In my last post, I talked about The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) language proficiency standards. ACTFL assesses language proficiency levels using the following categories: Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, Distinguished, and Superior. According to this CASLS study, most students exit a four-year high school language program at the Novice High or, at best, Intermediate Low level. Maybe you are thinking to yourself, “Intermediate? That’s not so bad.” But keep in mind that at the Intermediate Low level, students still can’t communicate that much. At this level, students can only communicate in short sentences on familiar topics and can only understand the main idea of what they read or hear if the language being used is familiar (You can look at this document for a more detailed version of what learners can do based on their proficiency level).
The reason students do not get that far in developing their language proficiency is partially due to the limited number of hours that students study the language. According to this CASLS study, after roughly 720 hours of instruction in a traditional four-year program, only around 15% of students reach a proficiency level higher than Intermediate Low. I also believe that another reason why student proficiency levels are so low after four years of instruction is because so much of that instruction is taught using traditional, legacy methods. And although I have no research to back this up, I fully believe that students taught in an input driven class will become more proficient more quickly.
In an input driven class, the goal is to expose students to comprehensible, compelling input. As Karen Lichtman states on this handout, in a class taught using Teaching Proficiency Through Reading and Storytelling (TPRS) techniques, which is an input driven approach, “class time is spent using the language for real communication.” This is also true in other input driven classes. This is not the case in most legacy classrooms, where teachers often give explicit grammar instruction, usually in the students’ native language, and present lists of vocabulary for student to memorize without ever using those words for true communication. As Bill Van Patten points out in his book While we’re on the topic…. BVP on Language, Langauge Acquisition, and Classroom Practice, many of the things students are asked to do in a traditional, legacy classroom do not involve real communication. No communication results in no input, which results in fewer words and structures added to one’s internal language system.
As I mentioned in my last post, if the goal of the language classroom is to help students develop proficiency, then everything we do in the classroom should be designed to help students receive the input they need to develop that proficiency. And in case you did not already know this, explicit grammar instruction is definitely NOT input (In fact, if you look through the ACTFL Performance Indicators for Language Learners, the only mention of anything even remotely grammatical in nature is the Advanced category, where learners are able to communicate consistently in various time frames). If you would like more information about how to deliver input in a classroom, read this post or visit this page.
So as you go about planning your lessons, ask yourself three questions:
- Is this lesson input driven?
- Is this lesson going to help my students become proficient in the language?
- Is this lesson appropriate for the proficiency level of my students?
And if the answer to all three of these questions is “yes,” you’re on your way to helping your students gain proficiency in their second language.
I Heart Input 