Theme: assessing spoken production plan: I. Introduction II. Main part

Grammar is taught in the context of other meaningful activities

“In the past,” Blouwolff says, “I think we had this idea that we had to give students all the rules before they were allowed to create with language at all. So don’t even think about the past tense until you know all six forms this way and that way.”
Now with the larger emphasis on functional communication, “We’re really backing up and saying, what do we need students to be able to do? In order to do that specific task, what grammar would they need? What language would they need?”
So rather than teaching grammar in isolation, with students completing dozens of conjugations, concepts are taught in small chunks as needed to meet a particular communication goal.
“When we present those chunks as vocabulary and not as tricky grammar,” Blouwolff says, “the kids are able to use it right away. Even my first-year French students can say, ‘I went,’ and if I give them that, they can tell me all the places they went over the weekend. But if you were to look at a traditional textbook, absolutely no way would students be allowed to form a past tense irregular verb in the first year. That’s just not going to happen.”
“I think the fact that we don’t tell them it’s tricky grammar makes it go down a lot easier. The focus now is really on, do you know enough so that you can convey a message, and who would understand your message? Depending on how accurate you are, maybe only another world language teacher can understand your French right now. Maybe next year you’ll be able to be understood by a patient native speaker who’s accustomed to non-natives. And then the goal would be someday you could stop a busy person on the streets of Paris, and they would listen to you. 
“But we’re not aiming there right away. If we insist on perfection from the get-go, most people just drop out, because that’s not how we’re built to communicate.”

Students examine authentic cultural resources

“For far too long,” Blouwolff says, “culture was relegated to these little blurbs in the textbook chapters, and if you had extra time you would read them and sometimes they were really awful. Or maybe some teachers were doing a thing like culture Fridays.”
In place of these activities, she says, “We’re using audio and text that were created by and for native speakers. So these are not materials for language learners: things like children’s books, YouTube videos, finger plays, pop songs, advertisements, tweets. The textbook really is not the curriculum anymore, and when we take these authentic resources and start using them at the center of our courses, then culture becomes the curriculum. But it just happens to be taught, for example, in French.”
For this approach to work, teachers need to select these materials with care. “We do have to be very intentional about the texts we choose, making sure that they’re appropriate for the level of our learners, that there’s tons of visual support, that the way they’re laid out really makes it clear what’s going on. And then we can create tasks that are appropriate.”
One activity Blouwolff did with her students was watching real estate videos in French. While watching, students are likely to notice some cultural differences, like the fact that homes in France keep the toilet in a separate room from the rest of the bathroom.
“They will initially often have a yuck factor,” she says, “like That’s so gross. How can the sink not be with the toilet? So we can try to take some of that judgment off of it by looking at it as a cultural product and then thinking about, okay, what’s the practice? What is the thing going on in this culture that makes this practice make sense? And it’s just a different way of looking at it.”