Tea with BVP - Episode 4

As an alternative to assignment 3, tech assessment at your school, I decided to listen to a podcast on second language acquisition, Tea with BVP. The podcast is run by professors at Michigan State University, and they describe their podcast as “car talk meets second language acquisition.” My topic of choice was Episode 4: Should we get rid of grades for language learning? This topic is of particular interest to me. I struggle with helping my students to find a balance between earning points towards grades and learning to gain proficiency.

I would support doing away with grades for a norm-standard approach. I realize that our educational system would have to change from the top down; colleges and universities would have to stop requiring grades for entrance and then it might trickle down to high school and then middle school. Early elementary school already has a standards based approach, as opposed to assigning letter grades. We could learn a lot from following such a model.

Bill VanPatten, aka BVP, runs the podcast. He wonders whether we are doing one thing and saying another in our classes; whether we encourage practical skill building, but yet put so much emphasis on objective grammar and vocabulary assessments and subsequently grades.

Bill VanPatten promotes using the ACTFL can-do statements to evaluate proficiency, even assigning point values to each statement in a 2-1-0 format, “2” indicating can do with ease, “1” indicating completion with some difficulty, and “0” indicating no proficiency. He also wrote an article on this topic along with his colleague, Walter Hopkins, in the Fall 2015 edition of Clear News, a publication of Michigan State University. The ACTFL-published can-do statements reflect general proficiency guidelines and levels. He created his own statements, based on ACTFL’s guidelines, in an effort to create doable classroom assessment tasks. The statements should include topics and abilities that form part of a larger picture of what it means to be at a certain level of proficiency. Students self-assess first and then practice. When it’s time for a class assessment, they record themselves completing the task and send their instructor the recording for a 2-1-0 scale grade.

This approach seems very doable for me as a teacher, and would promote proficiency as a goal instead of just test results. I feel that this approach would encourage more intrinsic motivation and also address ACTFL’s 5^th standard of community, encouraging language use outside of the classroom and for life-long learning.