How well do students transition from Somos to grammar courses?

Modified on Sun, 17 Mar at 12:53 PM

Wondering whether students taught with an Acquisition-focused or Implicit approach to language instruction, which is what The Somos Curriculum uses, is very common. We want our students to experience success in their future language classes, and we (usually) want to play nicely with colleagues.

Somos is used by more than 100,000 teachers around the world, and many of those teachers are sending their students on to courses that are taught with an explicit approach with significant or heavy grammar instruction. Keep in mind that, if this is the case, those instructional choices are not being made in alignment with state, national, and international standards, which are proficiency-based. Even the AP Language exam does not evaluate grammar!
The two biggest challenges that are reported are:

Student frustration
Angry colleagues

Student frustration:

Students were excelling in the acquisition focused program and communicating meaningfully in the target language. In the new program, they feel defeated because they are not experiencing the same success. One important thing to point out is that it is not typical for a majority of students in a Level 1 class to experience a high level of success. As students in a traditional or grammar-focused model move on to Level 2, their expectations about their performance are very different. Many students, if they choose to move on, are expecting to perform low in the new class. However, when we focus on setting reasonable expectations, communicating with students in a way that they understand, and celebrating what they can do, a majority of learners experience success in early levels. When those successful learners move on to the next level and are taught in an explicit model, they revert to the same patterns of success that they would have experienced had they been taught that way in Level 1. Students who are good at explicit learning (practicing, memorizing, applying, studying) will succeed, and those that aren't, don't. It isn't that the instruction in their first year or years failed them, it's that the instruction in the new program is not designed for them to be successful. If they complain that they don't "get" the grammar rules, they wouldn't have "gotten" them in the first place! Grammar is not language, but that's a topic for another time.

Angry colleagues:

This is a really tough one, because most of us care--at least a little--about relationships with colleagues. Whether you don't want to let someone down or whether their anger is making you question whether you made the right decision, it's hard. We recommend that you watch this special Fun Club video, which we recorded for exactly this purpose.

One compromise that many teachers make is to dedicate a very small amount of time at the end of the year to grammar instruction. Research actually suggests that students who spend a small amount of time learning grammar after they have begun developing an internal linguistic system, implicitly, perform just as well if not better on tests of explicit knowledge than students who were exclusively taught for a long period using explicit instruction.