I have taught AP Spanish for five of the last six years. At my school, AP Spanish is a fourth-year course. I do not require applications for the class or otherwise “cull” potential students. Anyone who wants to take it may do so. Also, we require all students who take an AP course to take the AP exam in May. My first couple of years I floundered around, trying to figure out what the College Board was looking for. The last three years I grew to understand more of how to effectively prepare students for the exam (that last part leaves a bad taste in my mouth, to teach to prepare students for an exam). This is my students’ record over the last three years, with a total of 21 students:
Scored 1: five students
Scored 2: five students
Scored 3: five students
Scored 4: six students
Over the last several years, I have learned a few things about the AP. My first year was an experiment for everyone; it was the first ever AP Spanish class at my school. I had two students. One of the students was a combination of motivation and aptitude I never saw before or since and do not know if I will ever see again. The student completely skipped Spanish 3. His father was the head of a construction firm that employed many Spanish-speaking immigrants, so he had an opportunity to work with them frequently. He would hear them say something and ask them to explain why or how they said it. He would ask me in class about particular features. Then he would go out and for the next week he would deliberately practice it until he could do it without much thought. He was functionally proficient in Spanish after three years in class – really, after the time he spent in the community.
He scored a two.
Honestly, after only three years, and with me bumbling through my first year teaching AP, a two was pretty good. But the AP purports to measure how well a student will do in a first-year Spanish course in college. And this functionally proficient student would not receive any college credit from the AP for his proficiency. That was my first hint of what the AP actually measures.
This year, I had a student who lived in Spain until he was nine. He could accomplish anything he wanted to in a conversation with native speakers; I saw him do it. He has no reason to take any college Spanish class, ever. He also speaks French and Arabic because he lived in Morocco after Spain.
He scored a one. And that was my fifth year teaching AP. Try as I might, I could not prepare him to take the test. Why? Because he was not a good test-taker. He was terrible at multiple choice. I mean, he would second-guess himself until he’d score perhaps 15% on multiple choice practice sections. And my student who spoke Spanish fluently could not receive any credit from the College Board because of this problem.
From these five years of teaching AP Spanish, here is my take on what the AP world language exams actually measure:
- Students who are good at taking tests will have a better chance because, after all, it’s a standardized test, and it measures how well a student can guess the answer the test writer was looking for.
- Perhaps as an artifact of the format itself, the test does not measure negotiation of language, one of the most important tools a student has to improve interpersonal communication. Rather, it measures the ability to react quickly to artificial prompts and predict what comes next.
- The test does not measure ability to communicate things students at this level typically talk about, but rather measures how well students can analyze unannounced choice topics from a dizzying range of advanced global issues. Okay, so it’s important to teach students to think very critically (although this is not a typical requirement to do well in a first- or second-year college Spanish language class), but this is primarily a vocabulary issue. Really, I promise, look at the Curriculum and Framework put out by the College Board. You’d better have your students analyzing historical events, solving the world’s problems, and predicting the future or it’s completely the luck of the draw of topic on the free-response sections.
All this leads to great teachers offering the stupidest tips ever. You know an exam is a bad measurement when you get tips like:
“Pick an idiom, any idiom, and determine you’re going to use it and figure out how.”
“Choose the most positive answer if the question is about indigenous peoples.”
“Choose the ‘greenest’ answer if the question is about the environment.”
“Five paragraphs will get you a higher score.”
Alas, I feel I must continue the tips. Stay tuned for a post sharing tips a French teacher heard at a recent workshop, with my take on them, and asking for yours in return.
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I am very frightened by the new AP exam, because now I really don’t know what to expect. This will be my 3rd year teaching AP Spanish, and although I have felt like I was floundering, I had great results. What I did, was treat my class like it was “An AP English class”- sounds weird, I know, but the first year I had 94% of my students pass, and the second 86%. I knew I wouldn’t do as well the second year because I had a large percentage of students who were 1st generation Latin American immigrants, with parents who were practically analphabets, and although they could speak and understand anything they wanted, and they could somewhat read Spanish, but they were not at a college level by any stretch of the imagination. This sway in students was because the administration thought that anyone should be allowed into the AP class. I agree only to the extent that anyone who is willing to study hard, work hard and be willing to improve should be allowed in.
In my AP class I stressed good writing habits- write good essays, know what kind of essay they’re looking for and attack it like you would in your English class, include a great thesis statement, opening paragraph, supporting paragraphs and a conclusion- good writing habits in any language help you land “a good job” – a useful skill for any high school or college student. Better yet, a necessary skill for job seekers. The next thing I stressed was proper language use when they were speaking, I would joke with them and say “Do you want a job at McDonalds or with a fortune 500 company?. I told the students that working at McDonalds is a perfectly good job, but college graduates usually only work there until they graduate, then their aspirations are much higher. I give them the example of my brother in law, he was a good ol ‘southern boy, with a college degree who wanted to climb the corporate ladder, to do so he had to take speaking lessons to get rid of his southern accent, he had to take etiquette lessons to fit into the situations he would encounter… it worked! He became the president of one of the biggest banks in America! What does College board say these students need to know to pass the exam from our AP class – I know – the equivalent of a college class experience- What I try to give them is an “edge” that will serve them wherever they go in college and after. Just being proficient will get you to communicate in another language, but it won’t get you those college jobs. I taught Spanish 1 before I taught AP, my goal was for them to be “proficient” and try their basic knowledge on whoever would listen to them. The students who didn’t pass this year, were the ones who were not willing to improve, who would frequently tell me that they knew how to say it and they didn’t see why they had to change- yes, they were proficient, but they were not at a college level for any country.
The last thing I stressed was reading, they read A LOT, I have always thought that reading good literature produces good writers. We read every day, and they read for homework, the more they read the better they got at decoding all those fancy words College Board likes to throw at the kids. They gave meaning to words by the context it was in, and then they had to look it up to see how close they were- it got better with practice.
I will add the “themes” to my new curriculum, and I still don’t know what to expect, but I will still teach my students to work, speak, read and write at a level that is equivalent to college and beyond. We will still practice previous tests, just to take the jitters out of testing, but not because I expect it to be the same on the exam.
I hope this helps, I don’t have a lot of experience, but I am very happy with my results.
I totally agree on the reading – another aspect is, I believe, it is the single best way to deepen vocabulary. Also thanks for the reminder that we’re preparing students for more than just the exam. One of my problems with the class is I feel like I can prepare students for the exam, or I can prepare them with life skills in a fun way, but not both. I’m starting to wonder, though, if my experience with low-level college Spanish courses is different from everyone else’s and what the College Board considers it. I know they poll and discuss a lot with college professors – is this really what low-level college classes look like? Scoring high on the AP would not have given me credit for my advanced classes or my literature classes, where I was expected to provide everything from high accuracy in orthography to in-depth analysis of classical literature trends. It would have given me credit for the classes where I chose a,b,c, or d for the correct verb conjugation.
You are the second person who’s responded to this post telling me of very high student pass rates (the other person has only had one student who hadn’t passed). Which makes me wonder for a moment, what am I doing wrong? But then it makes me stop and ask other relevant questions – what’s the preparation these students are getting from level 1 on? How many years have they had before AP? What’s the percentage of native speakers? What is wrong with my class, that I can get all my students passing this exam with the same year of AP instruction everyone else is getting?
[…] task were far too in-depth for a two-minute prep time leading to a two-minute speaking sample. (See the recent post on what I think the AP exam measures. Also check out the popular post Dear novice-learner teacher […]
So, knowing this new information about the AP exam, would you still make the same recommendations to lower-level teachers that you did in the post, “Dear novice-learner teacher–love, an AP teacher?” Is there anything that you would add?
Also, thanks so much for all that you share in your blog! Makes me want to scrap all that I do and start over!