I’m at the point of my career that every day is Professional Development. I spend two days a week at a high school, observing, teaching, and getting plenty of feedback and advice. I spend three days and an evening at my university, taking classes specifically designed for pre-service teachers, and observing how my professors teach us. I spend one morning a week helping out at a Saturday school. I chat with my mom, a retired ESL teacher, and her friends from the profession. I never go a day without getting some sort of input that helps me develop as a teacher. But what about the next 40 years? How do I continue to grow as a teacher over the course of my career? I plan to constantly question my own practice and to continue speaking with fellow teachers. In addition, I’d like to learn from other teachers from different districts at conferences, such as my state’s World Language Association’s conference, which I just attended this week.
As my mentor teacher pointed out to me, attending this conference is invaluable not only because I get to see how other teachers teach languages, but because I would be seeing the very latest in world language teaching. And the theme of the conference indeed seemed to be innovation. In general, when one thinks about “innovation,” the first thing to come to mind is often “technology.” And technology was certainly a theme in every presentation I attended. However, it wasn’t the only innovation discussed.
One of the big innovations discussed at the conference was the 90% rule. For those of you who aren’t language teachers, the 90% rule is the idea that language teachers should be talking in the target language for at least 90% of class time, no matter what level the class is. This contrasts greatly with my own experience as a K12 language learner. Both my elementary school and my high school taught world languages in English, and as a result, my exposure to the target languages was quite limited. With the 90% rule, students are exposed to the target language for roughly 5 hours a week – which isn’t much, but it’s a lot better than nothing.
There seems to be a lot of pushback to the 90% rule. In conversation with other teachers attending the conference, I often heard the opinion that there was no point to teaching in the target language because the students wouldn’t understand. In one presentation I attended, “El 90%: Métodos y Actividades,” the presenters began with a straw poll of whether we thought that it was possible to teach 1st and 2nd year classes while speaking Spanish 90% of the time. The answer was a resounding “Impossible!” Keep in mind that this was not a straw poll of a general population of language teachers – this was an audience specifically composed of language teachers who had taken the time to come to this conference, to stay until the very end, and to attend a presentation specifically addressing not whether but how to teach mostly in the target language.
I was surprised by all of the pushback. In my school, we teach in the target language. In the school I worked at in Spain, we taught English in English. And of course, no ESL teacher is expected to speak the native language of all of her or his students, who may come from many different countries, and therefore the ESL teacher has no choice but to teach in English. Why so much disbelief about something that language teachers everywhere already do?
There seemed to be two main reasons for the pushback. The first was a lack of comfortableness with the target language on the part of the teacher. This wasn’t specifically addressed in any of the presentations I attended, but I suppose that the only way to fix that is to practice speaking the language until they’re comfortable with it. After all, you can’t expect your students to do something that you’re not doing.
The second reason for pushback was the belief that students won’t understand them if they speak the target language. I say “belief” because it is a belief, and not a given fact. There are many ways teachers make ourselves easier to understand. We speak slowly. We simplify our sentences. We use cognates whenever possible. We repeat. We gesticulate. We model. We draw on the board. We activate background knowledge. We stick with words our students are familiar with, and introduce new words or forms slowly. At the conference, I learned other methods, such as making powerpoints with pictures of the teacher doing an activity and a sentence describing it, or using realia found online and having a structured conversation around it. The list goes on. In fact, you’re probably already bored by the length of this paragraph.
It’s my belief that a teacher can make herself understandable to any student, even an absolute beginner. If a teacher can’t make herself understandable to their students while speaking the target language, in many cases either the teacher or the student hasn’t tried hard enough. And if it’s the latter, it’s the teacher’s job to engage the student until she or he starts trying harder.
I’m not trying to say that it’s easy to teach a class in the target language. There is a steep learning curve to learning in the target language, and teachers must be careful that their students don’t despair when they don’t understand something repeated for the third time. Sometimes minutes are wasted trying to explain something that’s not all that important for the students to know how to say in the target language. There are days when a student just can’t focus on understanding speech in the target language. However, I think both the teachers and the students will find that the pay-off is worth the extra effort.
As my mentor teacher pointed out to me, attending this conference is invaluable not only because I get to see how other teachers teach languages, but because I would be seeing the very latest in world language teaching. And the theme of the conference indeed seemed to be innovation. In general, when one thinks about “innovation,” the first thing to come to mind is often “technology.” And technology was certainly a theme in every presentation I attended. However, it wasn’t the only innovation discussed.
One of the big innovations discussed at the conference was the 90% rule. For those of you who aren’t language teachers, the 90% rule is the idea that language teachers should be talking in the target language for at least 90% of class time, no matter what level the class is. This contrasts greatly with my own experience as a K12 language learner. Both my elementary school and my high school taught world languages in English, and as a result, my exposure to the target languages was quite limited. With the 90% rule, students are exposed to the target language for roughly 5 hours a week – which isn’t much, but it’s a lot better than nothing.
There seems to be a lot of pushback to the 90% rule. In conversation with other teachers attending the conference, I often heard the opinion that there was no point to teaching in the target language because the students wouldn’t understand. In one presentation I attended, “El 90%: Métodos y Actividades,” the presenters began with a straw poll of whether we thought that it was possible to teach 1st and 2nd year classes while speaking Spanish 90% of the time. The answer was a resounding “Impossible!” Keep in mind that this was not a straw poll of a general population of language teachers – this was an audience specifically composed of language teachers who had taken the time to come to this conference, to stay until the very end, and to attend a presentation specifically addressing not whether but how to teach mostly in the target language.
I was surprised by all of the pushback. In my school, we teach in the target language. In the school I worked at in Spain, we taught English in English. And of course, no ESL teacher is expected to speak the native language of all of her or his students, who may come from many different countries, and therefore the ESL teacher has no choice but to teach in English. Why so much disbelief about something that language teachers everywhere already do?
There seemed to be two main reasons for the pushback. The first was a lack of comfortableness with the target language on the part of the teacher. This wasn’t specifically addressed in any of the presentations I attended, but I suppose that the only way to fix that is to practice speaking the language until they’re comfortable with it. After all, you can’t expect your students to do something that you’re not doing.
The second reason for pushback was the belief that students won’t understand them if they speak the target language. I say “belief” because it is a belief, and not a given fact. There are many ways teachers make ourselves easier to understand. We speak slowly. We simplify our sentences. We use cognates whenever possible. We repeat. We gesticulate. We model. We draw on the board. We activate background knowledge. We stick with words our students are familiar with, and introduce new words or forms slowly. At the conference, I learned other methods, such as making powerpoints with pictures of the teacher doing an activity and a sentence describing it, or using realia found online and having a structured conversation around it. The list goes on. In fact, you’re probably already bored by the length of this paragraph.
It’s my belief that a teacher can make herself understandable to any student, even an absolute beginner. If a teacher can’t make herself understandable to their students while speaking the target language, in many cases either the teacher or the student hasn’t tried hard enough. And if it’s the latter, it’s the teacher’s job to engage the student until she or he starts trying harder.
I’m not trying to say that it’s easy to teach a class in the target language. There is a steep learning curve to learning in the target language, and teachers must be careful that their students don’t despair when they don’t understand something repeated for the third time. Sometimes minutes are wasted trying to explain something that’s not all that important for the students to know how to say in the target language. There are days when a student just can’t focus on understanding speech in the target language. However, I think both the teachers and the students will find that the pay-off is worth the extra effort.
