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.
There was not a lot of math in my teacher preparation in the 1980s. Actually, I managed to take my BA without a math course (I took extra science instead). I sure wish I had statistics from the start!
Sometimes no matter our experience or preliminary testing, we are surprised at how poorly a class does on a test. Most teachers resort, quite rightly, to some kind of “curve” to alter the scores. Even a valid, reliable test can be too difficult for students.
In effect, the standardized scoring was a useful set of training wheels that naturally disappeared once the class met the normal performance level!
A second issue of interest is in scaffolding difficult tasks for our students. Some things require time and practice to learn to do. Students may face low scores at first on such tasks. We don’t want their grades or their confidence to suffer. “Curving” the grades on a task while students are still in training for it is a good practice.
Enter the z-score standardization procedure. I don’t want this to be a post about mathematics (mostly because I am not confident to do so), but I would like to promote this as one of the best ways to alter a set of test scores in situations where (1) the group’s scores are lower than expected (say, more than 5 points below the class average overall in the course) or (2) the class is still practicing a difficult skill.
My interest in z-score began around 2010 when I was working to establish that the different capstone unit tasks I let kids choose were, in fact, of equal difficulty. I value differentiated instruction, but I also strongly value fairness. Z-score standardization let me establish how the rubrics for tasks in my class compared to a state test.
Standardizing the scores requires data that basically establishes a norm. How “should” the class have performed based on how a large set of previous students have performed? One of the things that makes grade standardizing hard is that one does not always have access to this data. How should my kids have done compared to how all my previous kids have done? Well, I saved my data.
I taught French for the first thirteen years of my career (plus two years later on) and then the other eighteen years I taught social studies. Now, mind you, I’m not a person to save a lot of stuff. My classroom was always pretty bare and I threw out stuff I wasn’t using. But data, that’s something I like to save. I have hard copies of my final grade sheets for all my students from 1994 to 2013. I also have all my Regents results (for those of you not in new York State, “Regents” are standardized state tests in different subjects). Permit me to share my data with the reader. This data will give you the mean and standard deviation on population sizes of around 100 (between 92 and 100) for French grades 8-10 and for social studies grades 8-11. See below.
I learned to do this with the help of my colleague in the math department, to whom I am grateful for answering a lot of my questions over the years and helping me learn basic statistics. I am a computer programmer and I wrote an app to do the calculations. It’s available for free and I invite you to use it. Just enter your class’ test scores, then the mean and standard deviation of the standard test you’re standardizing the scores to. The app generates a table of standardized scores and some statistical information.
A good example of using this is when I was teaching Global Studies 10 and US History 11. The new New York State Regents exams in these subjects have stimulus-based multiple-choice questions. These are hard for students at first. I had them do one each unit as a test. Standardized scoring let me modify their scores so that their grades were not harmed and their confidence preserved. So here’s the beauty of the standardized scoring: the method sets the mean of the current task to that of the standard, then adjusts everyone’s score using standard deviations. As the class improved on this task month by month, the class average approached the standard mean, so the grades were affected less and less. In effect, the standardized scoring was a useful set of training wheels that naturally disappeared once the class met the normal performance level!
A number of my education courses back in the ’80s were kind of useless. Hopefully, teacher training is better today. (I only had a one credit course in behavior management theory! Sheesh!) Statistics would have been a good course for me because I used it so extensively in my career. Readers who are interested might subscribe to InnovationAssessments.com to see the other statistical apps that you might find useful.
