#7 - Element 5: Output is Well-Timed and Meaningful | 10 Elements of Proficiency-Oriented World Language Instruction

Today's element is all about the speaking and the signing: how to make sure we're doing the right speaking activities at the right time.

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Kelloke Prophet Yamvin you. We are here for another episode of the Practical Proficiency podcast, and today's episode is element number five in our ten elements of world language proficiency instruction series. Are you ready for this one? This one's big news. We're talking all about output. Output is a big, big one in output. We need to address this very important word, and that is output is well timed. The other word that we're going to talk about a lot today is that output is meaningful. So here is the focus of our episode today. We are looking to make everything that we do in our classrooms focused around meaningful opportunities for our students to use the language in context. So anytime that you're asking students to do this, it's for a specific reason, it's for a purpose, and it's only for meaning. Here's the golden rule with this. When you're working with output, you are providing meaningful opportunities for output only after tons and tons of input. Students always have a scaffolding system as well that is appropriate for their proficiency level. This is a big one that usually gets left out. So I'm hoping that after today's episode, it gets added in to everything that you're doing from now on with this one, here are some ways that you can make this happen. How do you know if your output is well timed? Well, here's a quick check. First of all, it is valid for you to wait a certain amount of time, especially with level ones. And for every other student that you teach, keep this golden rule in mind. You need to wait until 70% of your students can understand and kind of use 70% of whatever you're trying to teach them. So whatever they're trying to acquire in class, make sure that you ask them to try something out and that about 70% of them can do it before you ask them to produce anything. You also need to be comfortable waiting until students show you that they are ready to start doing speaking exercises. Unless you're working with highly controlled, memorized language, like in a level one course where it is appropriate to start doing some speaking for more reasons than just the research, and we can talk about that at another time. You would only want to use highly controlled memorized language with students who don't have a lot of language in their heads yet. But with every speaking exercise, you're comfortable waiting for students to show you when they are ready to speak. They will show you when they're ready to speak with that 70%. Okay. They kind of understand what's going on and they're kind of able to replicate the speech that they're hearing. That's a good sign that you're ready for some output. It will start to naturally occur in fits and starts, bits and pieces, and it will certainly not be linear. It will be more cyclical in nature. Honestly, every time that you introduce new material, it will go through a cycle. The other thing that you can do to make sure that your output is both well timed and meaningful is that you're providing sentence starters for them. In the world of language acquisition, everybody always understands far more than they can actually produce. So you want to give students a chance to demonstrate what they understand by giving them something to hold on to, something to safely work with, some appropriate scaffolding. Give them sentence starters. So they are probably working with a lot of content words, things like nouns, like maybe you're teaching clothing and they know the word for sweater. They've heard you say it a million times. They know the word for hat, they've heard you say it a million times, but they don't remember the word for I'm wearing or how to put it together with I'm wearing today or I want to wear. That can be harder, especially if you are new to working with high frequency structures. And honestly, just for language learners in general, those are tougher phrases. The ten new content words that you're teaching in that unit, those will be more readily available to them in their dictionary because it's just one. Their lexical dictionary, I should say. Their mental Lexicon is the official term that they'll be more readily able to spout off simple, one offhanded words in the novice low, novice mid range. And it takes a while for sentence formation to happen. So help them with the sentence formation. Give them sentence starters so that they can start to see what sentences look like. And then when it comes time for assessments, be aware of the performance indicators for your country. I'm working out of the american context, so we use actful, and the performance indicators for us are that at novice low and at novice mid, like in most of our level one and level two courses, students are hanging out at fits and spurts of language. They're doing words here and there. They're doing simple memorized phrases and sentences, and they're not at all congruent or fluent ideas. They're little things here and there. And they need your language. They need that scaffolding in order to produce anything themselves. They will continually repeat the stuff that you say in order to get their phrases out. So give them that. Once they get to novice high, and when they're starting to creep into intermediate low, then you can adjust that scaffolding and you can adjust those sentence starters to push them further into the higher level that you want. Your sentence starters will look different at that level. So let's review all of the things that help to make your output and by output as a review. Output is anything that your students use to express themselves in your target language. Anything that they sign, anything that they say, anything that they write. Let's make sure that it's well timed and meaningful. Timing is everything with output. It takes time for your students to be ready for this. However, there are some appropriate times where you might want to give them some help in order to just boost their confidence and help them feel welcome in a world language setting with simple little I call them trinket phrases like my name is and hello and things like that. They want to be able to say that in a level one class, and we know that it's just memorized, it's fine, it's not proficiency, but it makes them motivated and makes them feel good and makes them want to continue on the learning path. And they get so excited about what they can say that they immediately go to the lunchroom and talk to their favorite teacher and say, like Mayamo s Daenerys and of course they said it wrong, but it doesn't matter. Like their favorite teacher is still impressed and that's what keeps them excited about your class and that's what will get them ready and motivated for the hard stuff that's going to come up later? So no, it's not technically research or research based, I should say. But those little trinkets, little gems of language for level ones. Yeah, it's helpful for them. It's helpful for their spirit, it's helpful for their motivation. Can you imagine teaching a whole level one class where even though the research on second language acquisition technically says that you shouldn't make them speak at all, could you imagine teaching an entire level one class where they don't speak in high school? That would be a really hard sell. It would be a really hard sell. So we have to keep in mind the practical constraints of the environment that we're teaching in. So in every other level, though, I would tell you that your output should be slow and steady, well timed and meaningful. That is. The one tiny exception is that there's a few phrases at the beginning of the year like just give it to them for a spanish one, they're going to want to show off to their friends and it really helps get buy in for your class. But most of the other times, and whenever you're teaching other units in Spanish one and French one and German one and all that, ease off on the output. Make sure that it's well timed and that most importantly, it is meaningful for levels two, three, four and five. Or if you are teaching in another context, maybe like elementary, where the level names are different, you want to make sure that your sentence starters are appropriate for that level. That was an important thing that we talked about. And as a reminder, the golden rule to help you know if your output is well timed and meaningful is this. If 70% of your students understand what's going on and what you're saying, and 70% of them can kind of use 70% of that sentence in some sort of output, then they're ready. They're ready for some output. That's how you can tell. Thank you so much for being here for this episode, and I'm excited to hear about all of your output opportunities. Now, if you're looking to get some good karmic give back and to brighten your own day, then be sure to rate this podcast if it helped you and to share it with a colleague because we are all looking to make this journey a little bit easier together and we would love to have them as a part of our libre community. So thank you very much for sharing a little bit of your time with me today, and I will see you on the next episode where we dive into element number six. I'll see you then over.