Pedagogy

Gloria (pseudonym), one of the teacher participants in our PAREA research project, said that she regretted allowing an advanced student to participate in an English language trip she had facilitated to the United States. “The student already knew too much to benefit from the trip,” explained Gloria. “I would’ve rather left that place open for another intermediate student who could have really progressed in the 14 days we were there.” Gloria’s comment piqued our interest. Is FSA more beneficial to lower-level students? Is there anything to gain for advanced speakers? It turns out that the answer is more complex than we expected. 

The likely reason why Gloria didn’t observe any difference in her advanced student’s English is what is colloquially referred to as the “language cone.” The ACTFL Proficiency Levels cone [PDF, 3,8M] was developed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL, 2012) to visually represent what knowledge speakers must accumulate when acquiring a new language. An image of this cone can be found in Figure 5.

At the bottom, pointy, end of the cone is the novice language learner. As you can see, in moving up the cone, from novice to intermediate, a learner doesn’t have to acquire much language. We know this because we’re often able to get by in a language with just a few key words and some accompanying gestures. However, the cone expands exponentially at each new level. So, imagine that you had to fill the cone with water. One ounce might fill it up to the intermediate line, but it may take another 10 ounces to fill it from intermediate to advanced, and then another 100 ounces to fill it from advanced to superior.

This explains why, in Gloria’s case, her intermediate students showed a noticeable difference in a short period but her advanced student didn’t. For the advanced student, the ounce that was added simply wasn’t as apparent as the ounce added to the intermediate students’ cone, even though, in actuality, they may have benefited equally from the experience.

The language cone also explains why a learner usually progresses rapidly in the beginning stages but then takes ages to move from intermediate to advanced. It also explains why it’s easy to have a passable knowledge of several different languages but difficult to be fluent in two or more. This points to a huge problem with assessment and evaluation. Testing a group of novices is usually pretty easy since they are likely acquiring the same grammar and vocabulary at the same time: days of the week, colours, family, food, and so forth. But what to do in the case of students who are learning different things at the same time?

Imagine taking a group of intermediate–high Spanish learners on the same trip to Colombia. One student spends his time volunteering at a nature reserve, speaking a very academic and technical Spanish, while another spends his evenings dancing salsa and learning colloquial language. Both should, of course, be encouraged in the pursuit of their language goals. But how can one common evaluation test all of those abilities? The answer is choice. At low levels, common evaluations work well, but as students move up the cone, more choice and more self-reporting are required (see Figure 5). For example, you could have each of the aforementioned students role play situations they experienced and then have them compare the different registers they used. Choice and self-reporting allow facilitators to assess the rich, unexpected learning that occurs in naturalistic contexts.