Proficiency and Performance – Feeling Confused?
Have you ever noticed how many terms and acronyms there are in education? Do you find yourself having difficulty keeping up with the lingo? It can be difficult remembering what everything means and how you are supposed to use/implement/incorporate all of this garble into your teaching practice. For us, World Language teachers, simple terms like proficiency, performance, and achievement can be very confusing.
I have spent years trying to make sense out of proficiency-based teaching and performance-based teaching. What does it all mean?
I Am Not An Expert
By no means would I consider myself an expert on this topic. However, I have done a lot of reading. I have attended a ton of workshops. I have asked top people in our field questions trying to make sense out of these terms. How are they different? I figured if I am unclear on the terms, maybe many of you are too. So I want to share what I have learned in hopes that it will help you with your teaching practice.
Proficiency
In basic terms, proficiency is the ability for learners to use language in a variety of real-world situations. Basically, you can’t grade proficiency. You teach towards proficiency but you are not qualified to score proficiency. You see why this can be very confusing for many people.
Proficiency is the ultimate goal, but it is so far off into the future, you will probably never see your students obtain this. You teach towards proficiency so your students will eventually obtain this amazing skill. How? You do this by setting up your students for success, following the ACTFL guidelines, and creating a safe learning environment. As a teacher, you are preparing language students to achieve proficiency… someday. Proficiency is simultaneously a vague yet very specific Mecca that you will never see your students arrive at.
Evaluating Proficiency Does Not Belong in the Classroom
WHAT! “I always grade towards proficiency,” many of you say. It’s the platform you have been supporting. Like I said above, proficiency will not be seen in our classrooms. Proficiency is big and broad. It shows how language users advance and accumulate more building blocks of language throughout their studies. It is unscripted, unrehearsed language used in any context imaginable. To measure proficiency, you have to keep moving language upward and outward. Continually expanding situations where students can use the language in real-world situations no matter what the context is.
Performance
Performance in the world language classroom is the ability to use language in limited and controlled situations. Our classrooms are controlled situations. We can assess performance. Performance tasks are opportunities for students to show us what they can do. We teach to prepare them for tasks that they have practiced, that are familiar and are predetermined. We don’t try to trick students during tests or provide assessments that “catch them” communicating incorrectly.
Teachers should provide comprehensible input to students. What students learn, practice and understand is what can be measured (the performance). Students produce language according to the expectations that have been established for a particular assignment. Expectations should be based on skills and language teachers have actually provided and students have had the opportunity to practice.
Our responsibility to assess performance should be within the scope of what we, as teachers, know students have been prepared for. Proficiency would be what students can do beyond the controlled environment of the classroom where they can communicate in ANY context.
Performance Gets Students to Proficiency
The concept of performance and proficiency is very difficult for this generation of students. Many are used to learning coming easily for them. They can walk into a class and understand what is being said and how to successfully pass that class. Langauge classes tend to be more difficult, even for the A+ student. It is a different way of learning.
Performance can be thought of as a straight line. In class, it is how students can learn new terms, memorize them, use them in simple sentences and eventually have an unrehearsed conversation putting to use all of the skills they have learned in the unit. All of it practiced. They start at point A and end at point B. A straight line.
Proficiency is more of a cone. Students need to climb and expand what they are learning. Build on their knowledge with each new unit or each year of language study. In order for students to move up the cone, they need to show they can do more complex communication in a variety of contexts. Not as simple as the straight line.
Think About This
Think of your students as a flower. The flower starts as a seed then grows into a stem. It then grows leaves and eventually blooms into a flower. Throughout this process, the flower needs nourishment and a fruitful environment if it is going to survive. So if you think of the student as a flower, you would feed them vocabulary and grammar. You would encourage them when they make mistakes, you place them in safe learning environments where they can make errors, you celebrate those errors. As they grow, you feed them more vocabulary and give them more opportunities to use the vocabulary in various contexts. You provide them with more and more performance assessments and feedback so they can grow taller an continue to bloom. If you don’t provide the student with assessments and feedback, they stay a stem, they never blossom.
Achievement
Achievement is the ability to repeat language elements that have been taught and mastered at some level. The performance assessments you provide your students are the space between achievement and proficiency. A novice student cannot be given a performance assessment on global warming. They will never achieve success and the evaluation will be pointless. However, give that student a task to introduce themselves to the new deaf student at school would be appropriate and give the student the opportunity to gain achievement for that task. Because that task was level-appropriate, the student can put together language and be successful.
The gap between achievement and proficiency is that a student can replicate language in real-world situations and achieve success if given the right opportunities, even if it isn’t rehearsed. Achievement propels students towards proficiency.
Thanks For Making It This Far
I hope this clears up these terms and helps you communicate your language goals with your students. If you are still reading this, thanks for hanging around. I know this was not the most exciting blog post!
