View Content #20049

By Stephanie Knight, CASLS Language Technology Specialist

Their blank stares were overwhelming, but not as overwhelming as my frustration. My mind screamed silent directives like, "Care more!" and "Try harder!," and I burned roughly 1,000 calories dancing and pantomiming what it was that I was trying to communicate. Still, no matter what I did, students in my sixth period International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme Spanish course remained stagnant in their development as Spanish speakers. I was at a loss as to what to do in my quest to support them in jumping over the Advanced-low hurdle while meaningfully engaging with the Spanish-speaking world.

As I reflected on what was happening, I realized that my students were desperately wanting to analyze the nuances of advanced Spanish structures in order to further expand their abilities to make meaning and to play with language at the advanced level. Until I embraced their desire, my sixth period students lacked the necessary metalinguistic competence to think critically about their work and develop a plan for improvement.

My first misstep was to treat structure as an unwelcome guest in our classroom. After all, I often reasoned, I needed the students to understand the complexities of femicide, international commerce, global health issues, and the other topics that we were covering in class. Though my students certainly made inquiries regarding advanced structures while we covered said topics, I tended to neglect to give the students the opportunity to practice their refined understanding of the structures at hand in realistic contexts. Thus, while their recognition of advanced structures improved, their ability to appropriately incorporate said structures to make advanced level meaning was not being addressed in the classroom. Instead, they relied on the basic skills and knowledge acquired in introductory courses and were not actively pushing themselves towards the use of advanced level knowledge.

The solution to my problem was simple; I could no longer solely focus on the content at hand. Instead, I opted for an approach which still focused on meaning and content while simultaneously helping learners analyze and understand the implications of words and structure. In this approach, learners were asked to complete discourse analyses, create vocabulary and conceptual maps centered on real-world topics, and analyze structures in practice in order to expand their personal knowledge and use.

My second misstep was to stubbornly ignore the fact that my classroom was never going to be a monolingual space. As Liebscher and Daily-O’Cain’s (2005) work reveals, conceptualizing the second language (L2) classroom as a bilingual community allows for increased student interaction because code-switching is viewed as a permissible scaffolding mechanism in such a community (though the teacher still functions almost entirely in the L2 and encourages students to do so as well). Moore (2013) supports this notion by contending that teachers should understand first language (L1) use as a “naturally occurring phenomenon” (p. 251) and harness its use to deepen the understanding of the L2. This conclusion makes sense on a practical level; the L1 provides language schemata for students to draw upon when trying to understand how the rules of syntax in their L2 weave together. As linguists and advanced learners, my students were ready for this type of complex multilingual system. Using their L1, they were able to more fully engage with analysis tasks at hand and wrestle with the elements needed to push beyond their current abilities.

As we consider serving students of advanced proficiency levels, it is essential to include linguistic analysis skills as part of instruction. In this way, we are able to tap into their existing language schemata and to reinforce positive linguistic habits. As students become more and more aware of the way that structures function in L2 negotiations, they become more and more adept at handing abstract concepts and unpredictable interactions. Indeed, utilizing discourse analysis and grammar instruction as key tools at the advanced levels of language instruction helps students to engage in self-analysis and to continue to grow in communication skills.  

For additional tips on how to incorporate structure in the L2 classroom, see Is Grammar Really Important for a Second Language Learner? by teacher Julio Foppoli at (http://www.eslbase.com/teaching/grammar-important-second-language-learner).

References:

Foppoli, J. (2015). Is Grammar Really Important for a Second Language Learner? ESL Base. Retrieved from http://www.eslbase.com/teaching/grammar-important-second-language-learner.

Liebscher, G., & Dailey-O’Cain, J. (2005). Learner Code-Switching in the Content-Based Foreign Language

Classroom. The Modern Language Journal, 89, 234-247.

Moore, P. J. (2013). An Emergent Perspective on the Use of the First Language in the English-as‐a‐     

Foreign‐Language Classroom. The Modern Language Journal, 97, 239-253.