledge. Each student goes, in turn, to ask a question, choose a classmate, and then the classmate creates a response. Everyone listens and records in the table the name of the respondent for each exchange.

At the end of the lesson, there is a quiz on the table during which I ask, in the target language, who did or said such-and-such. students look up the name in the table and record the name on the answer sheet.

I echo out everything everyone says repeatedly, so this enhances the experience and recall.

I really like this activity. Students have to be engaged all the time. They have to listen and practice speaking. They often improvise amusing permutations of the responses and this lends itself to long-term recall of the vocabulary. Best of all, this activity presents the same model phrases over and over. I echo out everything everyone says repeatedly, so this enhances the experience and recall.

“Guided Dialogue”, “Guided Conversation”, “Scaffold Dialogue”

These are all terms I have seen for a slightly different activity designed to build conversational competence with some improvisation. In the guided dialogue, the student participates in an extended conversation where every other exchange is in the target language. Back in the early 1990s, I found a British product for teaching French that was interesting. There were two books, an A and a B. Each chapter presented a different half of a conversation with necessary supportive materials like vocabulary and phrases. The activity was designed to have two students practice conversing.

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I tried on and off to use this during the time I taught French, from 1991 to 2004 (I taught social studies from ’04 to ’22). I could never get the students to commit to remaining in the target language throughout and that was the main reason I abandoned the activity. But I still wanted some kind of guided conversation that included scripted elements and improvised elements. I needed this to be topical so I could include it in a thematic lesson.

Reading and listening are important, but students who do too much of this and not enough speaking and writing without assistance end up notreally being able to use the language they toiled so hard to learn.

The Old French Regents Examination

Those of you not in New York State may not know about our state testing system called Regents exams. Back in the 1980s, the old exams had a part that I liked but which was eliminated in the new exams in the 1990s. In this part, the teacher read a setting in French twice, then something in the target language to which student were to respond. There was a prompt in English telling students in a general way how to respond.

I like this exercise because it calls upon students to produce language. Many commercial world language programs heavily emphasize receptive language because it’s easier to grade. Reading and listening are important, but students who do too much of this and not enough speaking and writing without assistance end up not really being able to use the language they toiled so hard to learn.

The Scaffold Dialogue Package

Shop for Scaffold Dialogue products at my store.

Okay, so I’m not good at naming things… But the series of interconnected conversation lessons that I developed using all three of these experiences I will term the “Scaffold Dialogue Package”.

Step 1: Learn the Vocabulary – Students should use whatever methods they usually do to learn the words in the thematic list. I use the online flashcards and word bank quizzes here at InnovationAssessments.com.

Step 2: Complete the two listen-record tasks: For a class of twelve, this taskes about one 40-minute period. I have taught this using paper and digitally using Google docs. We all like paper better for this. I harvested grades for this by calculating percent correct on an open-notes quiz on the table.

Step 3: Complete the Scaffold Dialogue- The scaffold dialogue is based on the two listen-record tasks. It’s important to echo what each student says both for improving pronunciation and for letting people hear enough to record the elements in the table. To avoide confusing when I echo and when I am giving the teacher response, I say “s/he said…” before echoing what the student said. I have harvested scores for this in two ways. If I have time, I give an open-notes quiz. Otherwise, I collect the sheets and select one column to score. This takes a whole forty-minute class period for a class of about twelve. I leave a lot of scoring leeway for these if I grade a column. There can be no English and it has to have some significant elements of what the student said, but for younger learners that suffices. For French 3, I require a little more spelling accuracy.

Step 4: The Test – Administer the test – it takes about twenty minutes or so. Repeat each item twice. When scoring, remember that only errors that affect auditory comprehension matter. Allow 2 free errors for French 1 and early French 2 and 1 free error for French 2 later in the course and French 3. I usually gathered a total score by calculating percent of checks out of fifteen.

For a class of twelve, the whole package takes about four class periods. Once students get in the habit of these, it goes rapidly. Each listen-record has a slightly different improvised structure, so there’s enough varation month to month for interest. Listen-record 1 usually is more basic and causes review of basic structures (like the Education one has students recall names of classes and school supplies). Listen-record 2 is more sophisticated, calling on students to offer opinions or to explain.