Ep. 11 SLAyyy: Realistic Expectations

Gaslight
Differences Between Language Standards and Other Content Areas

Setting Expectations from a Textbook

Proficiency vs. Performance

Hours of Instruction

Gatekeep
What proficiency levels do K-16 world language learners achieve? (van Gorp and Coss)

Document about AP and ACTFL Proficiency Levels

Don’t Beat Yourself Up, Girl

What Does Self-Assessment Look Like?

Girlboss

Course-End Expectations

Proficiency-Based Instruction, TL Usage, Motivation

Get Yourself Some Training!

References

Dr. Terry Waltz’ Super 7 Verbs

The Motivated Classroom Podcast by Dr. Liam Printer

Avant ADVANCE Training (featuring a testimonial from one Ben Fisher-Rodriguez)

Email us at SLAyyyForEveryone@gmail.com

Transcript

bill: 0:37

Hello, and welcome back to another episode of SLA, Second Language Acquisition for Everyone. It's a new year, This week, coming back in 2025, we are talking about setting realistic expectations for proficiency in our language classes. But first just welcome back. How have you been doing Ben? How have you been doing Brian?

FishRod: 1:05

I spent my winter in California, like a fancy lady. How

bill: 1:10

Right?

Bryan: 1:11

Flew back to the Midwest, but I didn't see any snow. you know,

bill: 1:14

You're lucky. It's awful

Bryan: 1:15

honestly

bill: 1:16

Yeah

Bryan: 1:18

don't know how much longer that that could be a realistic expectation But Yeah

bill: 1:24

My partner and I just bought a house. Yeah, we just bought a house. We got got all moved in and You may have missed the snow Brian I definitely did and completely overlooked the necessity of buying a snow shovel. So we got six to eight inches of snow and I didn't have a shovel. I had to walk

Bryan: 1:48

No,

bill: 1:49

uphill both ways to Lowe's.

Bryan: 1:51

No,

FishRod: 1:53

Woo!

bill: 2:01

So I'm really looking forward to that.

FishRod: 2:03

Yay!

bill: 2:04

All right. So I don't even think that. we've ever really done any life updates here before. So there's a little, little into your hosts here. But let's go ahead and. Talk about how we've gaslit ourselves when it comes to setting realistic expectations for our students language growth. And like, so, to start off, I think it's important to talk about actual guidelines typically, or at least something based off of the actual guidelines for proficiency to that are expectations for our students. And I know a lot of states have moved towards a more proficiency based set of standards. For example, Indiana has. Made their world language standards. Based on the actual can do statement. So we've got different benchmarks. We say like novice, we have a novice benchmark, intermediate and advanced benchmark. And in all of those, we have all the different sub levels, and we use those as standards, which is also like a weird. I don't know. Do you think about how our standards are a lot different than other content areas, standards?

Bryan: 3:25

Oh, do I? I may have written a very, very long paper about that. You

bill: 3:31

You want to say any more about that. Yeah, I think that's, that's a good question.

Bryan: 3:34

yes, I don't know if I've really talked much about this on the pod, but I did write my master's thesis about based grading and world language and the differences that might exist between what we do in our field and how we do it. that specific type of grading based on standards might work in other fields particularly math and science, which tend to be the ones that most often adopt standards based grading practices. And yeah it's just in math and in science. A lot of the standards are, you know concept based. Like you need Be able to do multiplication and you need to know what photosynthesis is. And so it's Like something that really show quote unquote mastery of once on a test and then move on to the next topic or concept. But with world language, obviously, if our standards are based around the idea of building proficiency and skills they just do not work the same way. So,

FishRod: 4:32

Yeah, this one, this is a really interesting one. A programmer and I've been working with like, there's a lot of, but don't necessarily understand the tech side of it. And now all of sudden, they're like, I tech to research, So, in the last, like 12 months or so, I've been really interested in the tech side of it. and and applying that to some of the things. and So, they could have the requisite novice skills to get by about some certain aspects of that, but not others, or like, you advanced level skills is being able like, more abstract, worldly topics. If you have only touched on a couple worldly topic in your studies, yeah, you're not going to be prepared to talk about other blank, worldly topic Yeah, is a broad base of things that is composed of a lot of different contents that are plugged into those that we are targeting.

bill: 5:09

Yeah, it's When it sounds like other content areas, standards might be more concrete than ours, and that's not to say that world language standards aren't concrete, but they didn't. Might not appear to be so to the untrained eye, I guess if you don't know how to read and interpret the standards and like like the, I don't spectrum of what proficiency and performance look like if. at, say, a novice low writing standard, it might say something about, like disconnected words and maybe even cognates might be included, but really no grammatical, else, it's just like, And I will say it typically is also, they need to be content words, or at least like, quote unquote, real words as in, as in, like, if is at novice, low proficiency is about their families, maybe they'll say, like, aunt, mom, dad, sister, uncle. But, and those are all real words but if they throw in things like English words or whatever the first language might be, that doesn't look like a real word. That doesn't word. To someone who's assessing, perhaps. But also they're, It's not like assessment and say, like oh, well, they were not So they are now a novice low Spanish speaker, French speaker, German speaker, Japanese speaker. Now, it's time to assess them on the next level, because. It's they might be novice low, just in that context. Whereas, maybe they can really talk about going to a restaurant.

Bryan: 7:09

right. And so that is. a huge reason why in my adoption of standards based grading practices of my tenets is that in order to truly equitably assess world language standards, you need to assess students at the end of the sequence of instruction, which is often, you know, at the end of the semester and weigh that much more heavily than where students were at in the beginning, because it's ideally about Continual development and the information really matters when we're asking the question of did the Apply. It's not it doesn't really describe student progress in developing their proficiency. it's just, just rather inaccurate.

FishRod: 7:53

I think it's about approach as well, because I think like a teacher listening might be like, well, if I could teach them, you know, like, oh, they know how to correctly form the predator and the imperfect. So they know how to the past tense or narrate a story in the

bill: 8:06

Okay. Okay.

FishRod: 8:11

that

bill: 8:12

Silence. Silence.

FishRod: 8:21

but I think that comes from like where you get your expectations from of like what students are going to do next. Because textbooks are sequenced in a way where First you learn the this, and then you learn the this, and then you learn the this, but we just know from the way that language develops that it is, you know, it's in fits, in spurts, it's in different things at different times,

bill: 8:41

Okay. Silence.

FishRod: 8:56

It's messy. It's time consuming. And know, this is kind of a preview of the article as well as that. If you're teaching in that grammatically sequence sort of way, you're actually not going proficiency development, the real world development that you think you're getting. And it might be kind of hindering your students from developing that growing proficiency.

bill: 9:18

Can I open a couple cans of worms?

FishRod: 9:21

Worms.

bill: 9:22

Great. still love me if I were a worm?

Bryan: 9:25

Hehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehehe

FishRod: 9:30

Gay mind meld.

bill: 9:32

so yeah, so my, my first can, oh, worms is I think I'm missing a reference. Am I missing a reference?

FishRod: 9:42

wanted to yell worms. No, no, I'm just

bill: 9:44

How do you say what's worms. in German?

FishRod: 9:47

Vrooma.

bill: 9:48

so going back to like using the textbook as. Like, you're guiding, I don't know, guiding the light developing proficiency. Like, something that always got So it typically didn't come up until chapter 5 of the Spanish 1 textbook. So trying to get students to talk about their wants before then? No, thank you, sir. Man person,

FishRod: 10:16

Which is silly because like want is the basis of

bill: 10:20

so many things.

FishRod: 10:21

and

bill: 10:22

Yeah.

FishRod: 10:23

Well, I just got Buddhist for a second, but yeah, it's, it's the, like, it's, it's what drives many stories. It's what drives people's actions, you know, their day to day how students are feeling any given moment. So yeah, not talking about wants is wacko. Keep going, Bill.

bill: 10:37

So like on that, just a quick out to Dr. Terry Waltz for putting together the super seven. We've probably mentioned just like a cornerstone of at least my words in there are super highly communicative and you can use them in a bunch of different contexts and you can get away with You can, well, you can get yourself into some trouble with them, but you can also get yourself out of trouble if you can use them. that joke didn't come across. I learned, I learned the joke. Yeah, I speak seven languages, but I can get in, I can, I can get into trouble in all of them, but I can only get out of trouble in one. going to cut this out. All right. My second can of worms.

FishRod: 11:16

that just

bill: 11:17

Okay,

FishRod: 11:18

that the useful stuff that we need for proficiency to express herself very basic ways gets sequenced way later in textbooks, even though it is highly relevant and a cornerstone of actual language proficiency from the very

bill: 11:32

and my 2nd can of worms think maybe we might gaslight ourselves about is the difference between assessing for proficiency and assessing for performance. So, my understanding of proficiency versus performance I kind of like to state it as like, proficiency is you're dropped off in a community that's speaking the language you're learning, and you show what you can do, whereas performance is maybe a unit assessment because We've been talking about the same thing. You've been hearing the vocabulary over and over and over for this purpose of assessing if you can do it or not. So there's also, like, a difference and at least for me, and I gladly accept pushback on my decision to do this, my end of course, goal might be lower than my end of Because students are going to be able to do more for our students are going to be able to do more on specific topics that we have spent weeks talking about. And, but then, at the end of the year, it's kind of like, what can you still do with all those things? Have we, like, are we still able to use it? Is it still in our heads? Have we been able to use the vocabulary and structures that we learned talking about those things to talk about other things? And so performance is just very specific to in my opinion, very specific to a classroom setting. And what we, as teachers are asking students to do proficiency being just. Open ended more.

Bryan: 13:16

really, like, the assessment of proficiency itself not appropriate for the classroom setting because it's literally the ability to talk about anything in the So might take a An assessment such as the Actful Oral Proficiency Interview, they will ask you to talk about your life and any given topic and, you know try and assess your level based on that, and if we use that as the basis of a grade For students who are learning the language for the first for not a very long time it's just we may not we may be very disappointed So it really has to be an assessment of performance But the thing is performance is often an proficiency their progress towards proficiency so it's still useful data, but we just really cannot complete them. And so it's important to understand the difference

FishRod: 14:08

I see that rubrics that people share online where they're like advanced. Slow, for

bill: 14:13

Okay.

FishRod: 14:22

if you prepare them to do an organized structured paragraph about something you've been talking in class about for 4 weeks. Yeah, I think it's a, you know, decently reasonable expectation that they do an organized structured paragraph because you've been talking about organized structured paragraph. But then if you again, if you change topics to something that is in the same band proficiency, it's going to look like something

bill: 16:50

Silence.

FishRod: 16:54

share is that, you know, like, Oh, look, our students are already showing advanced low proficiency. And I was like, we have to be careful because like we've trained them for this specific thing for this specific context and topic. And that is, like Brian said, is an indicator. It is not. We are not trained to evaluate there are other do that

bill: 17:14

Could you say organized structured paragraph 1 more time?

FishRod: 17:17

organized structured paragraph.

bill: 17:20

Thank you. And then like 1 more 1 more topic before we get into the article that we read, of other people read as well. It was getting shared around recently. So hopefully this will be, in digesting the article yourself. If you read it, but something else that I that. In well, really just about contact hours in class and what that means for the expectations that we can set for our students. And so going back to the Indiana world language standards. They have a, they have a chart within the standards. That was created based off of the defense Institute that worked with and the like language testing international. And so you can find the stuff there as well. LTI language testing international is like actual assessment group and they did studies with, training of language. So when people are in the military or in the government and they need to learn a language, they based. The contact hours off of these experiences, though, the document that Indiana has says that, like, a school year in a school year, it's reasonable to expect that students will get 135 to 150 class. Hours, and that is what they use to. Mark, like, where proficiency, where proficiency or performance should go up. So, at the end of year, 1 for, like, Spanish and they differentiate in different categories of language. There's a point to be made from the article later about that, but at the end of. Year 1 or 135 to 150 class hours students and say, Spanish or French are expected to reach novice mid to novice high, depending on the mode of communication and. The issue with that is that the, like, the Defense Institute that like, these hours came from were from very, very, very specific and controlled settings. So it is 8 hours a day. It's maximum of 4 students to 1 teacher

FishRod: 19:57

Assemblies, no fire drills, no,

Bryan: 20:01

no chemistry homework

bill: 20:03

Exactly that's assuming that. We get the entire class period to be doing language every single day, and every single student is present. There are no interruptions, so I just think we need to even when we are looking at. State standards, and we're using that kind of or those charts. There's also something from, like, the actual proficiency least in the 2012 version. I don't know if it's in the updated version like a timeline of, like, after this much time, this is where students are likely to end up or could be reasonably up. And so maybe we just take that with a grain of salt and take a look at. Who the human students are in our classrooms and help push them as much as we can push them rather than comparing them to some very, very specific situation in which you have highly motivated individuals. Who needed to not only learn a language for their job, but potentially like needed to learn the language for like security reasons. So very highly motivated. And I just, I ha you know, I, I love this generation of students. They are passionate and thoughtful and ingenious that said. I don't think that 14 year olds have just, they just don't have the same motivation as someone learning a language for a specific purpose.

FishRod: 21:38

Totally. It's, it's, it's all context. I would think this made me think of with who is an elementary school Spanish teacher who is going through some kind of like, like, reflection about her program because she sees students from K through 5th grade and, you know, I think she internally and then also to her administrators that she works with wants to be able to say, you know, is where we get after six years of language instruction, right? What, what is the, what is reasonable to expect after six years? But part of the conversation we're going to be having is like, How many hours is if she sees she sees these students for purely guesstimating because I don't even know at this point, maybe half hour a week for the for the lower grades and then like an hour a week for the upper grades going to maybe add up to like a level one or two high school class and so she needs to be able to scale her. expectations so that she's not expecting too much of herself over the course of these six years with her students, but then also communicate the progress that is being made to the stakeholders, the families and her administrators. So they're not like it's been six years. Why aren't they you know, speaking in entire fairy tales in the language when that's just not realistic, given the clock hours on earth that this poor woman has to Spanish into these little kiddo's brains. So it context again there, right? Like those children are not defense contractors, like Bill said they're school students in an hour a day sort of class. They, they're, you know, little kids getting an hour to an hour a week or maybe more. I don't The time has to add up. It is, language acquisition is a game of time. On that note, let's ungatekeep some research. And I feel a little bit like we're cheating because this research. was very ungatekept. It is publicly available on Beyoncé's internet. So, get it. We'll put the link in the show notes, of course. This article is called, What proficiency levels do K 16 world language learners achieve? And comes costs at the Michigan State University. Do I know any alumni of the Michigan State University?

bill: 23:44

Maybe, maybe you two.

FishRod: 23:47

I just gaslighted myself into believing you hadn't gone there, but there we go. Our very own Billiam.

bill: 23:52

Yeah. And Matt also is just doing great work. Um, if you, a quick little shout out for A project of his is that um, coming up in the language educator, there's going to be kind of like this uh, I don't know feature of, Matt talks with, uh, teachers and researchers. So, uh, and talking about like using that stuff in the classroom. So be on the lookout for that.

FishRod: 24:24

Okay, I would like to issue a formal apology to Michiganders for calling it the Michigan State University. Brian has informed me in the chat that they don't, I don't think they do that. Anyways. Carrying on. Alright, so the the purpose of this research article was to see what proficiency levels do K 16 and this is relevant, as say in the article, because, this helps you understand the achievements the program. So what your program can actually do and contextualizes, you know, what successes the program. has had, the importance of sustained language learning, the more time and resources that governments dedicate to learning programs, plot twist, the better impacts they're going to have, the more realistic, you know, changes that they're going to make in students language proficiency. Who'da thunk it? So, this the article talks about where we get it. Our levels of proficiency in terms of like, how do we assess that again? We would at the pod would remind you that we as teachers are not really trained to assess proficiency. We're mostly change to assess performances in the classroom and kind of controlled settings about expected topics, but there were many measures. you can use to kind of ascertain proficiency or approximately which include the AAPPL, the Apple test from Actful Language Testing International. Actful also has the battery of tests, RPT, you know, our oral proficiency interview or writing proficiency etc. And then the STAMP test, from Avant Assessment. that, I can highly recommend if you're able to get a training from any of these about these, Programs is totally worth it. I have done the O. P. I. Familiarization workshop as well as the stamps of advanced training. And you just learned so much about what the actual levels look what they really, really mean and how you might apply them to your classroom. Anyways, so those

bill: 26:11

I did stamp,

FishRod: 26:13

Yeah, yeah, go.

bill: 26:14

I said, I did stamp advance as well. And it was a great training. It has, it really, really, really helped me. Get a better understanding of because my school at my school, we do stamp at the end of the year, and I wanted to make sure that I could help my students do better on that type of test and it was invaluable. Like, I, I think I've made a lot of really good changes to my rubrics to my instruction and just to my assessment of student growth because of that. Check it out, if you can.

FishRod: 26:55

I have nothing to add to what Bill said, except exactly ditto. And I think embarrassingly, if you log onto the advanced website, there's a video of me talking about it. So plug, any

bill: 27:04

There is

Bryan: 27:05

put a link in the show notes.

FishRod: 27:07

agony. Alrighty. So those are different that we can use proficiency. And so the, the authors of incorp and costs kind of looked at different studies that had figured out what proficiency levels, different of language had achieved, including like elementary and middle school immersion programs Spanish, excuse me, Spanish as a subject in an English language school, high school study of a language, and then college study of a language. kind of see, like, where is everybody getting and how, you know, what is realistic And I'm going to give you the short and the short of it. who are in an immersion program K through eight who are getting all their content all the time in the language the target language are getting to the intermediate band by the end of 6th, grade. That means that middle school students who nothing but the language in their school environment are solidly intermediates at the end of middle school. And this could be developmental. This could be a variety of things, but Let's keep that in context as we then move over to our, high school Spanish learners or Spanish, excuse me, any language for high school, they discovered that most students 2 years in the kind of novice mid to novice high three to four years, they were in the like intermediate low to intermediate mid band in college, interestingly enough, college accomplished about the same thing, which means that if you're, you know, taking your lower division sophomore year of college, whatever is it, four semesters, six quarters of language, you're getting about those same results as the year high school students, And then college language, end up usually around the advanced band. Contextualize doing lots and lots of coursework only in that language and motivated to do the coursework in that language. and then I think, and that's it. So what does that actually look like after two years of high school language instruction? So I think in Washington it is the state requirement. One of the graduation pathways you have to get your two years in. they're in the novice mid to novice high branch, band of performance or proficiency. means when, you know, faced with tasks about their immediate environment and kind of things familiar to them, students are responding in it. Complete sentences kind of after two full years, and this is regardless of approach that the teacher used and kind you know, other contextual elements there years, they're kind of they're just getting some sentences kind after three to four years, they're pretty reliably using sentences with some details in them. Okay, that sounds like to our, you know, untrained ears, like a far cry from what we would expect that we produce these fluent speakers who are going out and conquering skills. Same thing, like, when we think about these, An immersion student who, again, has been getting all their content, all their lessons, eight being intermediate mid to intermediate high, that could be still pretty inaccurate with uses of tenses producing some connected discourse that, you know, has subordinated clauses and connectors and transitional elements, but not consistently, after years and years and years and years And so when I look at this, and when I think about this, it makes me immediately snap to expectations for these big kind of year programs that put a stamp or a sticker on a student's experience. I think of things like I B exams, exams, et cetera. and I'll probably link this document in the show notes as well. But, found that kind of lined up the actual can the rubrics with their corresponding performance descriptors. That document said that students who are at the intermediate mid level would likely get a 3 on the AP exam. To To again, to go back to the, to the, the research findings after 3 to 4 years, students are in the intermediate low to intermediate mid band. maybe getting a 3 on the exam, according to this correlation, right? Intermediate high being a 4 advanced low being a 5. And so we can see already that there is. Maybe a bit of a mismatch between the proficiencies that students are actually achieving and then the expectations set by big programs like AP and IB but also by ourselves, by ourselves as the classroom teachers. So it, it gives a lot of food for friends, think?

Bryan: 31:35

personally think? that, well, lot of ways society needs to re evaluate its to and scoring and expectations. transcripts, college credits, in a lot of ways, but this is just one particular way in which we have very solid evidence that what we shoot for may not actually always be realistic, or maybe most of the time is not realistic and we should be Motivated to celebrate what progress is actually being made despite a lot of that have it not happen, you know students who are studying a language that is not spoken, you know is not the majority language where they live and all the other factors. the fact that students are, are even able to reach intermediate, like that after a successful four years instruction is quite the accomplishment. So, perhaps, if we do not, you know, get that gold star, five on the AP exam we shouldn't beat ourselves up on it, about it. You know, the students shouldn't do that, and teachers shouldn't do that either.

bill: 32:42

couple of questions that I about this is specifically with like how Do how does like a year of high school equate to a semester in college? Like I, I don't, at least based on my experience when I was in college, like, I don't think like, just because you move through the textbook quicker, doesn't mean there's the same amount of communication, the same amount of opportunities to interact with language or the same amount of input for a student to like, Achieve, so I guess I'm just curious as like, maybe what is I would like to take a closer look at, like, maybe the syllabi of of these courses that were looked at in in this research brief.

Bryan: 33:33

I two as well. You have to think about the fact that college students were already screened in order to get into college. So they're not just, you know a random sampling of anybody who happens to live somewhere and go to a school and has to take a required class. These students are academically motivated. been admitted to the college or university.

FishRod: 33:52

works.

Bryan: 33:54

get their money's worth. And so they're putting in probably extra effort that I mean, may or may not exist in other contexts. So.

bill: 34:01

Good point good point,

FishRod: 34:03

I'm also, I'm as a no homework girly. I'm like, maybe they're doing more homework. That's a thoughtful contribution.

bill: 34:10

which, like, you know, actually kind of fair because. Like, in 1 of my 1st Spanish classes in college, like, we had to watch. A lot of movies, like that was the first time I watched The Pan's Labyrinth and never been the same since. Loved it. It's so good.

FishRod: 34:29

It somehow.

bill: 34:30

oh my gosh. You are in for a treat. You are going Oh, jeez Louie, I can't, I'm excited for you to experience it for the first time.

FishRod: 34:41

I'll let you, I'll try to see it before we record next, and then we can talk

Bryan: 34:44

Ben, did you have more to say about the article? Because there was something that I, that like kind of jumped out to me that I had questions about that I might want to bring up. So talks, one of the recommendations, that is made here is that. Proficiency tests need to be supplemented with information rich assessments, for example, assessments and assessment literacy so that both students and educators understand language proficiency development. And so, I wonder think I understand that they mean that we can't just use one individual test to determine the students overall proficiency, especially if it's actually probably a performance based assessment. But personally my experience with self assessment has been I don't know. Um, yes. Uh, I think that what is really needed, like the level of assessment and literacy that is really needed somewhat accurate on progress towards proficiency requires like an understanding of how language acquisition works and a lot of linguistic factors that are not reasonable to expect. Secondary and elementary and maybe even some college students to really know. And it depends on the context in which they're think that, you know, if they give themselves a good grade on the self assessment that will result in good grade in the actual class, they're likely to inflate a lot there. Performance assessment of themselves. And I don't know, it's just it doesn't. This is I'm not sure if I would call a self assessment information rich, although it is an perspective that if students are trained to respond to, like, it could be another perspective that, like, form a more complete picture of progress because they may know some things about themselves that you may not have observed. But I just really think we should I think it just has to be done in a very particular way. And yeah, I don't know. What are your thoughts on that?

FishRod: 36:42

I hear you on that. Yeah, that we have the pedagogical expertise to performances in this kind of abstract way because we have the language ability, but also the pedagogical ability to kind of assess for that. So I agree with you that the self assessment that. kind of also tipped me off, like, I wonder what that contribute. But in listening to you talk right now, I wonder, I don't know if students have opportunity to use the language in real world contexts and then describe. What they did, right? Like, oh, I told my neighbor about this problem we were having in the neighborhood and she said, thanks for the warning or whatever. You know what I mean? I think that could be an interesting thing that you is hard to capture. on something like a rigid performance test where that doesn't necessarily come that could contribute to a kind of fuller picture of someone's proficiency, but isn't necessarily of those assessment instruments. But again, that it is all, it's hard. It's hard to be precise. Even, you know, the, the oral proficiency exams, you know, as someone can take these exams over and over again and increase their proficiency just by understanding these tests more. And, you know I think I happen to think they're fairly valid in terms of these things. But again, like, anxiety is a real thing, right? And people, they're supposed to be doing one thing for And put on a little performance and then it's not what the test wants. And I just have experience with this, with helping teachers get certified in the state of Washington were consistently hitting intermediate performances in these high stakes and they are whether or not they're gonna be employed. And I, with my knowledge of these exams, was like, this, this, and then this, which I, know you know how to do, just highlight the language abilities that you do have wants. Then you're more likely to pass. And all three of them passed. And so I think, you know even, even the things that we get from these kind of standardized measures, Okay. can be murky and and not paint the full picture. put a number on something that's like abstract and complex. You know, and that's why I think assessment and the kind of more descriptive stuff could be useful, but the for us who knows if it would end up paying off in the end.

Bryan: 38:41

Totally. Absolutely. Yeah, I think just if anything, we just need to think about using a variety of methods to assess our students and understanding classroom, unfortunately, it does not always translate directly to real world performance and just keep that in mind proficiency even. So, all right. So anything else about the article?

bill: 39:03

It's a good 1. I'd

Bryan: 39:05

one, just, I think we're going to get into this really soon for girl busing, so I'll just hold my tongue on that. But in terms of what we've about our proficiency level expectations for students, I've done, you know, a large amount of my studies. My graduate studies was about understanding and assessment. So I've created a number of rubrics for all of the different modes of communication every, you know, expected level of proficiency that might attain in a high school program, though specifically the one that I'm teaching in. And I'm really happy with results because now know is a realistic expectation for students. And so I don't have to go based on like, what is a five on the AP exam or even like, Whatever it is that the textbook publishing compass company provides you as an assessment tool, and I can use that understanding to my students progress and then adjust and set goals based on that. And I what I'm finding is that my courses, students are able to do well. I'm not having, I mean, my particular something to do with it, but I'm not having, I've never, I'm not having grades in ways that they did in my, like, early you know, vocab, kind of. thing. So success is very possible, but there is a level, certain level of challenge that I think my particular students that, like, still attainable. not setting the bar way too high nor too low. I'm, like, kind of at a good sweet spot with that. I don't know, what's your that stuff?

FishRod: 40:38

my, my, for this was like setting, you have to set a proficiency level expectation and then assess towards it and like assess towards that. That's a good place to start because you, but because it requires knowing them but then also teaching to them Right. And I think our listeners are probably listening to the beast this and being like, well, what is reasonable? Do you have a, do you have a fast and loose, like, Level I'm shooting for this proficiency level. Level two, I'm shooting for this. shooting for this. Level three,

Bryan: 41:05

mean, I in my research for my thesis, looked at some studies that talked about proficiency level outcomes from programs and the vast majority of them say that intermediate mid is about a four year sequence of instruction. So for my level four class that is the goal intermediate mid. I do have slightly higher expectations in terms of the interpretive I just think that We can understand more than we can produce. And so that's just something that I do in my particular program. so we do go up to AP, which is level five for us. And AP, rubrics because it is a college board class And I have to, so, but my own, like, I guess, personal goal for that class is intermediate high. And so four is Intermediate Mid, three Intermediate two Novice High, one Novice Mid. So that's what I use as my framework.

FishRod: 42:00

good. I think that'll be helpful I, you know, people want something to, to hang their hat on. They want it to know or get, I, know, I think of for myself, I like the first year, I kind of set the level at like a novice mid so that kids can because most kids start outputting in sentences because they hear lots of sentence level discourse in the class, and so they get an early win, right? Like, yeah, you're doing the right thing because you're in the first year of a language. And that is actually a reasonable expectation. If it's for you to just be like baby babbling and like, that's totally fine. And we're like, we're in a specific context. Which is a language class and it's okay to like, be in that baby battle sort of level and then it's like level two where things start ramping up or it's like, yeah, you should be consistently responding with sentences and we're going to start getting into more connected discourse with details and with stuff like that. And so again, if listeners are, are like, please just give me the, the, like, the, cut and dry, the, quick and easy what should I set? like, maybe start you know, novice mid and then novice high to intermediate low and for level two, kind of. You know, I have be the next sub level. So if that helps you with your planning as a place to start, and then you find that your students are smashing that and you want to raise the bar, go for it. I found that I actually dropped down a sub level a lot of the time. I was teaching mostly online in 2020 and 2021 because they were not getting the same proficiency attainment because we had less clock time. The, the medium was terrible. We were all trying to figure it out. I bumped it down for that circumstance. And then once those students who I had seen through that way. Kind of phase out of my program. I've started bumping it back up slowly. And so again, it's contextual. It's you know, try things, experiment, knowing the proficiency levels well, and then, you know, move your expectations on where you get your students with your program.

Bryan: 43:46

one thing that I wanted to say a bit earlier is that I don't, I think that if you use proficiency based instruction, lots of comprehensible input and interaction in your classes, your students are probably not going to stay in Novice Low for very long. But if you stick to memorization of vocabulary lists and explicit grammar knowledge reproduction style tests, they may be there a bit longer than you might want them to. So have novice mid right as expectation for level one, but I find that, A non insignificant number of my closer to novice high. And that's just what happens. And, you know, like, like you're saying earlier, I think about rubrics possibly appearing to be too easy to the students. It's like, like, that means you're doing really well. And like, I don't know, like, I just think we need to celebrate progress wherever we can. And like, as if we have these realistic expectations in mind, It is accurate to say that, you know, so,

FishRod: 44:43

Yeah, don't think we, I, I'm like, I was shocked at the idea that we should be surprised that our students achieve our expectations like, like I wanted them to speak in complete sentences and then they did. And then I was mad like, no, like that. That's that's what it's supposed to be. Like, it just again, it's a game of time. The article itself. Also, if you're, if you end up reading it, a listener kind of lists out some factors that help with proficiency attainment and Brian has one of them on two of them, really which is the type of instruction. So students who are in proficiency, teaching sort of classes get higher proficiency in their classwork. The can push the students further in their or proficiency and their comprehension interpretation through proficiency based instruction. So, If you want to get your students further, focus on that. Language exposure. The students, pretty straightforward. The more, the better. students are exposed to, the better. So if you need to instructor to focus on 90 percent plus target language or whatever that looks like to you, knowing that that is daily and, you know, in times of life, et cetera, et cetera. But if you need to focus on. use of target language in your classroom, maybe make that your professional goal. The last one that they talked about was just like higher the motivation of the students, the higher the proficiency. That goes back to, to Bill's point from earlier about like, yeah, when you have defense language institute students who are like, if I get this wrong, a bomb will be dropped or something. I don't know what they do there. That is perhaps highly motivating for many. And so I think I this is I feel like we regularly plug motivated classroom podcast for good reason, because it is excellent, motivation is one of those things where we can say, Oh, I want my students to be motivated, but we have to have an actual concept of what motivation is and how we attain it. And so I, Liam printers using self determination theory. autonomy, competence, and relatedness has really given me so much to think about in how to build student motivation in my programs. And so I highly recommend that as a podcast as a, as a good place to start, but you know, can't get students motivated unless we know what motivation is and what motivates

bill: 46:49

1 last thing that I have about, like the article, the study that they cite about teaching methods a very recent study as well. He is from 2023. so I think that's a good indicator that. It's not, it wasn't just like a one off situation. Like it wasn't just like these, these, weren't like surprise results. I don't think based on people have been doing comprehension based communicative language teaching for a while now, like it's, it is starting to pick up and so not only do I think more people are doing it, but it's comprehension based or like starting with comprehension and then moving to production But I also think people are probably getting better at it So I think that I think that is a good reason to look at that article as a trustworthy source of of this like analysis of what should our expectations be and and like I would I I'll also say like It's I don't think that this means necessarily like one thing is better than another. I think what it's saying is that if. You're doing if you're running your classroom this way, these are the results that you might be able to expect. So, again, it's just, it's not saying 1 thing is wrong. 1 thing is right. It's helping us set realistic expectations or what our students can actually do as far as. My girl boss think of setting realistic expectations for students. I think that's something that I have really leaned into after doing the stamp advanced training was that. I have a better idea of means to be in the levels or the different performance levels. So, having a bit like, we see these terms all the time, like words, phrases, simple sentences, connected sentences, paragraphs, blah, blah, blah. But I didn't know what those meant until I did the training and like, have a better understanding of what does it actually mean for students to be producing phrases. And Like, because before, I don't know, I, I would think of like, oh, they say my mom is tall. My uncle is cool. My like, so they're using, like, maybe they're just using the word is over and over and over. Those are kind of simple sentences, but they're. Not connected, and they don't really show variety. So, is that really showing us what students can do if even though they're consistent in the type of output that they're doing? Are they consistent in variation of the language that the language that they use in an assessment? If I don't know, I'm getting slap happy, so I don't know if that makes sense or not.

FishRod: 50:04

totally, no, you're totally, I, I, a hundred percent agree with what you're saying is that we just need to get ourselves some training, like be, the, these words. Have kind of colloquial usage, you know, like strings of sentences, connected sentences, and you know, blah, blah, blah, phrases but having, you know, someone with, with the institutional knowledge to tell you like what that actually means, again, was super helpful for me. I'm linking it Embarrassingly, my testimonial is still up there. So enjoy that.

Bryan: 50:31

So one thing might, if I could get one gripe in there the actual website used to you could go through the proficiency guidelines and for each language of what performance at that level looks like in both speaking and writing, and it is not there anymore. So if someone at Actful. is listening to this podcast. think a lot of teachers would really benefit from having a resource like this. like that to help them with their instruction and assessment. Thank you.

bill: 51:05

When when was the last time that you like tried to check for that

Bryan: 51:08

I believe it has been removed since they've updated to the 2024 proficiency guidelines I was it when I was working on my thesis and since then it is gone, so.

bill: 51:20

Maybe that's a sign that they're getting updated for the 2024 guidelines, hopefully.

Bryan: 51:25

I hope so. Yeah

bill: 51:27

well, do we have any more gaslighting, girl bossing or gatekeeping today? Because we're running long today.

Bryan: 51:34

thing please don't say that you want your level two students to be an intermediate, mid, that's really just not, it's not a realistic I've heard some wild things from teachers about levels they want. They, they would like, I mean, they're not even really saying that these are the levels that their students are at, but they're like, I want my, you know, students to be just be, again, celebrate the progress that is being made and understand what is realistic.

FishRod: 52:01

Take

bill: 52:02

slow. It's pace now. Yeah. All right, well welcome to 2025. Let's see where this goes and

FishRod: 52:11

see to, to see you in the pod this year. We have some developments upcoming, so hopefully,

bill: 52:15

Oh, We got so many things

FishRod: 52:17

Woo.

bill: 52:18

All right um, we'll go out and keep on slaying

FishRod: 52:25

Bye.