#15 - Novice Mid: What Levels Are My Students? ACTFL Levels Deep Dive

We're continuing this series on the new 2024 ACTFL guidelines. This answers a common question I get - what level should my students be in and how do I know that?  Let's talk about what Novice Mid actually looks like and what it means for your world language program.

Check the ACTFL 2024 Proficiency Guidelines here 

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What's up? Ken, OK, a salute world language teachers. Welcome to the practical proficiency podcast, where we make the transition to proficiency oriented instruction in your world language class in a way that works for you your unique context and teaching style and doesn't sacrifice your well being along the way. I'm your host, Devon Gunning the teacher, author conference, host, curriculum creator and consultant behind la liber language learning. This podcast is for the creative world language teacher like you who's ready to ditch the overwhelming pressure of switching to acquisition driven instruction and CI overnight, you're ready to discover how using more target language in class can actually bring you and your students more joy, instead of adding to your plate with practical, authentic and down to earth strategies that don't require reinventing the wheel or more training. We'll work together towards the magic of the community based target language rich classroom rooted in the power of community and comprehensible input. Let's go. Welcome back, y'all. We are here talking about the new proficiency guidelines for 2024 and how we can use these to better support by better understanding our students and understanding and celebrating where they are at today's episode, we left off with novice low, so now we're jumping into novice mid. And what it means for this is where, usually you know what, let's go ahead and answer this question too, because this happens a lot, where with not only my work with teachers and being an instructional coach, I'm also a curriculum consultant. So I get this from both sides very often. With department heads and district leaders, they want to know, like, what, what proficiency group should I be representing in each level? As well as teachers who have those students that are kind of a mixed bag in, like, their level one and their level two, and they want to know what, what should this really look like? Here's the here's the short answer for you. It is complicated, because you are going to have a mixed bag of students no matter what, but at the end of the day, it's most common and most appropriate to have at the end of a level one course in high school, novice mids. So that's what we're talking about today. If you're in the middle school level, it will take you almost twice the amount of time to get through the same amount of material that a level one course will get. So if you have something like an a, like a French one A and A French 1b course, like your students will be novice mid by the end of your French 1b course, or like in the second year of you working with them, that's pretty common. If you are a fairly confident practitioner of proficiency oriented instruction, you can get them there faster, for sure, but your your middle schoolers will probably hit novice mid like at the end of a second year with you in elementary it's definitely a different realm. It's not my area of expertise, but it is a different realm. And I you know those programs don't see their students as often, but it's all about seat time. It's all about how often you see your students. So I hope that those time frames, and you know, talking about like years time frames, will help you with that as well, but I'm going to defer to an elementary expert on that one. That's not my area of expertise, but let's get into what your novice mid learners will be able to do, and for my elementary teachers that will probably help you to see where that where they will where they will fall on your spectrum of what your classes look like, because those levels are different, right? Like you label your classes more like fourth grade French, fifth grade Chinese, sixth grade Russian, that kind of thing. So let's get into this. Here. We left off with novice low and what it looks like to kind of transition to novice mid. Here's what actful In 2024 says is one of the most important things about novice mid. And you know, as a disclaimer, this is complete copyright of actful, and we are just using this to make sure that you have high quality programs that are based off of these performance indicators for you to teach better, create better programs. Support your people, better, all that good stuff. So coming from ACT full, this is what we've got with novice mid. With novice mid, the thing that I pulled out that was the most important for me. And of course, you can find these performance these new performance indicators from 2024 linked below in the show. Show notes as well, to refer to that the most important thing for novice mid is the the jump that you'll see from novice load to novice mid is that they're able to start handling some social interactions and some social tasks. Now they're not going to be crazy social tasks. They're certainly going to be basic social communication, and they will be using what actful likes to call stock phrases, which is really, really helpful. It's that exactly what we talked about in the previous episode of that ready. I call it ready to go packaged phrases. So students are this is a nice way to remember that students at this level, even at novice mid they are not making their own language that is not in the brain of a novice mid learner. They are recycling. They are taking anything pre packaged and they are putting it back out in the world. That is what they have available to them. So the more that you can give them those, you know, those frozen burritos, that they can just pop in the microwave and just go, go, go for lunch. They are not ready to create. They're not ready to cook at all. You need to give them those, those frozen burritos, those pre packaged phrases, so if you give them a couple good frozen burritos, they'll be ready to use them in the appropriate situation. For sure, there's going to be a lot of mess ups, though. There's going to be a lot of slip ups. There's going to be some kind of socio cultural understanding of a little bit of interplay. They'll be able to do, you know, basic turn taking. They'll be able to, quote, unquote, read the room, which is my own phrase, but not much more than that, they will, they will have a basic understanding of cultural awareness, but just enough for them to survive. They will not be thriving at this stage. They will also be relying heavily on their partner for communication, meaning that they need you as the language parent in order to get anything done, in order to make any kind of communicative progress, which means for you as the teacher, something important to note about your novice mid students. And again, this is many of your students that are at the end of your of your insert language here, your German one program, or in middle school at the end of your like year two German program. These students, whenever you put them in partners together, they still need a lot of scaffolding, and they would benefit a great deal anytime that you could sit down and have conversations and do interpersonal activities with them, because they're not going to be able to get any cues from their partner right, because both of them are on the same level, so they're going to play to each other's level, and Those conversations are going to be rough, really, really rough. They will be able to kind of bounce off one idea off each other, but that will be it. Some things that they can do in just concrete terms, for your novice mids to know where they're at is they will be very familiar with familiar questions about everyday topics. So if you are working with anything about daily routines, places they often go, immediate interests, school or family life or their friends, they will be ready to answer. The answer will not be native, like the answer will be rote. It will be disjointed, and it will have hesitation to it, and they may even rely on some lists at some points in order to get the job done, but they will be able to answer you as long as it's language they've seen before. This is not the era of them. You know, working through new contexts, they will struggle with interpersonal communication, but if you give them simple and rehearsed questions about everyday life and environment, and if you allow them to have time and pauses, they can, they can do some things with it for sure, and they're gonna, they're gonna mimic you, mimic you, mimic you. That is the mark of a novice myth. Now, of course, if you give them simple language that they can read, they'll do beautifully with that. Novice mids are at the point where they're like, Okay, I'm ready to absorb language. They're still very spongy. So especially if you're working with the high frequency side of life, like I have here, the proficiency guidelines for apple here for for speaking, and they're for novices, they're they're quite skilled with high frequency words and highly rehearsed expressions. So give them those high frequency words, the high frequency structures, they'll be able to navigate them very well, especially in immediate tenses. You're talking about present tense or like, immediate future or like just happened past, they can do that. And it has to be, you know, just for a few subject pronouns, I certainly found that the ones that you use the most in class, like I did this, you did this, she did this, they can handle that. But as soon as you start getting into we or they or y'all, that's. Things get weird for them. So remember that part, especially when you start to move into other tenses with the novice mitts. You don't need to shy away from it, but they are gonna get tripped up by you using plurals for sure. And something important to note as well for our novices is that when it comes to presentational mode, is be patient. There are many students who might be in novice mid in their heads, but because they're still in a new language environment, will not be able to display that. Also, I would say something important to keep in mind at this stage is that there's so much going on. Oh my god. Like you know what it is, in a level one class, there's so much newness, there's so much going on, that your students may be able to do far more than they think they can, and there's a huge confidence barrier. So you may think that your students are at novice low when and they may think that they're at novice low, but what's really happening is that they are terrified. They are terrified to make a mistake in front of you and their peers. So remember that Be compassionate when it comes to being in a new environment and trying to speak a new language in front of somebody. It's terrifying, even if you know what you're doing. I mean, it happened to me while I was in Austin just a few weeks ago. I mean, I speak Spanish, and you still get that like in your throat of like, Man, I hope I don't make a mistake. So remember and be compassionate for what it feels like to be a student, even though you know that they know it and you know that they can do it, keep in mind how they are feeling, because that will definitely impact how you perceive what they're able to do. Okay, so that is what we've got for novice mid. And I'm really excited to get into novice high, because y'all this is where you know world language teachers spend the most time. So get ready for novice high. I will see you for that episode. Bye, for now. Bye.