<p>I don’t think you can assume that the AP test is an accurate measure of language learning. As with other standardized tests, it is a great way of finding out how good a student is at taking tests.</p>
<p>My daughter had poor Spanish teachers for a couple of years, and then she finally got a very good teacher for AP Spanish Language and AP Spanish Lit. She did a lot of catching up in those two years, but she still can’t understand Spanish TV or radio, and she would struggle to have a conversation. She got 5’s on both AP exams. She just aces tests, including the placement test that put her into third-year Spanish with no previous coursework.</p>
<p>I have had excellent, inspiring non-native teachers in French & German. The most boring FL teacher I ever had was the elderly Italian gentleman who was apparently biding his time, picking up a paycheck from the university until retirement.</p>
<p>Calreader: I don’t think you appreciate how tough TV or radio is. I am completely fluent reading Spanish, speak it pretty well, understand it, can hold conversations, etc. I have no doubt that I could get a 5 on the Spanish AP this afternoon with no preparation. But if I turn on a Spanish-language TV show, how much I understand in the first 10 minutes varies a lot depending on the country of origin of the speakers and the level of formality. A newscast, especially a “serious” newscast, is generally no problem, but with a game show I might get about 50%. If I watched a few hours of it, I would get a lot better . . . but I don’t.</p>
<p>I’ve looked at the content of the Regent’s French exam and it looks pretty reasonable to me. The real problem is that you can pass with only 65%. My kids are very good at multiple choice tests so even my son who was a dunce at Latin did very well on the Regents. I do think our upper level Latin teacher is pretty good - the kids who stick with it do very well on the AP.</p>
<p>I don’t think you absolutely have to have a native speaker, but you do have to have someone who is keeping up with the language. Travel, reading current magazines and newspapers, keeping up via the internet or radio are all possibilities. </p>
<p>I agree about TV and especially radio. It’s a matter of getting used to it. I have trouble understanding Shakespeare until about 15 minutes into a play too. The first few weeks we lived in Germany my husband complained he couldn’t even tell where one word ended and the next started. Now it’s not an issue. It’s been 20 years since we’ve lived in Germany. When we watch a German movie I find it takes about half an hour before I can stop using the subtitles as a crutch.</p>
<p>No one assumes that is it a measure of anything but what is tested on the AP Exam. That does not mean that a 5 on an AP means that you are an expert at watching telenovelas. :D</p>
<p>“If you basically know a language, it’s not hard to pick up colloquial usage.”</p>
<p>I’d disagree with that, actually. If you know the basic grammar, picking up new vocab isn’t too hard. But picking up idioms is difficult, especially if they’re literature-based. That’s where having a native speaking teacher can help, as they will already be familiar with the metaphors and literary references behind them.</p>
<p>“And no modern language is taught to beginning students as if it were fluid.”</p>
<p>Yes and no. Grammatical rules are pretty much always taught as “usually it’s the case that X precedes Y, but in certain situations Y can precede X…” E.g., Chinese is always taught as an SVO language, as in “Jack loves Jill”. But if someone isn’t also taught that it’s also perfectly grammatical to say “JILL Jack loves” (emphasising Jill and not someone else), they’re not speaking gramatically in that particular context.</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.”</p>
<p>I think you’re probably right. It’s not commonly used to mean that though, in the same way that ‘gay’ isn’t commonly used to mean ‘happy’ anymore. The secondary meaning has for all intents and purposes become the primary meaning.</p>
<p>Each of my kids, in turn, had the opportunity during high school to live abroad and to be asked at some point to “help” with a high school English class or lesson.</p>
<p>Each of my kids, in turn, was then mortified at their inability to answer the most basic of English grammar questions. As my daughter summed up in an email…“did you know that English has more than 3 tenses?” My kids both easily passed their AP English exams and went on to colleges known for their emphasis on writing – but neither could do more than stammer when asked to stand in front of a class and give an example of the use of a past participle. </p>
<p>My son was only “teaching English” in an Asian country for a few weeks, so he learned more about the language of his host country than his own… but fortunately my daughter attended a Russian high school for an entire semester. She did come back with a good command of English grammar, including the ability to explain to me the (obsolete) use of the dative case in English.</p>
<p>“Fluid” and “having variable syntax” are two different things. I don’t know much about Chinese, but I would be surprised if the object-subject-verb syntax hadn’t been around for a while. It is common (and acceptable) to vary word order in every language I have ever seen, with the different word orders sometimes creating different connotations.</p>
<p>What people aren’t taught . . . I bet that only very advanced non-native English students are clued in to the increasing acceptability of pairing “no one” or “none” with a plural gender-neutral pronoun – a classic error of English grammar, and now ubiquitous in both spoken and written English. Or the whole ending a sentence with a preposition thing. Or the acceptability of sentence fragments in both written and spoken English.</p>
<p>I think I know what Laylah means by literature-based idioms, but I also think that may be limited to Chinese (and maybe Japanese, and maybe Hebrew, and probably Arabic and Parsi . . . ). It’s not a big feature of Western languages. We have something of it with quotes from Shakespeare or the Bible – references to “to be or not to be” or “a rose by any other name” or “walking on water”. But of course an advanced English student would recognize those references.</p>
Did you do that on purpose? My younger son is a big believer in sentence fragments and I keep trying to get rid of them. Maybe I should leave them be?</p>
<p>JHS and bluebayou, you’re right. TV and radio set a high bar for understanding - especially radio, because they talk so fast and you don’t have any body language to help.</p>
<p>I’m reflecting my daughter’s own opinion of her (lack of) fluency after four years of taking Spanish in high school. She became pretty good at reading and writing, but not so good at speaking and listening. There was only one other student in her class who was not a native speaker of Spanish, and that one was a kid who grew up listening to Spanish but not speaking it. So she had lots of helpers when she didn’t know what was going on in class, which was often :-).</p>
<p>None of the three outstanding foreign language teachers I’ve seen were native speakers, and the year my daughter had a native French speaker was the year she didn’t seem to learn very much. The native teacher also did not ask the kids to do a significant amount of written work, so there was relatively little feedback on that front. </p>
<p>At least with respect to French, the AP exam is quite difficult, and D’s excellent French teacher took a lot of her own time to carefully review all of the released exams and then over years put together a very carefully planned curriculum to make sure that students were very well prepared for the exam. She gave lots of assessments, had kids read a lot of articles from native-language (rather than textbook) sources, did multiple tape recordings that were similar to the oral portion of the AP exam, provided multiple recordings of (different) native speakers, and generally invested a huge amount of time making that class very effective. She told kids from the first day that the exam was hard and that they would really need to work at gaining proficiency, and she was very, very picky in grading writing, because she said that the AP examiners were also very picky. Her students had an excellent record on the exam, but I have no doubt that it was because she prepared the heck out of them. Her accent may not have been the purest, but I could not have asked for better teaching. (She also noted that she had never had a teaching evaluation that had any meaning for her as a foreign language teacher.)</p>
<p>My D’s Spanish teacher (who teaches AP Spanish) has the worst Spanish accent I’ve ever heard. Not even an attempt at authenticity. She speaks Spanish the way I (with no Spanish background) would. It’s so Americanized.</p>
<p>"Or to be able to read works, such as research, in the language. " - Reading part of the language is the easiest part. Especially research vs literature (novels), which uses rich vocabulary. But if learning language goal was to read research papers, than it is easier to accomplish than actually using language in verbal communication. Ability to speak freely in foreign language is harder to gain than ability to read it. Even kids who have foreign language classes conducted completely in this language which has been the case with my D’s couple languages, still cannot speak fluently.</p>
<p>Our experience with two that went through immersion elementary is that the the kids learn a whole lot more and faster with a native speaker. It’s harder for them the first time, but once they acclimate, their accents get better and they get better recommendations on all sorts of things, even what books to read at their level that are written in that language and not translated.</p>