Here we go again. New school year = new curriculum maps. Well, new map. I'm fairly satisfied with my French 1 and French 2 maps, which I revamped last year to align with the AAPPL test, so those remained fundamentally the same. French 3, well....
French 1 and 2: The only significant change that I made to both was to remove any mention of discrete grammar points, and instead replaced it with the term "lexis" (see Gianfranco Conti's work). This was also inspired by the Williamson County (Tennessee) Scope and Sequence documents which also reference "Language Chunks" - for their Level 1 document, click here.
French 3: To use a turn of phrase my students like...see what had happened was...I needed to streamline this class because it was too much work. I have a chronic autoimmune disease that requires vigilant management that is essentially my full-time job. So I thought I should make this course easier to deliver. While I was contemplating the new direction of the course, I saw many discussions on Twitter in my PLC, #langchat, about delivering content through language, rather than language being the content, and calls to emphasize interculturality (@doriecp) . Adrienne Brandenburg tweeted asking if anyone was using the Teaching Tolerance Social Justice Standards, and that inspired me to consider those in my design. Finally, I considered my own academic background - I began as a political science major in undergrad, and had a concentration in French civilization for both my M.A. and Ph.D. programs - and decided that a course focused on cultural questions would not only align best with my foundations, but also be the most provocative experience for my students. Level 3 is the terminus of my program at this point, and while many of these themes are typically considered Level 5/AP, I am going to work with them as well as I can at the Intermediate Low/Mid level. I pulled out an old edition of an intermediate university level text I taught from over 10 years ago (Quant a moi, 3rd edition) to examine some of the themes and language structures they used, and then built from there.
If you examine this map closely, you will notice it's very open-ended. In fact, I did not list any language chunks or lexis at all; instead I stated "Structures: As determined by communicative context". I'm a Department of One again in my district this year, but I'm hoping that another world language educator would be able to infer that if students need to be able to propose solutions, they may need to learn some subjunctive constructions, or if they are comparing, they need to learn comparatives and superlatives. What I don't want is to limit myself (or my students) to a discrete list of resources or language functions because it's on a document I have created in August. On verra!
I want to be certain to acknowledge two language educators whose work informs my own: I've listed Lisa Shepard's blog as a possible resource, and as always, will use Gianfranco Conti's methodology of teaching presentational skills in chunks as I create practice materials for writing and speaking.
MAPS
2019-20_french_1_curriculum_dawn_michael.pdf |
2019_20_french_2__curriculum_dawn_michael.pdf |
2019_2020_fr_3_curriculum_guide_dawn_michael.pdf |