Crecia C. Swaim
In middle school world language classes, we tend to have students with a wide array of language knowledge and skills. In my school, an arts magnet middle school in New Haven, Connecticut, language is offered as an enrichment class; if, based on state mastery test scores, students do not need math or reading enrichment, they are placed in a French, Spanish, or Chinese class upon entry in fifth grade. In general that student will remain in that language class for all four years at our school. If a student is initially placed in an enrichment math or reading class, but test scores and school performance assessments indicate that it is no longer needed, then that student will be moved into a language class; also, we get new students in each grade each year, as well as transfers during the school year. This happens frequently in sixth grade (this year about half of my sixth grade class was new to French); to a lesser degree in seventh and eighth grades (this year my seventh grade had five new students, my eighth grade three.) Sometimes these changes will happen at the beginning of the year, other times partway through the year. We don't have beginning and advanced classes for each grade, so new students enter a class full of students who have already been studying the language for one, two, or three years.
Clearly the skilled world languages teacher in this situation must develop a system for meeting those varied needs in the same classroom. Not that the story is any different in other disciplines; as teachers we are all, by definition, also differentiators. This unit attempts to address and offer solutions to the particular challenges of differentiating instruction in a middle school world languages classroom, using poetry.
At my school, the fifth and sixth grade curriculum is exploratory preparation for upper level study in seventh and eighth grade. Completing the seventh and eighth grade years successfully will allow a student entry into second year French at the high school level. In fifth and sixth grade the focus is on exposure and vocabulary-building, with lots of song and role-playing to develop a love of language and a foundation that is fostered and expanded in seventh and eighth grade. The seventh and eighth grade curriculum is literally the high school year one curriculum spread out over two years instead of one. The focus here is on communicative functions and grammar skill building, within a thematic context. All classes meet four days a week, for fifty minutes per class.
Oftentimes a student's first reaction to the news that they will eventually be memorizing something in a foreign language is that they can't do it, that it is impossible. The satisfaction visible on a student's face after proving that assumption wrong is invaluable. By consistently requiring these memorization and recitation tasks, the fear factor slowly disappears. The process of memorizing poetry helps students to develop a feel for and an understanding of the language being studied. And any time you can offer a student an opportunity to achieve a goal he or she thought impossible is priceless in terms of boundary-breaking and limit-busting.
In the process of memorization, students are able to progress at their own pace. Some will stay at the pronunciation level of performance and will struggle to say the words as they should. Yet they will continue to make meaning of the language, to find connections between English and French as they struggle to understand the language, and to develop a sense of both spoken and written French. Other students will begin to connect words, pronunciation, and meaning, and will be able to recognize vocabulary in other contexts. Using poetry in the world language classroom is an invaluable tool in its capacity to allow for differentiated instruction in this way.