The results are in and FIFTEEN of 31 students completing the STAMP 4S attained Intermediate High (the ACTFL level required) or better! One student even earned a 9, the highest score, in reading! Only two of those students are heritage speakers of Spanish – the other 13 began learning Spanish in 9th grade!
Indiana has only offered the Seal of Multiliteracy Proficiency for three years. According to the Indiana Department of Education, the seal is to recognize students who have “attained a high level of proficiency, sufficient for meaningful use in college and a career, in one or more languages in addition to English… Multilingual proficiency refers to having a functional level of proficiency in each language: the level of proficiency is not necessarily identical for both languages.”
Last year
Last year was our first year to give the STAMP 4S. At that time, only two students earned Intermediate High, and that was with retaking one or two sections of the STAMP 4S. The two who earned the award were VERY high fliers – one was the Lily Scholar (a very competitive scholarship given in each county in Indiana by Lily Corp.) and the other was equally talented academically. These kids are going to succeed at everything they do because that’s who they are. They only had one year of CI instruction, and that was their senior year. I was very nervous for them because their speaking skills were not as strong as their other skills.
This year
Of the non-heritage learners of Spanish, one is again the Lily Scholar for our county. The difference though, is that this student, and the other twelve, have had three years of CI-based instruction. They commonly reported that the most difficult part of the test was listening, and NOT speaking. What’s more, 11 of the 15 students earned Intermediate High on their FIRST TRY! I am convinced that it is comprehensible input that has made the difference in the results!
To break this down a little more, and to show the true power of using a CI approach to language instruction, take a look at the following details:
- These students’ first year of CI-based instruction (their sophomore year, Spanish 2), I also jumped head-first into a Master’s in Second Language Acquisition. I planned my classes minutes before students walked in and relied 100% on the iFLT/NTPRS/CI Facebook, Look! I Can Talk (TPRS books), and The Comprehensible Classroom. To say that every lesson was a learning curve for me, would be an understatement. But, as they say, a bad day of CI is better than any day teaching from a grammar-lead curriculum.
- Year two for these kids, they figured out they were my guinea pigs and were happy to be along for the ride. I also had 220 students and no planning period (which you can read about here). By spring break of that year, I was flat D.O.N.E. That was one of my hardest years of teaching yet, and I’m not sure how I survived. Needless to say, my level of instruction wasn’t as good as it could have been… and yet, these kids acquired a TON of language!
- Enter year three. As seniors, this group is super confident in their second language skills. They can chat in Spanish, defend opinions, and write essays. They also recently gave 10 minute presentations where they weren’t permitted to have more than a few words on any given slide. This year has been, by far, my best year of CI instruction and you can tell in their language skills.
I cannot take credit for these amazing results, because clearly I have been learning how to teach using this approach at the same time their brains have been happily acquiring language.
But wait, there’s more!
Just in case the above story about acquisition on the fly hasn’t convinced you to try CI, what if I tell you that this year’s seniors earned this award with fewer than five total days of homework in THREE YEARS!!! I promise it is true. My first year I was busy with my own master’s degree homework and simply couldn’t assign student work. My second year, I wasn’t about to assign homework to 220 students – who has time to kill all those trees??? And, since we were doing so well acquiring language without it, I made it a formal policy this year.
With results like these, I believe more than ever that it is input that leads to output (Krashen), not fill-in-the-blank exercises and explicit grammar instruction (textbooks).
So, what’s stopping you?