Dr. Rubio is a nationally recognized world language scholar who has published extensively on the topic of dual language immersion teaching and learning. In 2023, Dr. Rubio joined the faculty of Yale University as the new Director of the Center for Language Study. Prior to that, Dr. Rubio served as a Professor of Spanish Linguistics in the Department of World Languages and Cultures and co-founder and Director of the Second Language Teaching and Research Center at the University of Utah.
If you teach or are otherwise involved with learners in Dual Language Immersion (DLI) classrooms, you likely understand the various challenges and rewarding moments that come with interacting with these students.
Evaluating Results
We seem to reach the peak of excitement when we realize that these learners are able to fully participate in conversations with native speakers and understand language that would be out of reach for most other learners. But then we fall into the trough of disillusionment when we see them make the same mistakes over and over again with some of the most basic and predictable language forms. “How is that possible?” we wonder. “These students have been exposed to vast amounts of comprehensible input and plenty of opportunities to produce output in communicative situations. How is it that they don’t get that a plural noun requires a plural (not singular!) article?” Of course, our natural reaction as language professionals is to think about ways to take action. What can we do to help these learners’ proficiency keep growing? My suggestion is simple, at least in theory: gather lots of evidence, analyze it, identify the cause of the problem, and determine the appropriate intervention.
Gathering Good Data
Working from the ACTFL Assessment of Performance toward Proficiency in Languages (AAPPL) data collected by the State of Utah through its annual assessment of DLI learners, a team of researchers were able to study Spanish DLI students’ answers to the presentational writing section of the AAPPL test. We worked through hundreds of responses written by learners at different levels of proficiency and were able to isolate some of those high-frequency errors with basic structures that their teachers find particularly annoying. We looked specifically at errors with number and gender agreement; two grammatical features that, on the surface, should not be too problematic, but are extremely common among these students. We were able to identify the contexts in which these errors typically occur and then devise pedagogical interventions to address and, hopefully, correct them.
Taking Action
We learned, for example, that students tend to make agreement errors involving inanimate nouns (e.g., *una película) much more often than with animate nouns (e.g., *una gato); or that gender agreement errors (masculine and feminine) are a lot more prevalent than number agreement errors (singular and plural). The findings led us to hypothesize that an increased and guided focus on certain forms would result in better performance.
We were lucky to have access to data from thousands of students through a corpus of DLI learner language compiled by the University of Utah. While access to massive amounts of data is obviously very helpful, it is not strictly necessary. Every teacher can get into the habit of collecting their students’ evidence of learning and then analyzing it to inform teaching practice. A 30,000-foot view of our students’ production can often reaffirm our anecdotal impressions about what they can and cannot do. But, just as often, it challenges our assumptions and pushes us to do things differently. Give it a try!
