#23 - What Should I Teach In Levels 1 & 2? Units and Skills

Ever wondered: am I teaching the right things? How do I know that my units are getting the job done?
This episode mini-series on unit and skills to include in each level was inspired by a common question from the Practical Proficiency Network membership.

Here, we'll dive into years 1 & 2 of your world language program.

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Transcript

What's up, que lo que, e salut, 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 Libre 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 a 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 a community-based, target language-rich classroom rooted in the power of community and comprehensible input.

Let's go. Hey, welcome back, world language teachers. I'm so excited to be here with you for an episode of the Practical Proficiency Podcast.

My name's Devon, and I am the teacher, author, behind La Libre Language Learning, or La Libre Language Learning if you teach French. And today, we're gonna be continuing our series that we started before a very, very busy 2024 summer. If you were at Practical and Comprehensible, the annual free conference that I host, then you know that it was going down, and it was so much fun.

But we took a bit of a content rest as a team at La Libre, and now we are back into it. And I would love to continue this series with you because you gave me so much love and good notes about learning more about what it means to really dive into these proficiency levels, that we're gonna finish this series off with our very last one, Intermediate Low. Actual Intermediate Low, here we come.

Let's get started. So first of all, thank you so much. If you were a part of all the events that we had this summer or if you're watching later or listening later, you'll probably be a part of the amazing one that we have scheduled for you coming up this year.

It's all secret. It's all in the planning stages right now, so I can't reveal anything to you, but trust me, it's gonna be awesome. Now, with this fall, it's gonna mean that we have more time together, now that the summer is done and the conference is done for us to get back to some great podcast episodes and some blogs and all the good stuff that you love to get you moving along your proficiency journey in a way that I like to do at La Libre that is practical, sustainable, and most importantly, joyful for you.

And all of the new members that we welcomed into the Practical Proficiency Network, welcome in, it's so exciting to have you, but these are some of the things that we're talking about in the membership as well. Let's get into it. Today, we're talking about intermediate-low, which is actually very closely related to novice-high, so we're gonna start with a quick refresher on what does the reaching look like if you teach novice-high students, because many of them will also display a few teeny tiny little glimmers of intermediate-low in your class.

Here's what a novice-high student can generally do. At the novice-high level, you'll notice that students will be producing a good bit of well-structured sentences, especially high-frequency things that they hear a lot from you, that they read a lot, and that they have heard other native speakers use, so they have those structures in their heads and they're accessible for them. However, creative language only happens here and there, not very often, so them putting together their own sentences will not be a trait of novice-high.

They're also not gonna be in the detail stage. They will be very much so showing off that they have a more intuitive knowledge of how the language works by, whenever you're just talking about, oh, this is this feature of language, this is this grammar part, they'll be with you a lot quicker and say, oh yeah, I've seen that before, I know what that looks like, but don't expect them to be able to use it right away. A novice-high's bread and butter is still ready-to-go prepackaged phrases, meaning that it's stuff that they've memorized and that they've seen a lot and seen used a lot before, and so they know like, oh, this is the context where I'm talking to a shopkeeper.

Okay, what are my shopkeeper phrases? I know what those are, blah, and they spit them out. It's not gonna be something like a more natural conversation. As a reminder, for those who are actful novice-high and reaching into intermediate-low, this is how you know this is who you're working with.

These learners, they can survive in something like talking to a shopkeeper and they can get what they need, but that's about it. It will not be pretty. It will 100% not be pretty.

There will be lots of mistakes. There will be lots of, oh, I didn't understand you, and checking between the two parties and coming to mutual understandings will need to happen a lot, but they can do it. They can do a quick interaction of buying something or getting something that they need or asking a question, but they will often use anything at their fingertips from the L1 in order to get that done.

So they might accidentally fill some gaps with some false cognates or some L1, or they'll cause some misunderstandings by using the wrong word at the wrong time, that kind of deal. Like that's how you know you're working with novice-high. If you are still in the stage of like most people are, of course, most people are, let's put that caveat out there.

If you're still in the stage of, I'm Devin, I'm working to get more interpersonal activities into my curriculum. Don't worry, I feel you. Here's how you know that your students are novice-high is that when you're talking in class, they can pretty much understand you if you're talking about everyday topics and words that you've already taught them, they can follow you, they'll be good.

Most of the time, they won't really be able to respond to you that much though, unless your class is very heavy on rejoinders or you've given them some of those phrases to use. Novice-highs will be able to follow you, but they won't be able to join in too much, like just enough so that you know that they're still hanging on. There will also be a lot of, in novice-high, you'll see some detailed descriptions and they'll be able to compare, they'll be able to evaluate and make a little bit of connections, and they'll start being able to justify opinions.

They'll just be able to start doing that. So this is where we're starting with novice-high. Let's jump into and start talking about what is intermediate low happening? Then what do we got going on here? Okay, so we know where novice-highs are coming from.

And to give you an idea, this might not necessarily be your program, but most of the time, an appropriate place for novice-highs is at the end of a very well-developed year one curriculum. Meaning like, oh, they've had two years maybe in a middle school program, now they're at your high school program. They're probably novice-highs at that point, which is great.

And they may just have some communicative gaps, like maybe they haven't had enough presentational opportunities or enough interpersonal opportunities. But when you give them stuff, they can read it pretty fluently. And when they are listening to you in class or a native speaker in class, talk about a very familiar topic that they already know about.

Like if you're doing a home unit and they're talking about their home, the kids can follow what's going on. Students, I should say. That's how you know they're novice-high.

However, if you are in a level two or level three class, this does get a little bit trickier because in level two and level three, you will still have a lot of novice-high learners. People hang out at novice-high for a long time in their language acquisition journey. That's very normal.

So as a curriculum consultant, when I go in to work with individual teachers or school districts, one of the most common things I see is that their program is too difficult at the lower levels and then too easy in the middle and then again, too difficult at the end. There's this weird mismatch of like, oh, okay, we're gonna rush, rush, rush, rush, rush through all this important foundational beginner stuff and then because they rush through that beginner stuff, they think, oh, my students must be at this higher level because we've done all this vocabulary, we've jammed all these words into their head. Doesn't work that way.

So you might get to a level two program and think like, oh, they're ready to start talking about more advanced language features. Like let's teach them past tense and they'll be ready to use it. It'll be so exciting because we did all this vocabulary foundation stuff in level one.

No, that's a really common structure but it doesn't actually work that way. What your students really do need is they need a combination of both in both years. So imagine that the, we're starting to get onto a tangent here, so we'll keep this short but imagine that this is for your curriculum's benefit.

If you have a student who's in level one and you spend all of your time teaching them vocabulary, like here's all these different words that you can use but they have no structure, like no sentence pieces to get them to those, oh, I can use these phrases now. Like if they know all the parts of a house, they know all their family members and they know every room in the school building, cool. But if they don't know how to say I have, I use, I want, I think, I feel, and guess what? All of those vocabulary words, those isolated terms, they can't use them.

Like you need to give them the functional chunks in order for them to actually have those, that vocab accessible to them. So that happens in level one very often in curriculums where it's just vocab, vocab, vocab, vocab, vocab. Content words, here's a bunch of nouns, good luck.

Here's some adjectives, make sure they agree, have fun. And then you put them in level two and you're like, okay, we're gonna do a little bit more vocab but what we're really gonna focus in on is how do all these verbs work? What are tenses? And you can't start talking about tenses if your students aren't even comfortable in present tense yet. So there's a lot of difficulty in identifying where students are actually at in their progression because we have this very disjointed, disconnected view of how to give our students words to use or words to keep in their heads.

Go with the natural flow of language. What are the high frequency context-based functional chunks that you can give them so that they can start using language as quickly as their brains will allow in the acquisition phase? It's a bunch of fancy talk for, give them whole sentences, give them whole phrases that they can use. Like instead of just teaching them the places around town, make sure that anytime that you're teaching them places around town that it's like, I go to this place or I want to go to this place or I will be going to this place or do you want to go to this place? Then they can actually use those phrases because just the word place, like if you're talking about library, biblioteca is not gonna help them in conversation if they don't know how to say donde esta or quieres ir conmigo, you know? And with all of that in mind, you might be thinking, well, my level twos and my level threes are like they know a lot of vocabulary, but they are not really able to write a lot of sentences.

That's probably the missing piece. So you don't need to reteach the vocabulary. What you can do is just focus in on those important quality chunks of contextualized language, those phrases that are all together and ready for them to use.

Golden, absolutely golden. And then you'll be able to see, oh, these are where my students are actually at. Because what happens when those are missing is that many people think that because, I usually see two things.

When they get to level two or level three, they think, well, my students know how to use complex grammar because we've done some past tense or we've done some conjunctions or done this, that, or the other. So that must move them up the proficiency mark, right? Well, can they use them? Is this helping them in their communicative goals? Meaning like if you ask them some questions using those tenses, would they be able to respond to you? It doesn't have to be like a full complete sentence, but do they understand and are they able to respond to you? That's how you know where your students are actually at. If you only, if you're relying like strictly on these vocabulary driven lists and terms and things like that, then you're really gonna be stuck in novice mid for a while and you're also gonna keep your kids not really able to move into novice high with stuff like that.

Cool, so now you've got under your belt actually some really great stuff here about here's how you can improve some vocabulary lists and the things that you're teaching in class so that your students can move up to novice high a little bit faster. Now let's dive right into intermediate low. So with intermediate low, now you have a nice baseline of okay, this is what students can actually do at novice high.

So intermediate low hopefully won't be as jarring when we start going into it. All of that backstory is because intermediate low is the most misunderstood level I would say when it comes to teaching language. Intermediate low is all over the map with programs.

I see it as like, oh, by the end of level two, my kids will start reaching into intermediate low. Whoa, slow down. Or my kids will be in intermediate low by the end of level three, or like, hey, I want my kids to be by the time they're in the AP course, like maybe they should be intermediate mid.

Whoa, we need to talk about this. So let's figure out exactly what intermediate low is and what it looks like so that you can better adjust the things that you're doing in those foundational years of one, two, and three if you're in a high school program, which is the most common for world language in the US. Or if you are doing a program that many of my Practical Proficiency Network members are working on, they're doing things like, oh, I teach kindergarten, I teach a sixth grade exploratory class and I have middle school, or I have fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade.

So what do those classes look like? If you understand the levels, it's a lot easier to create your program. So let's get into the features of intermediate low. In intermediate low, something really important to note, the biggest, biggest feature is that intermediate low, this is the dawn of creative language for your students.

Like, we get to move past all of the, I need to rely on memorized things, I need to say exactly the same things what my teacher has been saying to me, or exactly what I saw on this vocab list, or what's in the textbook, or what's on this video. They start being able to put things together in their own creative way. Really cool, right? That is the huge mark of intermediate low.

What you will also see in intermediate low is that this is where we start getting into depth, description, multi-layered. So it's not so much about the length of how long your student can talk about a topic, it's more that now when you talk about a topic, like say you ask them what's their favorite book, instead of just saying Hunger Games, they're gonna say, I love Hunger Games. Hunger Games is so important to me.

Hunger Games is my favorite book because it's exciting. So it's not so much that they've started to no longer talk about things that are in the novice realm of, oh, me, me, me, my world, the things around me, it's that instead of saying, I like Hunger Games because it's nice, they're gonna start saying things like, Hunger Games is exciting, Hunger Games is a great book, I adore the author, they'll be able to take a topic and boom, really expand it, explode it out. That's how you know they're intermediate low when you ask them a question or you give them a prompt.

They can also now at intermediate low, they have access to complex descriptions. This is really exciting. This is the part in their career where students will be able to talk about something and make you feel something with the way that they speak.

So they'll be able to create moods, they'll be able to create descriptions that really put you in a place. Like instead of just saying, I was with my grandfather, it was cold, they'll be able to say, it was freezing outside, I was with my grandfather who I love so much, like it was warm and cozy even though it was cold. They'll be able to say things like that.

There will be mistakes, but it will be creative language and you will feel things when you read what they're writing. They will also start to get precise. In precision, that means they'll be able to start describing things with more detail so that you can really tell like one from the other.

For example, if they're at a, if they're buying, let's say jewelry, if they're buying jewelry and they're looking for like I want a ring that is really big or shiny or loud or anything like that or I want something that looks more like this other taste. Maybe they would say something like I want a ring that is small, something that matches my outfit. Like they'd be able to say a couple things like that.

There would be errors, it would sound like I want a ring small, I want a ring matches my outfit. So like there will be errors, it will be a little bit disjointed, but it will be very descriptive. The cool thing about this too is that they can also follow almost everything that you say in class if you're keeping it to a level that is very everyday, very much so language for your age group and language that they've already seen and worked with except for the normal amount of new stuff.

We always say that a good ratio is 70-30. 70% should be stuff that they already know or can figure out and 30% could be some new stuff. However, you will find that at intermediate low they really wanna do storytelling.

Like this is the emerging part of intermediate low and they want to explore this. However, it's not gonna be something they're good at, but they'll want to start telling some stories. And this is where you're gonna find the area of intermediate low that's actually really interesting.

One of the easiest tells that your student is at an intermediate low is that they are all of the sudden very aware of language. They are very aware of what they're reading. They're analyzing the structure of things that they're reading.

And they're also saying to themselves, I know what I want to say, but I just don't have access to it yet. Like they're so aware of their own language and they start to get in their own heads about like, dang, there's this sentence I wanna be able to write, but I know that I don't have this word, this word and this word. These parts are here, but the other three sections I'm trying to do are missing.

Very, very self-aware. That's how you know that your students are intermediate. This doesn't really happen at novice because they're just, they're just drowning and trying to survive all the time.

And you're like doggie paddling up to the surface. Like, I'm saying things, but intermediate low there, instead of just swimming all the time, they're starting to look around and be like, I wanna go there. Let's go there.

I wanna do this with my language. I see how cool it is to be able to describe things with detail. Let's do that.

I wanna go there. How do we do this? What is this type of adjective? Like you'll start to see them getting into the nitty gritty of language, which is so cool. This is the appropriate time for you to dive into grammar.

It really is. This is where they will actually be equipped for the toolkit that they'll be like, oh, cool, that's how you do subjunctive? Ready, let's do it. You'll have to spend a couple years on it, but they'll be ready for it at intermediate low.

They're not ready for it before that. And honestly, a lot of the grammar, the instruction that often happens in levels one through three is they're learning how to create forms, but they're not really able to use it in communicative settings anyways because their lexical bank is just not there yet. Like it's still getting filled with content words and prepackaged ready to use phrases.

So try instead if you can, if you have freedom to do this, do all of your, okay, I'm gonna teach you all the phrases that you need to communicate in the first beginning stages of your program. And then once your students start to show that curiosity, that, ooh, how do you do this? Or I wanna say more of this, or I wanna expand and do some stories or like say more stuff about my day. Like Profe, tell me how, how, how, how.

When you start getting those questions, that's when you know that you're ready to be like, all right, cool, solid. Let's go into all this grammar stuff. Let's give you all the deets.

Let's give you everything that you need to be able to do that. I would also say too that you know that your students are intermediate low when they can start forming their own questions and they can repair any kind of issues of miscommunications. So maybe they use the wrong word and they're self-aware enough to be like, all right, ooh, let me shake that off and try a new word, intermediate low.

And all of this too is just the emerging skills of intermediate low and it expands and grows in intermediate mid. Now, let's do a quick gut check on all the things that we've talked about so far, because this is why intermediate low is such a misunderstood level. With all of these things that intermediate lows are starting to do or capable of doing, are your expectations in the right place in your program? One of the most common mistakes that I see and I know that my other colleagues see in their programs and things that my members are struggling with in their own programs when we look at them together to do curriculum work is that the expectations are not appropriate for where your students actually are at and what they can do.

So it means that we're moving that beginner stuff too fast and then we do this weird stall in the middle for levels two and three. And then we all of a sudden expect in level three, okay, you're ready now, you should be intermediate low by now and be able to do all of these things that we just talked about. But think about your average level three class.

Is that really where they're at? Can they understand everything that you're saying to them if it's at a student appropriate level? Are they starting to do more varied and fluid descriptions of things? Can they give you multiple points of view on something? Can they identify their errors and be self-aware enough to know, ooh, these are the pieces of language that I'm ready to dive into more? Are they really at that stage? That's how you will know these are the intermediate low things that I need to focus on. I would say that for most people, the further back that you can put the expectation for intermediate low, the better, because it's okay to let your students hang out in novice high for a while, as long as the program is serving them well at that stage. So knowing deeply what an intermediate low learner really can and cannot do is golden for your program, because when the expectations are at the right level, you will also feel great about what you're doing and not feel all the time like, why can my students not understand what I'm saying? Or why can't they write these two paragraph length discourses that they're expected to on this final? They might not be there yet.

Or how come my students can't do this type of writing without any type of support or sentence starters when they should be able to do that at insert level here for what your expectation is. Check and see, can your students do the other things in the intermediate low description that I just gave you from the actual 2024 performance indicators and see, oh, I don't know, maybe we're not there yet. A lot of these things that we're talking about are some of the key pieces that the, oh, what's the word, I just lost it.

Oh, AP, that the AP exam is looking for. Like those of you who teach AP, you know, oh, yeah, that's a lot of the stuff that they're looking for. Being able to make comparisons and being able to fluidly hang out in a conversation or at least interpret a document that talks about societal issues and multiple points of view.

Yeah, that's like where we're hanging out for intermediate low to mid. And that's a very appropriate place for that to be in your curriculum because by then your students should have had at least five years of language instruction if they're an AP. So keep that in mind when you're thinking about what levels your students will be at and what your students can do in class.

Thanks so much for hanging out with me for what an intermediate low student can do as well as ways that you can shift your approach in your program to better match where your students are at. And I will see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for being here.

Bye for now.