Upon retiring from full-time public school teaching in 2023, I took part-time working teaching French remotely. Teaching via video conferencing turns out to be a terrific method and a very satisfying work!
Being also a web developer for a platform designed for remote teaching and in-class 1:1 designs, I was inspired by this work to begin developing a set of applications specifically for teaching world languages remotely.
I always loved improv and when teaching social studies or French in my career, my students and I enjoyed role play as a learning tool that was fun and meaningful. My practice was to incorporate many exercises to develop conversational proficiency using improv or semi-improvised “scaffold” dialogues.
The improv app at Innovation is now well developed. This app is available to subscribers only right now from the Language Console of the dashboard.
The teacher shares the screen in a remote teaching situation (or in-person, displays the screen in class). The first thing is to select the proficiency level. I use the CEFR descriptors.
A notice appears in red in the center advising students not to use AI while participating. This was sometimes an issue for me with some remote students, who quickly consulted Google translate instead of improvising their own contributions to our conversation. Teachers can remove this notice by clicking in.
Once the difficulty level is chosen, the teacher can select from the available conversation themes. These correspond to typical topics taught in world language classes that employ thematic units as the method. The reader will notice in the graphic that a scorecard appears on the right. The scoring method is that used in speaking tasks on New York State world language assessments and instructions are available at the click of a button.
Once the teacher has selected the theme, a set of possible dialogues appears.
Upon selecting the prompt, the conversation can begin. As the dialogue proceeds, the teacher can track the attempts and utterances in the scorecard on the right. They can award 2 points for utterances which are comprehensible, appropriate, and make no surprising errors for level. the can award 1 point for utterances that are not quite right for that student’s expected proficiency. The app automatically calculates the grade.
Now what I like to do is to use the large textarea in the center to provide useful words or phrases that the student asked for or needed during the dialogue.
List the expressions with their meaning separated by an equal sign. Here’s why: the Innovation flashcards app has been integrated so that we can study the phrases! Scroll down just a wee bit and you will find a small button called “Cards”. This will extract those phrases and arrange them into flash cards for study!
My practice is then to give students a copy of that list via email or in their lesson notes. They can themselves use Innovation’s Quick Flashcards app to generate their own drills for later.
The development of the improv app at Innovation has been a particularly exciting work. By incorporating elements of improvisation and conversation scaffolding, I’ve aimed to make language learning both engaging and effective for students in remote teaching contexts as well as for in-person learning. The app’s integration with other features such as proficiency level selection, themed dialogues, and real-time scoring ensures a comprehensive learning experience.
After a long hiatus while teaching social studies, I began a return to teaching French in 2018. I am a bit of a digital pack rat and was glad to find most of the teaching resources for French that I had developed in the 1990s still on an old hard drive. One of these is a unit for teaching a graphic novel called Astérix chez les bretons.
I found in that trove of activities a reading comprehension task that I had forgotten about: the ordered list or chronology. After reading the text and doing the usual vocabulary and comprehension kinds of tasks, I presented students a set of sentences where the events were out of order. On the worksheet, they were to number them in correct order according to the text. This was a great way to reinforce not only the events in the story, but more importantly the vocabulary and reading skills I was working to support.
I am currently teaching French online and one of my classes has chosen this graphic novel for a unit of study. Since I am teaching remotely, I want digital 21st century learning spaces instead of PDF worksheets. And so out of necessity was born this new app at Innovation, the ordered list.
The ordered list is simple: students either drag and drop or use the buttons to arrange the text boxes in order. They can check their progress as they go and submit a score when done. I can see how this would have been very useful when I was teaching history!
This needed to be easy for the teacher to create. It’s a snap: the teacher merely pastes in the ordered list and clicks a button to generate the activity.
As added features, one can attach a PDF document, an audio file, and/or embed a video from YouTube or Vimeo. The student could be prompted to order the text boxes based on these sources.
The usual 21st century learning spaces features are integrated. Teachers will see in the audit when their students access the task and how long they spend on it. The proctor monitors access to the page and student attention. It’s easy to view the scores of grades are taken and to apply standardized scoring or any of the other Innovation features and functions.
Try it for yourself! Use this passcode to access a chronology task for the American Revolution at the Innovation TestDrive: 397Q-NMXL-A15625Z-9-JON
Step into the flavorful world of French culinary heritage with our captivating culture unit designed for French 3 and beyond. Developed by an experienced educator who prioritizes cultural immersion in language learning, this product offers an enriching exploration of France’s gastronomic traditions. Whether teaching in-person or remotely, our comprehensive materials cater to both environments, ensuring flexibility and accessibility for educators and students alike.
Delve into the nuances of French dining etiquette and culinary history with meticulously crafted PowerPoints, “A Table” and “Patrimoine culinaire,” featuring engaging visuals and informative content spread across 46 slides. Expand vocabulary acquisition with our tier 2 word list, carefully curated to enhance reading comprehension and fluency. Engage in immersive learning experiences with five captivating readings accompanied by comprehension questions, along with thought-provoking inquiries tailored for six culinary and etiquette-focused videos. Additionally, ignite students’ creativity and linguistic prowess with two composition assignments designed to foster critical thinking and cultural appreciation. Plus, gain exclusive access to our virtual classroom at Innovation, where students can further immerse themselves in the rich tapestry of French culture. Elevate your French language curriculum and ignite a passion for cultural exploration with our dynamic and comprehensive French culinary heritage unit.
Using translation with beginner language students is fraught with controversy. When I was in elementary school, the contemporary teaching methods for modern languages were phasing out from “grammar-translation” toward more communicative approaches. Translation came to be seen as antiquated, impractical, unnatural.
It cannot be denied that some criticism of translation, especially for beginners, is valid. I cannot help reflect on some brilliant students I have had over the years who, by French III, had become held back by their insistence on mentally translating everything before they wrote or spoke. Their focus on the rules, the words, the syntax, the burden of feeling like they must not err, all conspired to leave them tongue-tied and frozen whenever they were called upon to improvise speech or writing.
Nonetheless, I find in my experience that there is a place for translation in novice language lessons. Students should learn the ways that the target language differs from their own so that they gradually learn to avoid applying the syntactical patterns of their own language. The also need to be able to discern morphological differences in the target language that may be slight to their eyes but which meaning can vary significantly. Finally, it is a good way for novices to learn the longer, whole functional phrases that are a part of the earliest stages of learning before grammar has been taught to let them synthesize their own utterances.
Barriers to Using Translation to Teach Novices
Limited vocabulary is the first barrier to using translation to teach novices. In the textbooks at the start of the 20th century, each chapter had a very controlled vocabulary that was repeated in reading and translation exercises. Many of us no longer teach that way. I teach through theme units. The unit has a lot of vocabulary but the higher order language work is not limited to that as a controlled vocabulary list. Narratives and authentic texts, even listening practices, while selected with difficulty in mind, do in fact include words and structures the student may not yet have been taught. The advantages of this approach are well known and it is common practice now. Among other things, the student learns the very functional skill of deriving meaning from context, selectively ignoring incomprehensible utterances in favor of the meaningful, and perhaps learning new words from context.
The second barrier to teaching with translation is, naturally, grammar. Good grammar exercises that use translation have to be very controlled to account for irregulars and inconsistencies that most language boast of. At the very early stages, novices has so little grammar under their belt that translation may not prove worthwhile. Or, the cognitive load of balancing all the rules will render the exercise useless for its purpose.
Here is What I Needed
I needed an app that would auto-correct and let students try again when they made errors. I needed limited vocabulary and limited grammatical competence to be largely irrelevant. I needed an interactive activity where students manage the syntax and recognize correct forms. I call the new app “scramblation”. It is a drag-and-drop interface where students assemble an utterance in the target language from a prompt that is either in text form or audio clip.
Translation plays a pivotal role in the process of studying a foreign language, serving as a valuable tool for language learners to bridge the gap between their native tongue and the target language. It offers learners a nuanced understanding of linguistic structures, idiomatic expressions, and cultural nuances, thereby facilitating a more profound comprehension of the language’s intricacies. Translating texts from the target language to one’s native language and vice versa enhances vocabulary acquisition, grammar proficiency, and overall language competence. It enables learners to decipher the meaning behind words and phrases, fostering a deeper connection to the cultural context embedded within the language. Moreover, translation exercises encourage critical thinking and analytical skills, as learners must carefully consider the nuances of each word and construct coherent and contextually accurate sentences.
A New App
Instructors can generate a new scramblation from the playlist of their course in Innovation. They enter a prompt, the correct answer, and some extra words. I link to use the extra words to enter un-conjugated verbs or words an English speaker might put in that would not go in the target language.
The prompt can be an audio clip (in which case the text prompt is hidden) and can include an image.
Students can see the task in their playlist and access to a scramblation can be made possible from a link in the lesson plan app or an external link that instructors can send to students.
The app itself is simple: first, students should remove any extra words by clicking the small red “x” in the word’s box. Next, the student drags and drops the words into the right order. They save their answer, check it, and the algorithmic AI will tell them how close they are.
Like all of the apps at Innovation, the scramblation has a proctor activated that tracks student activity on the page, including when they leave the page and how long they were working.
The importance of interactive web applications in the realm of remote teaching cannot be overstated. Interactive web applications emerge as powerful catalysts for student engagement, collaboration, and personalized learning experiences. The ability to seamlessly integrate multimedia content, real-time communication, and interactive assessments not only enhances the effectiveness of teaching but also empowers educators to adapt their pedagogical approaches to the diverse needs of their students.
The key drawback to early efforts at distance learning was being kind of trapped behind that camera like a goldfish in a bowl. You could make all the signs and signals you wanted, but the world on the other side of the glass was beyond your ability to control.
Teaching remotely is not highly effective when it consists of essentially just holding up things to the camera for the student to experience. Activate the Zoom – Skype – Meet – Teams session, share your PDF, give verbal instructions… this is a weak instructional practice mainly because it is largely passive for the student.
If the teacher were in a real classroom, tutoring the student at an honest-to-goodness table, the learning materials could be manipulated in real life in ways that support the process. They can fold the paper to hide the answer, they can shuffle the flash cards, they can write and cross out and scribble and erase. The manipulation of the learning materials is important.
The apps at Innovation are designed to promote the kind of virtual interactivity that heightens the effectiveness of teaching remotely. To be a great learning experience, the remote session needs to be virtually interactive in the same effective way that in-person lessons are. This is a big part of what we mean by the “21st century learning space”.
Flashcards
Let’s take up the example of teaching vocabulary using flashcards. In real life, I would want to use a process whereby I selectively show the student a new word, rehearse the pronunciation in some meaningful way, then cue up the words to rehearse the meanings.
Using the passive approach, I could share a PDF through the video conference software and “go over” the list with the student.
Using the flashcard app at Innovation, I can interact so much more effectively. To begin, I can select the target vocabulary word to display.
I prompt the student to repeat the pronunciation, then click to reveal the meaning.
Once we are through the list, I can repeat the process, only this time I can save out those items the student forgot.
Now we are only drilling those items. We can talk about mnemonic devices, use the words in sentences, or just repeat and rehearse. Once the student has the words down pat for recognition, I click Reverse Cue-Response to prompt from English cue.
Integrated Flashcard App
The improvised conversation app and the scaffold dialogue app both have integrated flashcards. During an improvised conversation task, the student may need to ask me how to say some words as we run through the conversation the first time. I list them for them in the textarea below the prompt.
So long as I pair the new phrases with an equal sign and a meaning, the app can generate a flashcard system right underneath after our conversation.
We can rehearse now the new words and phrases before we perform the dialogue once again.
Interactivity is Key
Being able to interact virtually over remote teaching sessions in ways that are as effective as in-person is absolutely necessary to achieve a satisfying learning experience that maximizes our effective use of time. The flashcard app at Innovation facilitates this process of simple cue-response training that is so foundational in teaching language. It allows me to go beyond just sharing my screen to “go over” a PDF!
Teaching composition in a world language is always challenging to organize and execute. In my experience, the best lesson series in supporting the development of strong composition skills consists in the following:
Students should have limited access to outside resources in composing their work. It’s too tempting, especially now, to use an AI translator.
Students should learn to avoid translating in their head from English to the target language. Instead, they should learn to “say what they can say, not what they want to say.”
Assessment should provide a clear and understandable measure of the value of the work product and a clear path to remediation for next time.
I started teaching in 1991 (I am now retired). Back then as a French teacher, the method for assessing student compositions involved marking off each clause, identifying each error, and checking whether the clause was comprehensible (to a native speaker accustomed to dealing with foreigners), appropriate (such that it built on the theme coherently; it “fit”) and had good form (no more than 1 error in grammar / conventions). This was abandoned in the later 1990’s for a rubric that was more consistent with other New York State Regents examinations of the time.
I think the only thing I like about the rubric assessment was that it considered the variety of vocabulary used. Otherwise, the rubric did not really satisfy what I wanted in an assessment for composition work and this rubric was far more subjective than I was comfortable with.
Teaching remotely, I wanted an app that met my criteria for supporting composition skills in the target language.
The first challenge was to limit the use of outside references. For this, I coded a sort of algorithmic surveillance AI that I called “proctor”. Proctor consists of a series of JavaScript functions that record when a student has resized a window, pasted text, “left” the page, or restarted the task. These actions are saved and reported to me when I assess the students’ work.
In the remote teaching situation that I enjoy at present, students do their compositions unsupervised for homework. The proctor allows me to curtail student access to other tabs because it announces in red text on the page whenever any of these “suspicious” actions occur. Although students may indeed use their phone separately on the side to confer, I can also check later in our debriefing by asking whether they know the leaning of one phrase or another.
The composition app for world languages allows me to present students a word bank. The word bank can be an antidote to mental translating because students can be taught to weave together meaning from words they have rather than get caught up on words they don’t.
The assessment process in the composition app works as follows. The instructor:
marks off the clauses for evaluation.
highlights each error.
assesses each clause for comprehensibility, appropriateness, and form.
assesses the whole composition for vocabulary “richness” (10% of the score).
This process lends itself well to debriefing because the errors can be studied directly and are readily observed.
Training wheels are temporary assistive devices for young people learning new things. They are a modification to the program that is usually temporary; a scaffolding that brings students upward in the zone of proximal development. The composition app has space for a word bank to support composition from known lexical items.
Guardrails are there to protect us from error, safety features along the road at dangerous points to avoid a pitfall. The composition app includes an algorithmic AI to monitor student activity and discourage assistance that would not be appropriate.
21st century learning spaces lend themselves to debriefing: they are designed such that the anonymous presentation of teacher-selected student work is easily generated for debriefing. The composition app is readily shared with the student and the assessment page is clear and easy to understand. When I debrief these, I paste the student composition into another screen and go over the relevant errors.
21st century learning spaces are a Swiss army knife. Such collections of applications serve many functions from the same core. The composition app saves the composition prompt in a database whose elements can be re-used.
21st century learning spaces are those where the teacher rules the roost and student privacy protection is a high priority. Locus of data control is with the teacher. The teacher can view the composition as it’s being composed and has ownership over the final product.
Since September, I have had the distinct pleasure of working part-time for a company based in California that offers remote middle and high school credit-bearing courses in world languages. LanguageBird is perfect fit for a retired public school teacher and I am very contented working for them (not a paid promotion).
The pandemic placed we public school teachers in the position of teaching remotely, some for the first time. A lot of that went poorly in some places, but in other places it went pretty well. My work teaching remotely now has given me the chance to re-explore online teaching practice and the kinds of 21st century learning spaces that meet the needs of that situation.
Besides my work for LanguageBird, I also am enjoying teaching a remote French class for the public school district from which I retired last June. This is very different from LanguageBird in many ways and teaching in both contexts has provided a wealth of interesting experiences that I feel are instructive. In this series of posts, I would like to share my experiences and conclusions as well as the apps I am developing to support remote teaching.
In the public school remote teaching context, we had set it up as a daily synchronous class. This was informed by our pandemic experience that asynchronous courses are a bad idea for most adolescents. It is a small class of five, two for French III and three for college French, credited from a local community college who approved my application to work as adjunct for them in a high school. Each school day during period 2, I fire up a Google Meet and students log in. They are supervised by a language teacher (Spanish).
We (administration and I) were concerned that remote teaching made it difficult to maintain the kind of teacher-student rapport that was so necessary for learning. I suggested that I work in-person for a half day at the end of each marking period (ten weeks) to teach a class and meet with students individually so they can present their projects and practice French conversation. (The district is a 45-mile commute for me one-way, so going in-person for one daily class was not practical.)
At LanguageBird, we only teach one-on-one lessons. I find this extremely useful, so from start I modified my public school lesson plans such that I would only teach whole-group for the first 15 minutes and then each student would have an individual “tutorial” with me for the balance of the time. This turned out to be a fantastic idea and I am guessing the students like it too.
During the pandemic in my district, we had two days to launch into teaching by video-conference (Here is a post on my experience teaching during the pandemic). My current students, many of whom were then in my sixth grade social studies class back in 2020, had a mostly negative experience learning online in general. I felt strongly motivated to demonstrate from the start of the school year that this remote learning experience would not be like that. The first upgrade I made to what I was doing in 2020 was to focus on individual lessons over group lessons.
I think of positive rapport as being a trusting sense of mutual goodwill between an instructor and a pupil. Building a positive rapport with students is extremely important. I had the sense that this was possible only to a very limited degree in remote learning. However, I now stand corrected. In remote instruction over video-conferencing, it is necessary to favor one-on-one teaching situations.
Fostering positive rapport extends not to just being present to interact one-on-one. It is also built on online software applications that foster efficient and readily accessible learning interactions for delivery, practice, evaluation, and debriefing.
Next post: teaching composition to world language students remotely.
When I was developing an app for synchronous chat, my eighth, ninth, and tenth graders were only too happy to be my beta-testers. It was in the last month before I was to retire and so I wanted to make good use of my time remaining, especially preparing students for the conversation part of the regional world language examination in French. The chat app arose out of the desire for an effective method for students to communicate in the lesson in a paired situation, in a 21st century learning space.
Synchronous Online Discussion in a Co-located Classroom Setting
A number of advantages to blending online discussion tools in the classroom present themselves. In peer face-to-face interactions, “student differences in social status, verbal abilities and personality traits cannot guarantee equal participation rates (Chinn, Anderson, & Waggoner, 2001, as cited in Asterhan & Eisenmann). High-status, high-ability and extrovert peers may often dominate the discussion and group decision making” (Barron, 2003, Caspi et al., 2006, as cited in Asterhan & Eisenmann). Online discussion tools can reduce these factors and present a more egalitarian framework for participation.
Having students in the same room communicating with each other on a chat system may seem odd at first glance, but in addition to the benefits noted above, there are some practical benefits especially for the secondary level. The presence of an adult will ensure more on-task behavior and more appropriate behavior (no “flaming”, for example). Students may not all have equal access to home internet services such an an asynchronous model would demand. Furthermore, the synchronous model greatly ensures that the task will get done. Asynchronous assignments often fall down to procrastination, a typical foible of the adolescent. A literature review by Asterhan and Eisenmann reveal that “[c]ommunication in synchronous discussion environment is closer to spoken conversation and therefore likely to be more engaging and animating than asynchronous conferencing (McAlister, Ravenscroft, & Scanlon, 2004, as cited in Asterhan & Eisenmann). Students have also been found to be more active and produce more contributions in synchronous, than in asynchronous environments (Cress, Kimmerle, & Hesse, 2009, as cited in Asterhan & Eisenmann).”
When used during the class period, synchronous chat is a small part of a larger lesson which includes scaffolding, participation, and debriefing.
Early synchronous chat software such as reviewed in the study by Asterhan and Eisenmann had some practical limitations for class discussion. Instant messaging or threaded discussion boards both work on precedence by chronology, which makes conversations difficult to follow and so may actually defeat the purpose of the exercise. Some teachers have attempted to use FaceBook or Twitter to facilitate class discussions. These platforms were designed to satisfy a commercial interest.
A 21st century learning space paradigm provides the necessary structure (guardrails and training wheels) to maximize quality participation frequency while eliminating concerns about privacy and advertising.
How it Works
The chat app works like this: the teacher opens a chat session and displays the host control dashboard on the large screen. Next, students join the session from their devices and once everyone is onboard, the teacher explains the assignment. The teacher then clicks the control to generate random partners and then to enable the chat session. A timer can optionally be set. Students engage in a real time discussion to carry out the task for the allotted time. During this session, the teacher can display the current chats going on (anonymously, of course) and offer any coaching that would be useful. At the conclusion of the time, the host closes the chat session and can debrief by displaying the chats and offering comment. The chats are anonymous: unless students introduce themselves in live session, they do not know necessarily who their partner is. The pairs are organized by “city”, a nickname generated by the app to identify them from a list of world capitals.
Host Screen Displayed at Front
The first issue that developed was that they enjoyed it (not necessarily a problem but…). It caused a lot of “real” chatter in class as students chuckled about funny things others had said or trying to find out who their partner was. Older students who were more serious about their studies also were motivated to communicate outside the chat session to strategize in real time addressing their assignment. My tenth graders were assigned to use the chat as a writing exercise, such that they answered the prompt by collaboratively composing a paragraph. When a class is engaged in this activity, they need to be trained to maintain a mostly silent room, focused on the task and not the distractions.
A second issue that arose in the early version of the app was that students would forget the prompt or instructions. It was easy to modify the app to allow the teacher to attach “accessories”: text, video embed, and/or a PDF document with the assignment and rubric displayed. Now students could refresh their understanding of the assignment by clicking a button.
Sometimes a student would leave the chat window to another browser tab to look something up. For situations where is is not allowed, I modified to app to include a “proctor” that records right in the app when a student leaves the window and when they paste in text.
Research on this sort of application support the practice of including assessment in the activity (Gilbert and Dabbagh, 2005, as cited in Balaji & Chakrabati, 2010). Students are aware of the rubric and are graded, which has an enhancing effect on their performance as they are often more mindful of their progress. Using the timer, which displays in the front of the room from the teacher’s host screen is also helpful. If one is pressed for time, one is less likely to be off-task without knowing it.
In keeping with the paradigm of the 21st century learning space, the app lends itself well to assessment and debriefing. The assessment screen makes it easy to assess student work on a built-in rubric.
Scoring Controls
Students can see their scores and comments.
I developed this in the context of teaching French, but its application to other subjects is clear. For example, a social studies lesson could include a document or video segment for students to analyze or a short discussion on a topic from lecture.
The chat application is designed as a 21st century learning space .
Guardrails: The proctor for the chat app reports on text paste-ins and leaving the browser tab.
Training Wheels: The optional accessories can provide the scaffold support for the discussion. The optional timer supports on-task behavior.
Debriefing: In debriefing mode, anonymized student contributions to chat can be displayed for analysis and discussion.
Assessment and Feedback: In scoring mode, an efficient system of evaluation saves time and offers students significant feedback.
Swiss Army Knife: The chat can be viewed in discussion mode, where other features can be applied such as identifying logical fallacies and replying to the posts of students other than one’s assigned partner. In forum mode, the teacher can participate.
Locus of Data Control: The student chat submissions are stored on a server licensed to the teacher’s control. Commercial apps such as FaceBook and Twitter may be less dedicated to the kinds of privacy and control exigencies of education.
Synchronous chat turned out to be a hit in my French class. It provided a solid and effective tool for engaging everyone in the lesson and made me feel like my time was well spent. In the next academic year (2023-24), I will be teaching an online synchronous college level French course. Look for posts next fall where I share how the new app went over in that class.
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.
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 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.
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.
Here’s a lesson in reading skills for English that can easily be used in reading world language. Actually, I built this lesson from my world language teaching training and elementary ed. training.
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.
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.
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.
Listen-Record table with quiz on back fold.
A student’s completed table.
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.
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.
A British communicative activities book I used in the early 1990s.
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
Screenshot from the 1985 French Regents part 2.
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.
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.
