Proficiency
October 19, 2022
In the language teaching field, we have a long, treasured history of arguing and drama. We may agree or disagree on classroom setup, teacher recruitment efforts, and the best ways to encourage learners to study abroad, but primarily, our arguments center on one question: What works (or doesn’t work) for successful language acquisition? In true Sra. […]
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May 14, 2019
Think about yourself and the bilingual people you know. How did you all become proficient in a new language? A while ago, Marc’s post on 5 things to tell kids on the first day of class reminded me that I had done a survey related to that question. I felt like I discovered some important […]
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March 28, 2017
Subtitle: The sheer, incomparable power of making meaning. Other subtitle: Anecdotes from my Russian journey. When I tell people that I’m learning Russian, I get two reactions, one right after the other. First, Wow, that’s neat! Then, Why? I don’t really know how to answer this. Before I started learning it (this time), I didn’t […]
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December 13, 2016
The fourth-most popular post of 2016 on Musicuentos was a post in which I detailed where I felt the agreement was among people with very different opinions in our field (and there are as many opinions as there are us!). Where are the points of agreement in language teaching? When I graduated from my master’s […]
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July 20, 2016
When I graduated from my master’s program in Linguistics with an emphasis on Second Language Acquisition, I suffered from a fundamental misunderstanding. I thought that there was a consensus on the general principles guiding how language acquisition works, what that means the second time around, and what that understanding ought to mean for the classroom […]
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December 31, 2015
My old rubric served me well for four years, but it was time for a change. A clean slate, a lot of websites, a lot of feedback, and a lot of collaborative brainstorming later, I finally had something I was willing to put out and test out. Check the post below – the links go […]
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December 19, 2015
The third and fourth most popular posts of 2015 were very close, but with the benefit of a few extra months the post on task completion on rubrics barely edged out the #4 post to take the bronze medal. I’m so glad I wondered about task completion and its importance in life and in rubrics […]
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December 17, 2015
December found us doing our first formal assessment of the semester. That is my reality this year, and I love it. We go at our own pace and make our own rules and I don’t see my students enough to warrant spending our precious class time on assessment instead of engaging ourselves with the language. […]
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December 4, 2015
How about an elementary rubric?
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It’s possible a good rubric for communicating performance-towards-proficiency for early language learners exists, but if it does, I haven’t seen it. (If you have, please share in a comment!) See this post for my update from this past summer on my more complex rubric designed to be used with no younger than middle school students. […]
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September 7, 2015
If you’ve enjoyed using – or considered using – the taco talk to help novices and intermediates (and their parents) understand what it means to learn for proficiency, you’ll love this resource. Many thanks to Iya Nemastil, a Japanese teacher in Ohio, for taking this idea and putting it in a beautifully visualized form. I’m […]
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August 24, 2015
This might be my most important resource release this year. First, you can read here about all the things that frustrated me about that snazzy 2011 rubric that I used to use (and that got downloaded from this site a lot). Some of them probably frustrated those of you who used it, too. So I decided to […]
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August 19, 2015
Many teachers have enjoyed using the taco talk to help beginning students and their parents (and administrators!) understand what a novice-level, proficiency-based class is all about. This year I finally tweaked the document to be helpful to teachers of intermediate students. And then a French teacher contacted me for permission to change the “taco” portion […]
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