This post was a homework assignment for Designing Curriculum and Instruction taught by Raymond Cummings. I refer to two texts:
- Wiggins, Grant and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. 2nd ed.
- ACTFL. Standards for Foreign Language Learning.
Many FL curricula contain explicit instruction of grammar to varying degrees – some focus on grammatical forms of words, others on how grammar conveys meaning. Many FL curricula have the explicitly stated or implicitly understood goal of communication for a specific purpose (e.g. ordering in a restaurant, buying clothes, understanding business contracts). Many FL curricula in American high schools treat the A.P. exam as the ultimate goal and capstone experience, making literature the focus of the big idea. From my limited experience in the Applied Linguistics department at TC so far, I can tell that the context is very much up to the teacher, but grammar should be used to facilitate communication in a target language. How do understanding, essential questions, and backwards design – as Wiggins understands them – fit within the goals of FL curricula?
The American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages gives five goal areas: Communication, Cultural understanding, Connections to additional bodies of knowledge, Comparisons of languages and view points, and Community participation. (“Standards for Foreign Language Learning,” ACTFL) These are further defined by ACTFL. This implies that understanding grammar and forms is not an end in its own right – a direct challenge to traditional Grammar-Translation Latin pedagogy. Much of the first and even second years of Latin curricula are spent learning forms and translating them without context or communicative purpose. Today I saw a Latin teacher hand back midterm exams saying, “It’s clear that you can all translate very well!,” and thus showing that her goal was to teach how to translate Latin accurately. Translation, according to ACTFL, is not one of the major goals of FL learning.
Within the ACTFL and Wiggins guidelines, it is clear that the purpose of learning Latin cannot be only to understand the grammar, to know vocabulary, or to successfully translate. In Wiggins’ example of To Kill a Mockingbird he writes that “the book is … a means to an educational end, not an end unto itself.” (15) Understanding grammar and vocabulary (what Chomsky defines as “language”) is our “means to an educational end.” ACTFL enumerates these educational ends in its goals, which can become the “Established Goals” of a UbD lesson plan.
If grammar and vocabulary are our means, they are still part of the curriculum. Grammatical functions are part of “understandings” and vocabulary is part of “knowledge.” In teaching grammar and vocabulary students need concrete, clear examples to learn. If the goal, however, is to teach a communicative purpose or cultural point, then the grammatical functions taught and the specific vocabulary must be tailored to the goal. For example, if the goal is to teach students about gladiatorial games (The essential question may be “How did Romans define entertainment? What role did gladiators play in Roman society?”), then the students need access to Latin literary texts and inscriptions pertaining to gladiators. The learning experiences should include the grammatical functions used in these texts as well as review of the vocabulary. If there are to be experiences with specific grammatical functions and vocabulary, then these experiences should include as many examples of these grammatical functions and vocabulary as possible. If there are going to be enough examples, the students should have as many real examples from Latin texts as possible.
What would the final assessment look like for such a unit on gladiators? First, the final assessment would not center on verb charts or vocabulary lists. Those would be better in formative assessments because they do not, by themselves, meet any of the goals of communication or cultural understanding. The final assessment could include a demonstration of the students’ knowledge about gladiators (e.g. what weapons a Murmillo used, what kind of theatrical sets gladiatorial fights employed) as well as a test of the students’ skills in analyzing culture. The students’ knowledge about gladiators is crucial to understanding the bigger goal of analyzing culture. In writing an analysis of culture, the student will use the grammatical forms covered (plus ones learned earlier) and thus they can be assessed directly on the use of grammar for communication. The analysis of culture can answer an essential question, and the student will learn skills of analysis, self-expression, and grammar.
My question becomes one of feasibility. What do the teachers need in order to execute such a curriculum? How much of the materials should come from a textbook and how much should rely on the teacher?
Thank you for sharing this - I read it and went 'yes! finally!' and shared it on my facebook. But as I started thinking about it more deeply, and in my own classroom experience, this is what happened:
ReplyDelete"Thinking about this more deeply, the concept that's going to be most challenging for students and require the most instructional time, is the grammar. The inquiry could be "What role did gladiators play in Roman Society", but that's still going to get a bit lost in the act of figuring out the grammar. My students might be reading about Gladiators and trying to learn about them, but I think they'd get distracted and confused trying to handle the difficult grammar concepts (That was a problem with the first unit I taught). And as we spend more time clarifying those, we lose sight of the bigger picture - that gladiator shows created a sense of the foreign and exotic, with the effect creating a more unified sense of Roman identity (or whatever particular take we're going for). The real world Latin that students encounter is usually pretty advanced; basic sentences, basic conversation are more difficult to come by and less representative of the literature students learn Latin to be able to read. Without a thorough understanding of the grammar, I think they'd end up getting lost and unable to appreciate the more 'big picture' cultural goals. I tend to use 'reading fluency' as a goal pretty often, because my goal is that students be able to read Latin literature (you can learn about Rome and Gladiators without reading Latin - though, of course, knowing Latin gives you a better understanding!). So i want students to understand concepts like "Language follows patterns" and "Romans read left-to-right, not 'where's the verb'" (though where's the verb is okay as a tool when they get stuck, they should still go back and read the sentence left to right). I think the problem Foreign Languages encounter with UbD is that we don't think of Grammar as a 'big idea', just as a 'skill'. The culture and communities aspect is also important - equal to the grammar and we should teach students how to use their ability to read Latin to answer questions about culture and community, but those are goals OF EQUAL WEIGHT to learning the grammar. I think grammar fails for so many students because they're taught it as something that's rote, not that it's something to understand.