You don't receive, you build

I write today to reflect on the first week of the semester.  By all the current standards of public education, I was given an incredibly manageable group to facilitate.  Here are the vitals for my class:

• Spanish 3
• 26 students
• First period (8:00-9:30)
• 7 contact hours / week
• 3 native speakers
• 12 girls, 14 boys
• 2 Freshman, 9 Sophomores, 16 Juniors

This week was a fairly unorthodox start to a language class.  Students were asked to draw from their well of past knowledge to generate, putting them in the role of Subject rather than Object of learning.  They freely associated, created lists, explored geographical phenomena, and narrated past events in their beautiful sputtering way.  I gave neither grammar lesson nor vocabulary list, allowing students to muck about in Spanish after so much time away.  The purpose is not to take away the structure, which we know to be a deep need for children, but rather to try to view language in a new way.  It is going to be a groaning process of breaking the habit of passivity in students accustomed to being treated like receptacles for information.  

Students have a composition book that they use to complete class activities, take notes and write me a short letter in Spanish at the end of the week telling me what they learned and any questions or concerns they might have.  The comments were positive, and at times telling.  There were many questions that were indicative of the assumption that the system has built into them: 

knowing grammar = productive/receptive language ability

I don't want to throw the baby out with the bath water here, and I will indeed be signaling some of the finer points of grammar and syntax for those linguistically inclined, but I maintain that these things are only important if they are connected to their real world functions, and how they are fleshed out in communicative tasks.