Practical Proficiency Podcast
Where world language teachers gather to transition to proficiency oriented instruction through comprehensible input. All through practical, real-life, teacher-friendly ideas that make teaching language more joyful! Hosted by Devon of La Libre Language Learning.
Practical Proficiency Podcast
3 Strategies to Make Grammar Your Friend, Not Your Boss - Proficiency-Based Grammar Instruction
The proper role of grammar in proficiency-oriented instruction requires a mindset shift from traditional approaches to one that aligns with what research tells us about language acquisition.
Watch the episode on youtube here: https://youtu.be/zo1ys4aCh5A
• Grammar isn't driving your language program—it has the snacks while you decide the direction based on student proficiency levels and goals
• Understanding grammar does not lead to acquisition, but helps make existing language more accurate
• Pop-up grammar offers quick, contextual explanations when students notice patterns without extensive practice or assessment
• Inductive grammar engages students in discovering patterns themselves, which improves retention and understanding
• A three-week grammar bootcamp provides a transition strategy for teachers in grammar-heavy departments
• Treating grammar as functional chunks (like teaching "je voudrais" instead of the entire conditional tense) works well until intermediate levels
• Accuracy becomes more important in years 3-4 when students have enough language to refine
• Canadian research shows input-only programs still need some accuracy focus at the right time
Submit your questions about proficiency, grammar, or creating communicative classroom environments through this link: https://airtable.com/appOp9IY7Ah77oYup/pagpRzuEqAVZgBnrk/form
and I'll answer them on the show!
Check out the ACTFL Levels Series episodes here:
Novice Low: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2318898/episodes/15045273
Novice Mid: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2318898/episodes/15045294
Novice High: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2318898/episodes/15152805
Intermediate Low: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2318898/episodes/15827515
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Submit your questions about proficiency, grammar, or creating communicative classroom environments through this link: https://airtable.com/appOp9IY7Ah77oYup/pagpRzuEqAVZgBnrk/form
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What's up? Que lo que Et 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 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 a community-based, target language-rich classroom rooted in the power of community and comprehensible input. Let's go. I'm so excited to hang out with you today because we're starting to answer some of your really great learner listener questions. So this is a series where folks have been submitting questions who are listening to the podcast and looking for some help on proficiency oriented instruction, just like you, and many of the questions came to be around the entire subject of grammar and what is the role of grammar in a more proficiency-oriented model for your students, when using more target language in class Like, where does this fit in? Because there is a lot of conflicting opinions, I would say, rather than information. So today let's talk about your grammar options, what it can look like in your program and what the transition and the practical approach is, rather than the all or nothing approach. So I will preface this by saying that this is actually the most common topic that I get hired to teach in school districts. So if you are struggling with the role of grammar in your own program, or if you know your district could use some love on this topic, this is something that I teach about a lot and would love to come visit your school about. But let's get into three options that you have for your instructional strategy when working with grammar and making it fit in its right place in your proficiency-oriented program. This what we're going to be looking at today.
Speaker 1:If you're watching via video for the video version of the podcast, you're going to see a sampling of some slides for a workshop that we did together for my PD program, the Practical Proficiency Network, because, again, this is a really important part of understanding how to make proficiency-oriented instruction work for you instead of working so hard for proficiency. So this is a whole module within the Practical Proficiency Network and you're going to see a little bit of some examples here. So in this module of instructional strategy, we were talking with members about what is the role of grammar. That's one of the lessons here, and you can see some of the other sections that we talk about as well, including reading and things like that. So let's talk about getting practical here, and there's this great article that's honestly kind of old now it's like over a decade from Alyssa Villarreal. All about it's not really either, or when talking about grammar. And, as a reminder, the role of grammar has now been established in the main guiding ACTFL principles as well, and one of the things that ACTFL says I think it's number nine in their guiding principles is talking about the role of grammar as well, and the role of grammar is presented in ACTFL as well.
Speaker 1:Grammar is a concept in context and it talks about more in depth the role of grammar in your program and how it's less about grammar being your program and more about grammar being a stepping stool or even just a piece of the toolkit that your students have access to, to create more original and hopefully more accurate language, although that's not the focus of most of the proficiency levels we're working with. So here's what this article says, going back to that even before those guidelines got updated I think it's from like 2012 or 2013. So this is not a new idea. But Alyssa says here in this article published in the Language Educator that quote it does not mean that we abandoned grammar or accuracy unquote for context. We're talking about a proficiency program Back to the quote but rather that we align it to the proficiency guidelines. So that's what we're going for here. What does that really mean for us?
Speaker 1:In the Practical Proficiency Network and on this podcast, you will hear me talk a lot about the role of grammar, and this is the way I like to envision. It is that in the past, if the journey that we're going on with our students is a vehicle and you're going on a fun road trip, it has been perceived in the past that grammar was the one driving the car, that it was going to direct you on where you should go next. And, as clarification, we should talk about the fact that what I mean by grammar in this sense is the you know the lay person traditional view of grammar, which is the rules of language and how it's constructed and how it works and interacts with each other, mostly based on form. But the SLA version of grammar is actually different. In SLA, in second language acquisition, grammar refers to all of the elements of form, feature and function of a language. So it's far more complex than we could boil down into what's in a textbook.
Speaker 1:There's that famous saying from BVP Bill Van Patten that what's on page whatever of the textbook what page 42, is not what ends up in your head. So we need to reprioritize grammar and make sure that grammar is in its proper place in your program. So grammar is not actually the one who's driving this car. You're the one driving. You decide where things are going in your program and the things that are your roadmap are things like what level are your students, what kind of input do they need in order to progress and what are your proficiency goals for that particular unit. So grammar has got the snacks. It's not the one driving. Grammar will support your goals, but it's not the goal.
Speaker 1:Understanding more about grammar does not lead. We have found in research, in over 50 years of research, that grammar does not lead to being able to use it in context in communicative situations. To further expand on that, we're really saying the idea here that in the world of language instruction, language acquisition, all of that that understanding and studying more about different form and features and linguistic structures does not actually help us access them when it's time to talk or read or write. It helps us make those things more accurate, but it doesn't actually put those things in our heads. So we need to make sure that we're using grammar in its proper place.
Speaker 1:Now, many of you already know that. Some of you it might be a new idea to you. So let's talk about the practical side of this, which is well, what do you do then? How does this work? Because obviously, this is still an important part of many programs, or so many people would it be trying to get away from it, away from grammar, being in the driver's seat? So I have for you some ideas that help to put this whole thing into a transition mode instead of an all or nothing piece, because that's really not going to help. He's going to create a lot of stress for you and your students.
Speaker 1:Here we go no matter what level your students are, they will benefit from these three strategies I'm going to show you today, which is number one pop-up grammar. Number two inductive grammar. Number three a three-week bootcamp, which is a really great transition method, especially if you're working in a department where not everybody is on the same page about whether grammar is driving or whether grammar has the snacks. So if you're in a program like that, this particular one will really help you a lot. And I'm going to also give you a bonus one here call it like number four which is that for many proficiency-oriented teachers, what this really looks like is that the most crucial grammar structures that, instead of trying to deconstruct them, we just show students what they are in living, breathing language and make sure that they know that these are the most important functional chunks that you need to be able to communicate with other people. So that's going to be more of a mindset shift overall rather than a specific tactic. So let's talk about our first one. Number one pop-up grammar. Who doesn't love a good pop-up? Now for pop-up grammar. This is a common method used inside of the proficiency community, especially in the CI community, because they're the ones who popularize this.
Speaker 1:But the idea of pop-up grammar is this it's when you're using a specific construction in class and it's happening a lot, let's say we'll go with something easy like the past tense. So let's say you're using the past tense a lot to tell your students a fun story about something that happened to you last weekend and you're using a lot of those context heavy words like yesterday or last night and things like that. But your students are. They're following your story. When you say things like I went to the store but I forgot my grocery list. So you're saying I went, I forgot, I went back to my house those things. I went, I forgot and I returned back to my house, those three verbs are going to have some sort of simple past tense construction. If you're in romance language, it's going to be like the preterite. So with that in mind, if your students are saying wow, that really looks like I mean I remember that word go, but it looks really different In Spanish, it looks really different In French, it looks exactly the same, but it's got a bunch of funky words in front of it.
Speaker 1:So if you're saying something like je suis allée in French, your students might be like hey, I understand where you're going. I see that you said like I go somewhere and yesterday must mean like I went, but like why does it have that weird accent? Why is it looking different? So if your students are starting to ask about it, then they're probably ready for you to explain just a quick thing about like. Oh well, when you use the past tense in French, if you're talking about like simple, immediate, one-time actions, what you're going to do is usually you're going to use a past participle with the verb être in front of it or the verb avoir in front of it, and they'll be like oh okay, and then you can just move on.
Speaker 1:Or if you want to go into like a knockdown, drag out thing about it, you could keep it like 10 minutes or less, and what it looks like is in the moment, in context, you are quickly explaining relevant features. You're not really doing any practice with it and you don't have any assessment attached to it. You are literally explaining how this past tense structure works in French, because your students asked about it or because it is the way that you're presenting this grammar structure, which is how I used to do it. So what this does is the purpose of it is for them to understand and put together some of those functional elements of ooh cool. Look at the structure that I already know, which is this verb aller, and look how it forms differently depending on whether it's in a different time frame or not, comes differently depending on whether it's in a different time frame or not. So it really helps enrich that communicative ability in that specific moment with just that specific phrase, with pop-up grammar.
Speaker 1:Something to keep in mind is that this doesn't mean that you're going to expand to like the full breadth of what past tense looks like, which, by the way bonus tip I would say is the number one problem that we have in programs is when the textbook that you're following or the program or the curriculum that you're following says, hey, we're doing past tense now. Often teachers think, well, I got it, they have to know everything about the past tense. And that's not true, because in a communicative context, when people are picking up an L2, context, when people are picking up an L2, they don't learn the entire structure all at once. They pick up little pieces of the structure at a time and usually they actually pick up the irregulars first, because in language those are the high frequency terms that are more common. So you can apply this exact same concept when you are doing a past tense unit, like it's very common in Spanish too, to spend a lot of time on the preterite and then do we do the what's the word I'm looking for?
Speaker 1:We use regular preterite for a while and then we go into irregular mode and then our students are just drowning in all these flashcards of like oh my God, there's so many irregular forms of this. But dial it back a little bit and think of it this way instead of well, I could show them with pop-up grammar some of the really common irregulars that they need to know. Like you'll fui, which I like, you have to have that to talk about anything in the past tense. Right, but it doesn't mean that you need to also teach the other 1,600,000,. Thank you Spanish. Irregular preterite forms at the time. Why don't you just focus on, like the sweet 16 or even smaller, the super sevens of what those high-frequency past tense forms are? Because you know as well as I do that that, like, teaching all of the irregulars at once it's too much for you. It's too much for them. Like who's? Please raise your hand and let me know if you've ever had like oh, wow, amazing success. All my students felt great about doing this very lengthy and in-depth unit about every single irregular preterite form. Have you, I don't know, a single teacher who's had success with that? So we should try a different approach.
Speaker 1:And just as another example is that something that I used to do with students when we were talking about these verbs like gustar often in Spanish class, especially in Spanish too, we use this verb quedar a lot to make this comparison, because it's an important grammar structure that's different from the L1 that most students have, which is English. So I would use te queda versus te quedan, that whole concept of like it fits me well, or it, or, in this case, it fits you well, or like they fit me well, when you're talking about like a pair of pants or something in this case, it fits you well or like they fit me well, when you're talking about like a pair of pants or something. We would do this just by looking at a catalog of clothing and then we would talk about and use the individual items of like. For pants, you always use Kayvan and for this item, like you know, a scarf or something, or a hat that fits you well, and it's going to be singular. So it's the whole idea of like let's keep it in context and don't worry about assessment until you really feel like students have a grasp on maybe more breadth of the subject. But assessment isn't the purpose here. It's actually to help them navigate the communicative situation they're in.
Speaker 1:The other really great method that I love to use is inductive grammar. There's been a good amount of research actually done on this and it really helps students to cement this into their brains and into the more long-term memory side of their brains and it helps them make sense of things. Inductive grammar overall is just the simple idea that, instead of presenting the rule to students whatever that commonality, that pattern or that rule might be with a specific form or feature of your target language is that you ask students to figure out the patterns themselves. So it's a lot more interactive, it's a lot more comprehension-based and it's a lot more like you guys figuring it out together, and so it stays in their memories a lot longer and it helps them make sense of things. Here's how it works Present a very simple text, really really simple text, with whatever your targeted structure is.
Speaker 1:So you could say something like in Spanish you could do like voy al cine de nuevo or fui al cine ayer and you're going to ask for students to figure out what is the meaning. That's step three here. Step four is you're going to hypothesize as a class, while guiding the students by giving them gentle hints about like, oh, you're onto something, or like I see where you're thinking is that? But it's going to be a little bit different. Keep trying, so see if you can hypothesize as a class what the feature means and what the pattern might be. So if you're looking at something like I went to the movies yesterday, you're going to really highlight the word yesterday, talk about fui, and see, like, if they can figure out what do you think this might mean, based on the context. So, as that's happening, this is step five the teacher is facilitating discussion.
Speaker 1:Students will come up with the correct rule or formation on their own and how this works too, and you can see this in a lot of modern teacher manuals. If you're currently in a college class, or if you take in a college class and you're like me and you kept most of your textbooks, then you can look back and see that inductive grammar is a very common, well-researched way to, in a proficiency-oriented manner, include grammar in your program in a way that helps students by hopefully producing that feature later on, because they understand it in a much deeper way than just the surface-level memorization of oh, here are the endings, oh, here's the irregular form. Now the next thing that you're going to do after this is, once students have the correct rule, once they've got the pattern down and they've come to the correct conclusion, then you're going to give them some ample practice and even more input to really solidify that structure in their heads. This works really well with let's go back to the French example when you have something that is easy to figure out on its own, like if it's got some familiar elements that they've already seen before, like the verb aller in the past tense in French looks really similar to the infinitive that they've seen all year in French 1. So if you're in French 2 and you're working with aller, like, this is a really nice inductive grammar. So, in summary, this option number two, inductive grammar, is just asking students to figure out the pattern on their own and gently guiding the discussion so that they get to the right conclusion. It really helps them to memorize it. Now, if you are like me and you are team, the less grammar the better, not because grammar is bad, but just because it doesn't actually lead to acquisition. It just helps to transform and make the acquisition that's already in your students' heads more accurate.
Speaker 1:And since accuracy is not really a focus of my classroom and never has been, that can be like a whole nother episode that we talk about is that when you're just hoping to have students have more fluency, more words to use and more context and communicative situations in which they actually feel comfortable producing things, grammar is not really going to help you get there. So I eliminated it from my program as much as possible, because the time you have with students is very little and very precious, so it just wasn't high on the priority list for me. So what I would do because I didn't know where my students were going to go after they were hanging out with me in French 2, they could go to a French 3 program that was very grammar heavy. They could go to a French three program that was very grammar heavy. They could go to a college program, because I was working with a lot of high school seniors at that time and they could potentially do a college exam where they're trying to get out of French 101 and just jump right into French 102, which would save them a lot of time and money. So I want them to be really happy with those results, and a lot of programs are still pretty grammar-based.
Speaker 1:So something that I would do is tip number three, which is a three-week grammar bootcamp. When I get this question from practical proficiency members of like oh my God, I have other people in my department who teach a lot of grammar and I don't want my students to drown in that class because their abilities to communicate won't shine as well just because they don't. They might not know the rule, even though they can use it, which we all know is better. But with this idea, we want your students to be successful in every environment that they're in without it taking up too much of that quality juicy input time in your class. So I would suggest this simple thing, which is a three-week grammar bootcamp. It's exactly what it sounds like.
Speaker 1:You know all of those simple practice and presentation models and like simple, boring-ass worksheets that you're used to and that you have maybe in abundance somewhere in an old filing cabinet or an old Google Drive. Well, this is a great time to do that, especially if you've got something like national exams coming up that you don't really have control over what's in the actual test or not. Maybe there's a state exam that's going to be testing on a specific grammar feature, or maybe you know that the next teacher that they go into for Chinese 3 is really going to hit them hard with some grammar rules and you want them to feel successful. So all this means is as simple as it sounds pick a section of the year and go over all the things you avoided with grammar during the year and let students go wild with that very comfortable form of class that they know well, which is teacher gives information, students absorb information, memorize and then can write that information down later on a test Like that's easy.
Speaker 1:You guys can do that all day long. As long as you have some fun ways and some fun games to do that, it's not nearly as difficult as creating communicative situations. Right, that could be an easy planning period for you. You just got to watch out because it's really boring. It's really really, really, really, really boring. So you're going to need a lot of games and a lot of fun prizes and things to make this work. But it also can make students feel very secure and very happy because you can give them things like hey, here's a two-week packet of study guides and info and burp charts, and like easy stuff for students to memorize that doesn't require a lot of cognitive thought which, by the way, is probably why grammar is monopolizing a lot of the time.
Speaker 1:That we do in class is that when you have a difficult class or when you don't have any materials like this is something that students are really good at and can experience a lot of success in, even though it doesn't. Those skills don't transfer over into any type of communicative situation unless they're already at intermediate low in the amount of language that they have in their heads, and so you're just helping to polish and shape up the language that's already there, but again, it doesn't create new language. So this is a really nice way to shape and polish things up before an important test or before moving to a new class that you know there's going to be a lot of conjugation flashcards in there. Now, overall, here is one thing that I think helps a lot of teachers who are in a pretty grammar heavy program transition over into this new world of proficiency without feeling like you have to completely change everything that you already have, because we just spend a lot of time talking about like well, grammar is fine, but it's not the best use of your time in class if it's really taking over and you know like more than like 20% of your instructional time. So here is something to help you understand that there is another, really simple way that you already have access to. It doesn't require any new training, any new materials or any of that junk. And it's this Pretend that all of the grammar structures that you're teaching are just vocabulary and keep them in functional chunks.
Speaker 1:Functional chunks is the new favorite phrase of ACTFL. You know since about like. I don't know when it started, but I know that around like 2016, 2017, it really started to get a lot of steam in the proficiency world. Thinking about like let's keep language in context together. Steam in the proficiency world thinking about like let's keep language in context together.
Speaker 1:So, instead of presenting the conditional in a first-year class, remember all those restaurant units that we have in textbooks that are talking about like I would like. When it's time for you to order, and so you teach some things like in Spanish, you teach like me gustaría un vaso de agua when they're ordering, like I would like a glass of water. Or in French you're teaching je voudrais un limonade or something like that. So je voudrais is the conditional form of vouloir and it's all about I would like rather than I want, and when you put it in that context it's a natural piece of your vocab list and students might be if they notice like, oh wow, so it's I would like. Is it related to I want? Most students won't make that connection, but remember how we always used to teach this. You know, before proficiency was cool and a lot of people were talking about it Like conditional was always part of restaurant units in level one, always whenever we were talking about food, and we never bothered in level one to expand the entire concept of conditional and say, hey, here are all these other forms of conditional and other ways that you can make polite requests.
Speaker 1:We just taught the one functional chunk in that one phrase when students needed to access it to talk about what they needed and to get a communicative thing done, which is to order in a restaurant politely. So we can do that with literally any other structure that you can imagine. The best example is conditional here, when you're talking about level one, but you can really treat any grammar or any language feature as just a natural part of your vocab list, and errors quote-unquote errors they can just be spelling mistakes. For now this works really well until level three or four, when your students are starting to reach in their intermediate low and they actually crave a little bit more grammar instruction because they have language in their heads and they want to be able to use it more accurately. But in the first two to three years of language most of your students are, they're not really going to care that much about how the language works. They just don't. They don't even have enough language to realize that there's a structure. They or to have enough brain space to pay attention to the structure because they're just, they feel like they're, you know, clinging for anything to float on in a sea of language for a long time. So you can just give them little chunks of already constructed pieces of language and let them use that whenever it makes sense for them in a simple context like oh, you want to be polite in a restaurant, you're going to use this phrase. It's conditional, but you don't need to worry about that right now. Just say je vous trais instead of je veux, and you can do that for the entire year any way that you want to. It works in so many different situations.
Speaker 1:This was one of the main ways that I moved more towards proficiency in my program without changing anything about the current program that my school was following, because it wouldn't make sense for me to change the program right. It just made sense to change a little bit about how I presented it and taught it. If you're doing this, I would say too, it also makes sense that you're not going to assess whether students can produce or, you know, break down the verb wohlwil and put it back into conditional right, like that doesn't make any sense. What does make sense is if you're going to give them two different verbs that they could possibly use, for I want and I would like, and make sure that they circle the one that says I would like to be more polite in a restaurant situation. That's a way you can assess that we're at a wrap here y'all. Those are the three plus one important mindset shift for all of your grammatical constructions, for all of your grammatical constructions.
Speaker 1:I hope these are really helpful to you for things that you can do to make your program more proficiency friendly without having to actually make a lot of tweaks if you're working in an already pretty grammar heavy syllabus, but remember, at the end of the day, there really are no purists. So do what works for your curriculum, do what works for your students and make sure that grammar has its rightful place, slowly over time, without making a ton of changes that are really going to stress you out, because you and I both know that the most important thing for proficiency to happen is for you to be ready to interact with students in communicative situations and provide input for them, which is a pretty energy draining activity. It's really rewarding, but it's the most important use of your class time, so you need to save and prioritize all of that energy for that activity. Also, I'd like to address a very common misconception about this, which is that we don't abandon accuracy. We're just abandoning the false notion that grammar will lead to acquisition. So studying a grammar structure doesn't help cement that structure more in your students' heads or allow them to access it in communicative situations.
Speaker 1:So I would say, too, that one of the things that we need to keep in mind is that accuracy is still an important part of your overall five-level program, whether you're starting in elementary, middle or high school. That students don't actually do well with accuracy if you are completely in a comprehensible, input-focused program, which means that your students are just doing input, input, input all day long and responding back to you spontaneously when they have the ability and it comes to them, but without a lot of pressure for output. So in those situations what we found is in like multi-year programs that those students actually really struggled with accuracy. There was a lot of studies done in a Canadian program that was driven by input alone and accuracy is an important part of our program we need to address, but at the right time. So we're looking more at when students have language in their heads around the end of level two, around level or year three, when you know that they're starting to reach and create their own.
Speaker 1:I would say like there's a whole series on this if you'd like to dive deeper into levels. If I'm saying intermediate, low and you're like what does that mean? There's a whole series on this. But I'll leave those podcast episodes for you to check out in the show notes and in the link below here. But just know that your students need to have a certain amount of language in their heads before they can start sharpening it and making it accurate and all of that, but that phase is still important. We just need to move it a little bit back. You know we're not doing a lot of accuracy in level one, barely if at all. In level two we're starting to talk about accuracy with really familiar forms and then in level three we can roll out a little bit more accuracy, focus with some pop-up grammar or method number two, inductive grammar or method number three, doing a two to three week grammar boot camp. So thank you so much for being here. I hope that this helps you with your role of grammar in your program and having some practical ways that you can move forward with grammar in a way that makes you feel like your students are getting what they need but they're also not spending too much time on things that won't lead them to acquisition.
Speaker 1:So let me know what are some things that you want to know about grammar. You can submit questions to the podcast anytime now. I'm really excited to answer more questions like this. You can check the show notes below or the YouTube description below for a link to where you can submit questions. I would love to answer anything about proficiency, grammar, ci, all that stuff. Anything to do with a healthy, safe and communicative classroom environment where language is the focus. Put it in the questions, and I'd love to answer that question over the air. But in the meantime, thanks so much for spending some of your valuable time with me, and I can't wait to see you in the next episode, where we're gonna talk a little bit more in depth about the role of grammar in your program. All right, ciao, bye for now.