Can Do Statements
I posted a similar article to this one here a few months ago. I am posting on this topic again because I feel like it:
If daily goals like the ones in the list below were on the board to start each class, as a language student I personally would not get particularly excited about class that day.
“Today I can identify and use regular -er verbs in the present tense.”
“Students will learn five new vocabulary words related to food.”
“Today I can correctly use the verb ‘to be’ to describe people.”
“I can introduce myself and ask a partner for their name, age, and birthday.”
“Today I can ask and answer questions about what I did over the weekend.”
“Students will be able to order food from a menu in the target language.”
“I can read a short paragraph and identify the main idea.”
“Today I will write three complete sentences describing my house.”
“I can describe two traditions associated with Día de los Muertos.”
“I can use adjectives to describe my family members.”
Let’s just say it: the above objectives are not going to get our students very engaged in my class that day. They just aren’t. Why?
Here are some reasons:
If you read the things in the above list, they are boring. What students come into a language class wanting to conjugate a verb or write three sentences about their house, especially if they don’t live in a very nice house because they can’t keep up with its maintenance because their dad is in prison? That’s assuming that they even live in a house. What if students’ middle schools are located in shoot zones? And what if a student can’t order food from a menu in the target language when they can’t even afford to go to a restaurant, but get their nutrition from a bag of potato chips because there are no food markets near where they live? What if a student doesn’t care about the Day of the Dead because they have seen enough death in their own neighborhoods? What if they don’t care about answering questions about what they did over the weekend because they worked 28 hours from Friday to Sunday? What if they don’t have any family members?
If you read them carefully, most of the “Can Do” learning objectives above involve students outputting the language when they have not had remotely enough comprehensible input to be able to do so. The research plainly states that a massive amount of input must precede even a little amount of output, so why ask them to do something they can’t?
Third, the above objectives are about memorization. Even the few students who can actually do those things for the test can’t do them even a few weeks later precisely because they were memorized, so how could they be expected to do it on an approaching common assessment? All this has to do with Krashen’s “Silent Period”.
Let’s repeat that: when kids memorize words, they forget them, which is the same as they never learned them. Everybody knows that memorization is happening and that something is wrong, but they can’t quite say what it is. It’s the memorization. It makes a hypocrite out of ACTFL and their lofty language. Memorization has nothing to do with Communication. Full stop.
Not every student can read a short paragraph in their first language. A lot of their ability to read comes from the neighborhood elementary and middle schools they attended. With this point we are now moving into the DEI piece, a concern that is not being addressed in most schools except in spite of all the talk.
Let’s not even comment on this one: “”Today I can correctly use the verb ‘to be’ to describe people.” That’s also about memorization, not naturally emerging speech. Another full stop.
And before the reader labels me as some kind of radical, please understand that I posted goals like these every day for 24 years in my classrooms in South Carolina from 1977 to 2001, so I get it. It made me want to quit teaching.
We do not use Can-Do statements in our instruction because they are in direct conflict with how people acquire languages. To use Can-Do statements in a CI format contradicts every detail of the research about how people acquire languages. For more on Can-Do statements, See Appendix I of the new Triangle book.
I was re-reading this and hoping I might find “Learning targets” we CAN reasonably use to satisfy our box checking admin…
as in, things you have said before, like: “Students will listen to and understand spoken (TL)”
Is that in a different post?