Blog #2: ACTLF's Five Cs (due Monday, 1/23/12 by 8 AM)

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Jessica Richardson on January 22, 2012 at 7:44pm

I think as we saw in the diagram of the 5 Cs that they all touch and intertwine with each other, and that is ideal. All aspects are important to include in teaching, and in a setting where authentic instruction occurs, I think they will all be present. Sometimes I think it is easier to include some aspects than others. For example, communication is a given in a Spanish classroom; students will be learning grammar and vocabulary, but all of them should be present or the students are not being served well.

            I think the hardest to incorporate is probably Connections or Community because classroom subjects and life, particularly in American education, have become so isolated. However, as educators aiming for integrated Best Practice, we strive against that tendency.

            While all 5 should be present across the curriculum, and covered well and pretty evenly, all the standards cannot be covered by one lesson. Therefore, teachers should cover different ones in different lessons. Making a few standards a priority every day, but rotating them with different activities, ensures that all are included in a natural way. Also, focusing on different standards paired with differentiated instruction in a natural and useful correlation.

Permalink Reply by Ben Campbell on January 22, 2012 at 9:08pm

I think we will all agree here that the five c's are all interconnected.  As the text book says on page 52, "no one goal can be separated from the other, nor is any one goal more important than another."  This interconnection is reinforced in the 5 c's diagram where there are 5 rings all connected.  That being said all 5 should be focused on.  Now I know there are some c's easier to focus on in the classroom like communication and culture however that doesn't make them more important than the others.  

If we look specifically at a lesson, I think it is nearly impossible to fit in all the 5 c's and I don't think one lesson is suppose to focus on all 5.  However, over a unit I think the ideal situation is to equally focus on all of the c's.  One reason I believe this is because it makes class more interesting.  Instead of going to class everyday and only doing repetitive vocabulary and grammar drills, one day you may do grammar games but the next day you focus on the culture and comparisons goals.  This would create a better learning experience and a more enjoyable one as well.  Another reason i think a unit should focus equally on all of the c's is because it's like a form of differentiated instruction.  Some student in the class may not understand the preterite/imperfect lecture however on the next day when the class is reading about the history and culture of a past civilazation and sees the preterite/imperfect used in the readings he may better understand it.  So i think it gives the students more ways to really learn the language.

One last thing I want to say is some teachers I have talked to from my high school and a few at the school I'm at now act like the 5 c's are just busy work for the teachers.  If we look at them like they are just more things that we have to check off of a to do list it will just be busy work and it will do no good.  However, if we don't look at it like something we have to force into a lesson the 5 c's are going to be incorporated into our lessons whether we know it or not.  So I hope that once I start teaching I don't over look the value of the five c's and just start looking at them as something I have to mark off and then ignore until the next unit.  I hope the c's will always remind me of the importance that community, connections, communication, comparisons, and culture have in teaching and learning a language.

Permalink Reply by Richard Barrett on January 25, 2012 at 7:07pm

Although this might seem contrary to what I've said previously, I actually do believe the 5 C's can be addressed in each lesson that we do.  Now, I don't want to say that that is what we should do because that is prescriptivist language, but I think it is necessary to point out that it can be done and is done, we just might not realize it; we automatically tend to do it when we're trying to make something make sense to our students.

 To illustrate, let's use your example of the preterite/imperfect lesson.  Let's say to help teach the preterite/imperfect, you use an authentic text about a member of an indigenous population and his/her first-hand account of the arrival of the Spaniards.  Okay, before reading/showing them the story, you contextualize it by explaining a little bit about the culture of some indigenous peoples by telling them who they were.  Then, you connect this story to the history of the Pilgrams from England who landed in what is now the United States.  Then you and the students compare the experience of the Native Americans of North America to that of Native Americans in Central and South American when Europeans first came to the Americas.   

After that, you can move to the grammar stuff; the text is already trying to communicate with the students, you just have to help them understand what it is trying to say.  When talking about the past tense you tap students' prior knowledge of the past tense in their L1; after making these connections, you facilitate the making of comparisons of how both languages express the idea of past tense.

All while this is happening, you are buildingcommunitybecause you are fostering the students' understanding of a language and culture which will one day allow them to be a part of or at least navigate the target lingua-cultural community.

Now, I know your reading this and probably thinking to yourself, that's a lot to cover in one lesson. It is; but keep in mind that a lesson is not hindered by the confines of a mere day.  You could have a lesson that covers two or more days or longer!

Permalink Reply by Richard Barrett on January 23, 2012 at 3:06pm

To be honest, I think this question (and the previous answers as a result) are inherently flawed.  By asking whether one of these goals should have more importance than another, it is putting a value statement on that particular goal (something that I feel is particularly dangerous when working with unreadily quantifiable themes such as these).  And the same is true even when you say that these goals have equal value.  Regardless of whether you are saying that a particular goal is greater than, less than, or equal to in importance to another goal, you are making the assumption that these goals are comparable.  When talking about the five “C’s” however, this is in fact not the case.  When trying to compare Community, Connections, Communication, Comparisons, and Culture, you are basically (to use the old adage) trying to compare apples to oranges.  I think that when some of my colleagues speak about the C’s in “competition” and wanting to fit them all in to each lesson, that represents a latent misunderstanding of the interrelationship of the C’s as well as each C’s distinctive individual importance. Now, let me explain.

As I alluded to earlier, these goals are very different.  To illustrate this difference, I find it important to categorize these goals into three separate groups: those “C’s” that address content goals, those that address methods/strategic goals, and those that address relevancy/applicability goals.  To put it a different way, these goals can (or even should be) grouped according to what types of question they answer: “what” questions, “how” questions, and “why” questions.

 For instance, Communication and Culture are the content goals because they answer “What” we want the students to learn/be able to do.  These are the primary “things” we will teach in an FL classroom. 

Connections and Comparisons represent strategic methods goals because they answer the question of “How” we want students to learn content.  These are primarily “ways” in which we teach.

Finally, I’ve put Communities into a group called relevancy/applicability goals because they represent “why” we want the students to learn content.  I think you would agree that we want students as a result of our teaching to be able to be a part of or at least navigate different language and culture communities.  In the end, we also want our students to be a part of a continued community of learners; our awareness of what and how our students learn will do a lot to nurture this sense of community.

To summarize let me say this: yes, these goals are interrelated and each is very important, but they are not on the “same page” so to speak.  Therefore, it would be wrong to say that these goals have equal importance.  They do not have more or less importance than one another; they simply have different kinds of importance. 

So, maybe instead of asking which has more importance, maybe we could simply ask ourselves about the true interrelatedness of Culture, Communication, Connections, Comparisons, and Community.

Permalink Reply by Richard Barrett on January 25, 2012 at 7:35pm

Sarah, I'm sorry if I've misrepresented what you or anyone else was saying.  When I said what I said, it was only because it appeared to me that the C's were all being viewed as types of content to be taught; however, I think we can agree now that this is not the case.

I agree with you about the relationship between communities and cultures.  During my conception of the place for communities, I originally thought that it could hold a place along with cultures in the content categories because of the word's innate connection with the word "culture".  But then I realized that "culture" could include "community" because every community has its own culture.  Think about for instance the community of Berea and its culture.

Also, I ended  up putting community where I did because of the descriptors/standards under the category.  These point to a desire for the students to move beyond the level of content and "knowing" and more towards a level of "being".

 

Permalink Reply by Ben Campbell on January 25, 2012 at 4:56pm

Rrrrricardo (extra emphasis on the 'r' in remembrance of spn 305 and don bill) I like the way you proposed a change to the question at the very end of your post.  I think by asking about the interrelatedness of the c's instead, keeps us from comparing the c's and misrepresenting the importance of the goals as a whole.  You are right, we shouldn't look at individual c's and say this one is better than the others because like you said it's like comparing apples and oranges.  That being said, i agree with sarah.  I don't think anyone of us looks at the c's as if they are in competition.  Also, I don't think any of us believe that all 5 c's should be put in one lesson.  That's pretty impossible to do since some of us only have 55 minutes of class and that would probably take a week of classes.  Last i'm a bit confused by the your second to last paragraph.  When I said each goal is equally important, i was saying that no goal is more important or less important than the other.  Which i think you would agree with right? So i'm confused what you are getting at in that paragraph...I think we all think the same way about this...maybe i'm just confused or missing something?...Anyways, i also like the way you look at the 5 c's as what how and why questions.  thats a good way to look at it.  (i think it's time to stop my reply as my punctuation and grammar get a lil out of hand...) :)

Permalink Reply by Richard Barrett on January 25, 2012 at 7:43pm

Ben, I think that what I was trying to say through my semantic pickyness is that even when you are saying that two things are of equal importance, you are making a comparison about them, and what I am arguing is that we shouldn't be "comparing" the C's at all.

Permalink Reply by Jessica Richardson on January 25, 2012 at 6:10pm

I'm going to comment on this one too because it is somewhat different than the others (thanks for the perspective Ricardo! ) and I think our other posts have said many of the same things. However, the danger that I see in all of our discussions of the 5 Cs, and maybe this is what you are alluding to, is making them too important in and of themselves. Yes, they are the what, how and why of teaching, but I think it's dangerous to focus too much on incorporation, because, as Ben says, you could take forever on that, or to have it be something else to "cover." I agree with Sarah in that these are things that we should be doing naturally in holistic teaching, and that perhaps a detailed discussion of them is good for us (as those learning to teach) to know and good for those not proficient in including those aspects into teaching. However, if we are doing our jobs well, they will be a part of our teaching. Perhaps that's the real reason teachers get annoyed with them, they are a redundant reminder of what we already do. That's just a guess, but maybe teachers feel like they are being belittled in having someone else guide their instruction (however the sad state of affairs is that they are necessary in certain cases).

Permalink Reply by Richard Barrett on January 26, 2012 at 2:59pm

If this was facebook, I would "like" this comment.