<p>We have a girl from Germany staying with us for two weeks as the second part of an exchange between our schools; my son went to Germany for 3 weeks last summer. While my son was trying to catch up on his homework over the weekend, she looked at a graded paper that had been returned to him for corrections. She was very critical of the teacher's grading of the paper, saying that he had ignored glaring errors and had corrected things that she said were totally acceptable. Now I am not going to condemn the teacher's ability and knowledge based on an exchange student's comments but it did make me stop and think about how dependent students are on their teachers for language instruction. In other subjects, like math or science, a teacher's manual could be used to grade tests. Some errors I am sure are still made, but I think that erroneous teaching would be more easily recognized. How do you know if the foreign language teacher knows what they are teaching? By the time that he graduates, my son will have had this teacher for 5 years. I guess if few of the students do well on their IB exams, the school might question the ability of the teacher. any thoughts?</p>
<p>I’m guessing the schools can judge by AP exams, etc… I do know that my d has never had a decent French teacher, and it really saddens me. I guess there aren’t too many good French teachers out there? Or maybe just bad luck, as she has had many great English, history, math, and science teachers. As a country we don’t take language learning seriously enough and maybe that means we don’t raise great language teachers? I know my d would LOVE other languages if she’d had some vital, interested teaching, and I’m so sorry she has missed this.</p>
<p>If the kids do poorly on the exams - yes, I would question the teacher.
If they are fine - let it be.
You can never compare a native speaker to the teacher of the foreign language as they both learned quite defferently. And the native speaker knows the intricacies of the language to the extend that a learner will probably never use nor understand. BTW, I know 3 languages (so I am speaking a little from the experience :). My DD , who is VERY into learning languages, is taking one on one private, conversational lessons in two langauages. Both teachers have degrees in education as well as are native speakers. However, the one that is not teaching the language at her job (teaches other subject) is not as good as the one that has made a career out of theaching her native language to others.</p>
<p>This is why, being on my third year of a non fluent FL, I hate the class. I am utterly dependent upon my teacher–who is not very good. And, to be honest, in spite of getting good grades in the class–until and including now–I don’t feel as if I have learned much. I would be slow in conversation, and couldn’t get myself out of trouble (well, I could, but not too well, and just as well as I would have been able to before) in the home country.</p>
<p>Now I am stuck taking the course. I sincerely wish that I had never started a FL. The second year was the only good year, regardless.</p>
<p>For me it’s nearly impossible to tell if my kids’ Spanish teachers are any good, because I don’t know a word of Spanish (or any other foreign language, for that matter). My HS daughter is in honors Spanish, and while she only gets B’s, I assume she’s learning because she did very well in the national Spanish exam. My middle school D does not do well in Spanish at all and I have no idea if it’s teacher related. My older D said her middle school Spanish teachers were not good and her HS teachers are, but who knows what makes a good teacher in her mind.</p>
<p>D’s HS used native speaker (from Cuba) for Spanish and I strongly support using native speakers for Foreign language teachers. It was not that important for my D., she is not pursuing any language digree in college and foreign language is her easy subject. She has fulfilled college reguirements by taking the highest possible Spanish class based on her placement test. By the way, college reguire Foreign language placement test and whatever they did not catch in HS, they will get in college. Well, if one really wants to know language well, they need to live in foreign country for awhile anyway.</p>
<p>D has had the same problem. After getting A’s in Spanish every single year, and after even being skipped a year by the school so that she had AP Spanish V in 11th grade, she did very poorly on the AP test. I’ve got to think that this is teacher-related, since D is a good student and does all her work.</p>
<p>I noticed a huge difference between my kids’ American-born Spanish teacher and their (later-hired) native-born Spanish teacher. My younger son benefited by having the native-born teacher for 2 years. </p>
<p>The difference is amazing.</p>
<p>I had very good Spanish teachers, none of whom were native speakers. Then I went to Spain, and my Spanish teachers there were still not native Spanish speakers (they were Catalans).</p>
<p>There are loads of good Latin teachers out there, none of whom are native speakers.</p>
<p>Good question. Makes me really wonder how good…or how bad…our high school’s foreign language programs really are. The only standardized measure the high school uses for Spanish and French proficiency is the NYS Regents exam, which is given at the end of three years. The pass rate is generally 95 to 100%. The “mastery” rate – those scoring 85+ on the exam – ranges from 45% to 65%. Is this a sign that the school’s program is excellent or that the test is way too easy?</p>
<p>In my elder daughter’s opinion it is the Regents exam that is too easy. She took five years of French, scored a 96 on the Regents exam, but felt that after five years she really didn’t know enough French to be considered marginally fluent. Although she was able to pass the exam at her college that allowed her to opt out of French I and II she fely that her classmates who had taken AP French after 2 or 3 years of preliminary study were way ahead of her. Our high school doesn’t offer the AP option. Instead, kids who want to take a fourth or fifth year of French or Spanish can opt to pay the sponsoring SUNY university for college credit. The rigor of that program is questionable in my my, however.</p>
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<p>I live in the West and here the easiest way to test my kid’s Spanish skills is to turn the Spanish TV channel on 
How much can they understand?</p>
<p>You are correct. Pass rates on AP/IB tests will indicate if students are learning what they should. But: </p>
<p>1) Poor teachers exist in every discipline.
2) Our FL is taught [fill in the blank] at the HS level – a similar level course is taught differently at our local community college
3) A native speaker will know different dialects, Castillian Spanish, for example, which is typically not taught early in the US.
4) A native speaker will know the exceptions to the rules, which may be Level 5 in the US…</p>
<p>“She was very critical of the teacher’s grading of the paper, saying that he had ignored glaring errors and had corrected things that she said were totally acceptable.”</p>
<p>If every single error is marked in an assignment, most language learners would end up with a page awash in red ink. Often teachers focus the grading on only one particular thing for each different assignment: are the tenses right today, or is the word order fine, or is there good agreement between masculine/feminine/neuter/plural nouns and the modifying adjectives. Without a copy of the teacher’s scoring rubric, we don’t know what he/she was actually looking for in that assignment. Chances are that the teacher is fully aware of the “glaring errors” and will work on that next time around.</p>
<p>As for “correcting things that are totally acceptable”, all we have to do is remember all the times that we’ve been told to not split infinitives, not begin written sentences with “and” or “but”, and that we should use “I” instead of “me” in the sentence “Harry is faster than me.” Some rules of formal language (most often written formal language) are simply not followed in most spoken language. Not to mention that many usages change over time. The version of the language used in the classroom may be quite correct, but somewhat more formal than the exchange student is used to using, or may reflect the dominant usage of a different part of the country.</p>
<p>My sister is a high school French teacher, and lived in France for several years. She has commented that it is very hard for administrators to know how good a language teacher is, especially if they don’t know the language, so some very poor teachers stay on the job forever. Most kids at our high school don’t go on to AP level, so there is no way to know how much they have learned. My S’s German 4 teacher doesn’t seem to be teaching him a whole lot. he had her for German 2 and German 3 as well. Plus, the AP French exam is very hard; D did poorly on it but tested into 3rd year college French and did well there.</p>
<p>“There are loads of good Latin teachers out there, none of whom are native speakers.”</p>
<p>Yes, but the difference is that (with the exception of the Vatican) Latin is not used as a spoken language. It is not fluid. Spoken languages are in a permanent state of flux - slang, new terminology, new idioms. Unless you are taught by a native speaker, you will never pick these things up. </p>
<p>Case in point: my degree is in Mandarin. My first textbook was called Practical Chinese Reader, and informed me that the correct way to address a stranger politely was tongzhi. When the book was published, tongzhi meant ‘comrade’. It now means homosexual. So sure, going up to someone and saying ‘hello tongzhi’ may be gramatically correct, but all it would get you is someone laughing in your face.</p>
<p>I would be happy if my kids were taught any modern language as well as they were taught Latin. If you basically know a language, it’s not hard to pick up colloquial usage.</p>
<p>(Latin, of course, WAS fluid for several centuries. And no modern language is taught to beginning students as if it were fluid. The real difference is that there is a specific historical period whose Latin is privileged for instructional purposes, and that period doesn’t change, whereas for modern languages the privileged period is always 10 years or so ago.)</p>
<p>(I would venture to guess that the use of tongzhi to mean “homosexual” is not unrelated to its meaning as “comrade”, and that – depending on the context – it can still mean either. Whether anyone outside the Central Committee of the Communist Party still greets other people as tongzhi is another question, of course.)</p>
<p>This is an interesting thread for me because I’m still trying to figure out why my D, who’s been studying Latin forever, gets Summa Cum Laude on the National Law Exam, etc., bombed her AP test in Latin. She got a 5 on her AP Bio, so it’s not that she has trouble with APs in general. Are the language ones just harder?</p>
<p>The only real test of the language could be ability to use it in a foreign country. The reason that we study language is ability to communicate. The rest is secondary. Although college GPA is important consideration.</p>
<p>BurnThis,
The language gets easier with each next one. I believe that Spanish has been D’s easiest class because it was her language #4. It has no reflection about general intelligence.</p>
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<p>Or to be able to read works, such as research, in the language. </p>
<p>Re: the student’s comments on the graded paper… when I was in high school, I spent part of a summer living with a French family in Normandy. When I returned to the States, I corresponded with them. I needed a little help with one of the letters my French mom sent, so asked my high school French teacher – I was in French 3 at the time – for help. She was appalled by my French mom’s grammar. </p>
<p>A native English speaker need not go far to find numerous errors in written English produced by native English speakers; I doubt native English speakers are unique in that way.</p>