A Word from Tina 

Excerpted from Year One and Beyond

I did not write these Stepping Stones materials to show you how to combine communicative language teaching with the textbook, or with grammar, or required word lists. I wrote this book to offer a new vision of what is possible in World Language teaching: communicative language teaching organized around literacy skills that are achievable, doable by even first-year students, that build upon each other through the year and the years that we spend with our students, and that have cross-curricular application, and in a framework that allows for you to use any content -- including topics and themes from textbooks and other programs -- and combine it with this literacy work and help your students make personal connections to the material.  

You can use the instructional cycles presented herein to easily incorporate themes and topics that are in your textbook into your communicative language lessons. However, some of us are in a situation where, because we have shared assessments that test students on discrete grammar points and specific vocabulary found in a textbook, we need to do more than incorporate themes and topics into our communication -- we need to teach them grammar and vocab. After their time with us, many students go on to another teacher who will expect them to know certain information from the textbook (what a verb conjugation looks like, for example, or the names of certain parts of the language).  

For teachers in these situations, I offer this suggestion. Devote as much time as you can to communicating in the language, for as long as possible in the school year. Delay formal study of the contents of the textbook for as long as possible. Then, when the common assessment is coming up, or the students are about to leave you to move on to a new teacher, address the required content. You can do this through PACE (Presentation, Attention, Co-Construction, and Extension) lessons, through conscious learning “tricks”, and through games and competitions.  

My advice is to keep your communication time uninhibited by the required elements of the language, and simply devote time in class to consciously learning them, as late in the term as possible, to prepare the students for the next level. 

Attempting to use our communicative language teaching to get students to learn how to manipulate certain paradigms or memorize certain words is way above the pay grade of the average educator. It is simply too difficult, and makes the communication too stilted, to do this. It also means that the promise of communicative language teaching is unable to take off and soar to its highest potential. But, just because communication does not easily teach vocabulary and grammar does not mean that all hope is lost! It just means that we need to use communication for what it is good for: building communicative competence. And we need to let the conscious mind do what it is good at -- learning stuff like word lists and grammar rules.

You can use your communicative lessons to address certain themes and topics, through which students will, of course be exposed to vocabulary that is related to the topic. For instance, if you are working in a Description cycle and you devote one of the phases -- or even two -- to the topic of food, then, of course the students will be exposed to a bunch of words that relate to food. But it is frustrating and unnatural to expect all that communication about food to result in everyone's remembering a list of 62 vocabulary words from Chapter Four in the textbook. It's just too hard. Better to do a Word Off or other games to help them learn what they are expected to know (and perhaps try to whittle down that list to the essentials!)

You can also engineer the communication task to provide exposure to certain functions of the language that you can be pretty sure will contain lots of examples of the grammar point that you need to eventually get the students to learn. But just don't expect that the communicative lesson will get them to remember and know how to apply it. To make that happen, you will probably need to actually plan a Language Study lesson and teach the conscious mind. But before you do the Language Study, you can "angle" the communication lessons to expose students to the forms you will teach them later using Language Study. This makes it easier for them to uptake the Language Study because they will have a deeper schema for the grammar forms you will teach them.

For instance, if you teach French or Spanish, and you know that you will need to teach the subjunctive, and you know that the students will need to take a common assessment on it in November, and it is now October and you are currently working in the Narration unit, you can use the Guided Oral Input strategy of "Narration Card Talk" which is outlined in the "Narration" cycle, and ask the students to sketch a picture of a time that they wanted someone to do something and they had a hard time convincing them. In the stories that you would tell the class to narrate using some of the students' cards, you can use a bunch of dialogue with the students using the subjunctive to tell the other person what they want them to do. Through the daily Shared Writing that follows the input, you can make a point of including as many instances of the subjunctive as you can, in the dialogue. You can "angle" other Guided Oral Input strategies in the same way, over the course of the next few weeks. And then, later, when it is time to learn the subjunctive, students will have a better grasp of how it "tends to sound" and will have a much easier time learning it from the language lesson.

If you are asked to teach for conscious learning, I recommend delaying that as long as possible, at which point you can tell your students, who will most likely have grown fat and happy off of the rich diet of successes in the language that you have crafted for them up until that point, that it is time to turn their attention to a different way of studying the language. I recommend the aforementioned PACE model for this conscious study. Your students will, if you follow the instructional framework outlined in this book, find the this conscious study is much like the noticing we do during Shared Reading, when we look at how the language is put together and spelled.  

You will most likely be surprised at how quickly any required conscious language study “clicks” in the minds of students taught with communicative language. I certainly was, the first time I had my students tackle some workbook pages! What took their counterparts in a traditional classroom weeks and weeks to learn, they got within a day or two. What’s more, they laughed, literally laughed, to think that consciously understanding these points of language would present any trouble to anyone. They had heard and read these forms in meaningful contexts, as they had naturally come up in our communication, so many times, without thinking about them at all, that once they were asked to examine them with their conscious brains, almost every student found them child’s play.  

Taking time out of your communicative language time to address these word lists and grammar lessons might mean that you only make it through five of the six instructional cycles, or even four. That's OK; we are here to help you with pacing and planning. Another option is that you might only choose to complete three out of four of the phases of each cycle, in order to carve out time to do this conscious study.