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The TEKS (Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills) for foreign languages is pretty general. It has to be in order not to dictate HOW we teach our language. Do we teach grammar first or are we reading based? It shouldn't matter. Which is why the TEKS or even the National Standards are so general. (here's one version: http://www.sedl.org/loteced/products/friendlyTEKS.pdf
The most critical section is this:
(1) COMMUNICATION
The student communicates in a language other than English using the skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
The student is expected to:
(A) engage in oral and written exchanges of learned material to socialize and to provide and obtain information;
(B) demonstrate understanding of simple, clearly spoken, and written language such as simple
stories, high-frequency commands, and brief instructions when dealing with familiar topics;
and
(C) present information using familiar words, phrases, and sentences to listeners and readers.
So consider if you were to mark questions on a test with which of the TEKS you are addressing. Seems to me for the most part I'm doing 1B & 1C. But that's so general, it almost covers everything. So how do you show that students are truly acquiring skills?
We unfortunately have no formal list of standards with regards to learning/understanding such things as:
* subject/verb agreement
* noun/adjective agreement
* verb tenses
* noun case usage/function
* pronoun usage
* dependent clauses
etc etc
Anyway, I only started thinking about these things when trying to tie TEKS to test questions and realizing that most of mine fell under 1B, which makes it look like I am not teaching much. But of course we are all teaching lots of things--from simple to complex. The TEKS hardly show whether we're teaching at a low cognitive thinking level or a high one. They do not demonstrate rigor demanded, or skills acquired, other than "engaging or oral and written materials"....
So I guess the next thing I need to do is to create a list of content mastery goals or something, something aligned to the stages in CLC. Surely such a beast already exists? I suppose I should really check the CLC website to see if such a thing is there.
My point, though, is this: we have the standards and have had them for a while, but if we really want to be able to compile data via these new software programs (such as Eduphoria, which my school is using), then we really need to think in greater detail about what we do and why and how.
The most critical section is this:
(1) COMMUNICATION
The student communicates in a language other than English using the skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing.
The student is expected to:
(A) engage in oral and written exchanges of learned material to socialize and to provide and obtain information;
(B) demonstrate understanding of simple, clearly spoken, and written language such as simple
stories, high-frequency commands, and brief instructions when dealing with familiar topics;
and
(C) present information using familiar words, phrases, and sentences to listeners and readers.
So consider if you were to mark questions on a test with which of the TEKS you are addressing. Seems to me for the most part I'm doing 1B & 1C. But that's so general, it almost covers everything. So how do you show that students are truly acquiring skills?
We unfortunately have no formal list of standards with regards to learning/understanding such things as:
* subject/verb agreement
* noun/adjective agreement
* verb tenses
* noun case usage/function
* pronoun usage
* dependent clauses
etc etc
Anyway, I only started thinking about these things when trying to tie TEKS to test questions and realizing that most of mine fell under 1B, which makes it look like I am not teaching much. But of course we are all teaching lots of things--from simple to complex. The TEKS hardly show whether we're teaching at a low cognitive thinking level or a high one. They do not demonstrate rigor demanded, or skills acquired, other than "engaging or oral and written materials"....
So I guess the next thing I need to do is to create a list of content mastery goals or something, something aligned to the stages in CLC. Surely such a beast already exists? I suppose I should really check the CLC website to see if such a thing is there.
My point, though, is this: we have the standards and have had them for a while, but if we really want to be able to compile data via these new software programs (such as Eduphoria, which my school is using), then we really need to think in greater detail about what we do and why and how.
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