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1. The Promising Prospect and the Critical Caveats

Contemporary second language pedagogy furnishes a consistent system of proficiency standards, teaching approaches, assessment procedures and understanding of instructional materials that offers the promising prospect of relatively easy and quite effective integration with instruction and learning in other subject areas (and not just the STEM subjects!), as long as those from other subject areas who are reponsible for the integration of second languages with their disciplines will apply the proper pedagogies from their fields and also that of second languages. These are weighty reservations, since in many programs second language instruction and STEM-subject instruction are conducted by teachers (and supervised by administrators) who lack a grounding in modern pedagogy (and sometimes, in the case of second languages, any pedagogical backgroudn at all). Therefore we express here two critical caveats about approaches that could bring disaster to projects to implement an integration of STEM + languages:

a) combining a grammar-translation approach to language learning with any sort of STEM pedagogy, and particularly with a retrogressive pedagogy based on rote learning and preparation for discrete-point "standardized" assessment; attempting to implement such an approach would lead to an inhumane and unproductive recitation of poorly assimilated STEM knowledge in a language the learners themselves might not actually understand or speak - imagine, if you will, a nightmare where the student babbles out, not a list of verb conjugations, but rather - in German - a memorized version of the general formula for solving quadratic equations (as many learners have had to do in English in pedagogically unenlightened math classes).

b) directly converting a STEM course, however good its subject-area pedagogy, that is conducted in the native language into one conducted in second language, at the same level of STEM-subject sophistication and, compounding the disaster, the same level of linguistic sophistication; equally inappropriate - but probably not such a temptation to do - would be borrowing, from German educational sources, an existing resource for younger learners, in the earlier stages of acquiring their native language, and using it unchanged in a clasroom with older learners, in the belief that the simpler language will be more accessible to the learners, while ignoring the great disparity between the original content and the cognitive abilities of the older learners.

To put the same points positively: communicative language learning can combine well with the kind of STEM instruction that supports not only factual learning but also understanding of concepts and principles and the ability to communicate them to others - provided the instruction is calibrated carefully to the language capabilities of the learners and provides more language resources as they are needed for increasingly sophisticated comprehension and expression. This is the guiding principle of the main work conducted by this AATG-STEM project, and explains why it has had to be so selective among exising lesson plans and so intensive in its efforts to develop new model lesson plans.

••example from grammar

•• Setting the Appropriate Language Proficiency Level Is the Key Factor

In formulating the specifications for projects to be funded by its grants to support STEM + German, the AATG wisely emphasized the ACTFL Intermediate proficiency level. While it would be wonderful if learners of German in US educational institutions commonly attained - and attained earlier in their educations - higher levels of proficiency, this is not the case, and will not be for the foreseeable future. As this website's pages "about language learning" and "about assessment" discuss in detail, the Intermediate-Low level of proficiency in German, for speaking and writing, may be reached by well-motivated learners at the end of the first fulll year of college language study, by older K-12 learners after three years of high school study, and by immersion students, meaning those who start in K, somewhere during middle school (though such learners will also have strengths in listening and reading not shared by the other two groups). Correspondingly, the Intermediate-High level might be reached by at least some learners at the end of the second year of college language study, some exiting high-schoolers after studying the language continuously, starting in middle school and by some immersion learners during high school.

In effect, the setting the Intermediate levels as the main target range for these projects is a realistic compromise. Anything lower than Intermediate-Low, as the main focus, would force a painful and ludicrous simplification of the STEM content (though highly motivated learners with Novice-High proficiency and strong STEM competence can participate in activities aimed at the Intermediate-Low and even Intermediate-Mid levels). Anything above Intermediate-High would be suitable only for a small fraction of those who are learning German in K-12 and even college (though learners of German who have Advanced-Low or Advanced-Mid proficiency can gain from activities that are intended for those at Intermediate-High).

Certain features of the ACTFL Guidelines reinforce this focus on the Intermediate level of language proficiency. By Intermediate-Mid, learners are handling a wide range of everyday functions and contexts - they are beyond the level of bare survival - and have developed some flexibility in the communicative resources. They can produce several related sentences without constant prompting and correction. At ••Intermediate-High, the ACTFL Guidelines begin mentioning "••", which for students means their schoolwork; their "occupation" is to learn their various subject areas. A properly designed language curriculum would thus include systematic attention to communication about those subject areas - and would treat them as contexts for integrated, even hands-on learning, not as academic topics for individual, intellectual reading and fodder for grammar exercises or non-functional vocabulary quizzes. In other words, the learners' other subject areas would be addressed, in at least part of the language instruction, through the methods of Content-Based Instruction, Team-Based Learning, etc., which are also effective in language instruction about any context, not just school subjects and, within that realm, not just STEM.

This contention is borne out by many sets of state and local language standards. An example can be drawn from the document ••

Here it is vital to understand both what learners CAN and can NOT do at the ACTFL Intermediate level. Intermediates live and breathe in the world of concrete entities, and mostly in the Here and Now. They do not manage abstract concepts well in their second language, even though they may well have the cognitive capabilities, subject-area knowledge, and first-language skills to do so on the "outside". They do not readily manage counterfactual situations, or represent the viewpoints of others, or even convey more than the simplest events in the past or future time-frames. It should be recalled here that the standard of competence is what can be done effectively in real-time and unprompted, not what grammatical terms and concepts have been presented for targeted manipulation, or what vocabulary lists have been distributed. Intermediates are Intermediates. The language learner who can handle without major discomfort the higher-level tasks and tools described here is not an Intermedaite, but something higher - but that judgment must be based on an objective assessment of what the learner can truly DO with the language, not what has been "taught" in the classroom, tested in isolation, or just talked about in discussions of grammar.

Examples can help greatly here, and will be drawn from the areas of health and environmentalism - quite appropriate both to the interests of modern STEM curricula and also to the prominent roles the German-speaking countries have played in medical science and, more recently, also in environmental science and sustainability. The first example is drawn from the work of the committee of preK-20 educators that produced ••. The PI of this AATG-STEM grant project served on that committee.

At a crucial point in producing its document the committee decided to give examples of the language that typified various levels of proficiency in discussing health, which certainly relates to STEM. The committee was discussing how to advocate, with communities of stakeholders, its work with standards, assessment, and curricula. It wanted to show that language learning could be occupationally relevant to all learners, not just an elite; it wanted to show how languages could be integrated with subject areas that were acknowledged as "core" disciplines, rather than as electives - and indeed as prestigious or "hard" subjects; and it wanted to discourage school districts from setting their language proficiency "benchmarks" too low, in their unwise inclination to produce more "benchmark met" scores at the expense of producing learners whose actual learning was so inconsequential as to be useless.

The choice of specific context for the general topic of health was an initial exchange between a medical professional and an incoming patient whose native language was other than English. In the examples the document offered, the "patient" and "caregiver" speak English, since the committee's document was intended for the general community; but each of the examples was carefully formulated to conform to the ACTFL level which it was intended to illustrate. Here are the examples for proficiency levels that cover the chief target levels for the AATG-German projects, and also those that fall below and rise above those target levels:

••

The example about health is drawn from discussions of a state-level committee that, starting in the mid-1990s, was developing language standards and content specifications for Oregon exiting high-schoolers, again with the PI as a committee member. For three reasons the committee wanted to promote linkage between second languages and other subject areas: 1) Recent landmark legislation had moved second language from the realm of electives to that of required "core" subjects, to rank alongside mathematics, natural science, social science, English, and fine arts / music (a policy that was later honored in the breech rather than the observance). 2) Wisely concerned about the marginalization of second languages, the committee wanted to include other content areas in its curriculum and show how languages could be included in those other content areas. 3) The ACTFL Guidelines clearly stated, as discussed above, that a broad range of non-survival contexts was appropriate to the Intermediate level, including occupational themes, with the occupation of students being defined as "student", and thus the content of the various school subject areas a legitimate source of topics about which to communicate in second languages.

But the committee was worried that stakeholders who were not language specialists (and even some who were) would either balk skeptically at teaching content from those areas in second language classes, because of lack of teacher competence or the necessarily low proficiency levels of the learners, or else would assume that the students would process those content areas at a much higher linguisitic, or even conceptual, level than was reallistically possible.

Therefore the committee decided to offer specific examples of language that, at the various proficiency levels within the range of K-12 learners, might express a content, choosing environmental studies as that content, because concerns about the environment were becoming a widespread national concern and because the Oregon economy depended much on the natural environment (agriculture, forestry, tourism). The PI, thinking also about the effects of pollution on German forests, then much in the news, suggested the specific topic of pollution,trees and acid rain. The committee then easily determined that the vocabulary that would be encountered in first-language discussion of that topic, even in high school, would be hopelessly beyond the range of K-12 learners of second languages if the intent was for them to use it in real time in larger units of communication: "deforestation" and "acid rain", for example, in utterances like "If German factories had been more closely regulated, large-scale emission of pollutants could have been prevented and thus deforestation prevented." (The example here would rate far up in the ACTFL Superior level, and many a high-schooler would not be able to produce it in even the native language.)

Instead, the committee looked rightly at the descriptors for Intermediate proficiency, which emphasize the presence of the ability to formulate complete sentences and perhaps a few at a time (but no more than that), and also considered what ecology-related, though simple, vocabulary might be available at the Intermediate level, and which situations related to the natural environment a young language learner might encounter under "real-world" conditions. For example, it would be quite natural for a teenager who has had several years of high school German to then visit Germany for a few weeks, including a drive or hike through areas like the Rhineland or the Black Forest, which are indeed scenic and filled with trees, but yet near large centers of population and industry, with their major sources of pollutants. If skill in using a second language can be described as willingness to use available tools to say what is possible, rather than lapsing into silence after failure to say the impossible, then the young traveler, looking at the trees, sky, and expansive landscape, might use Intermediate language to say, "The trees here are sick. They are gray, not brown and green. The water tastes bad - sour. A lot of people live there. They have big houses and cars." "Tree" is Intermediate- or even Novice-level vocabulary, as are the basic colors, "sick", and all the other words in the example, with the possible exception of "sour", though a clever learner might borrow it from "Sauerkraut" - and indeed the German word "saur" is the source of "Säure", the German word for "acid", which a helpful interlocutor would probably point out on the spot, and the young traveler would learn the word "acid rain" easily. On the other had, "forest" is not Intermedaite-level vocabulary, but "trees" will do the job for the while, just as the young traveler can express the causal link between sick trees and large populations with a high standard of living simpy - and even eloquently - by the sequencing of the simple sentences, rather than attempting, at an unrealistically high level of proficiency, a linkage with words like "because", whose German equivalent ("weil") is easily confused with English "while", and which involves major difficulties with word order.

These examples were discussed at considerable length because the way they were originally developed shows how instructional resources for STEM+languages should be developed. It also illustrates the single most dangerous pitfall,which is not "dumbing down", but rather "smarting up": aiming at content that is too complex, to be processed at an unrealistically high level of language. Far better to "keep it simple", perhaps providing optional enrichments, than to demand the impossible and then leave the classroom teacher and learners to pick up the shattered pieces in an atmosphere of failure and frustration. Here the guiding principle for the target language level should be Krashen's famous "Input Principle", or "i+1": for progress in language proficiency, the student must encounter the language input ("i") on a level that is one distinct level above what would yield perfect comprehension - but only one level, not any level beyond that would fatally undermine even basic comprehension. The same rule might be appropriate for the selection of the specific subject-area content in in STEM and other learning. One is tempted to hypothesize that STEM+language instructional materials should aim mostly at either "i+1" in the language OR in the STEM content, but NOT constantly both at the same time, except for some "challenge" items, or to allow for a moderate range in learner levels in STEM or language within the same class. An additional cautionary point might be that care in selecting the language level may be even more important than care in selecting the level of the STEM content.

•• Almost As Important: Selecting STEM Activities That Encourage (Require!) Communication between Learner and Teacher and among Learners

There are, no doubt, excellent STEM instructional materials that are nevertheless unsuited for language learning of any kind or level. Looking, then, at STEM materials with an eye to suitability ofr the integration of STEM + German (or second languages in general), two desiderata are evident: 1) As the discussion above explains, they must be approachable at the ACTFL Intermediate level of speaking and writing (with some activities also accessible at lower levels, especially Novice-High), and at the Advanced-Low/Mid level of reading and listening (with some activities also accessible at lower levels, though probably no lower than Intermediate-Low). 2) The activities must vigorously encouraging human communication and interaction with authentic or realistically simulated STEM-related resources in the target language.

The latter issue deserves considerable elaboration. First, asking that STEM materials encouraging human communication is not a demand alien to current STEM pedagogy, which indeed pays attention to integrating STEM with communication, both to reinforce the individual learner's communication skills, and because the modern workplace needs STEM experts (and other specialists too!) who can engage in communal problem-solving and explain their work and ideas to others. But of course some good STEM activities may not pay much attention to verbal communication, whether written or, certainly, oral, and whether interpersonal or presentational.

More to the point, though, is this: STEM activities, suitable to integration of STEM + languages must support not only the appropriate level of proficiency, but also, at least in the aggregate, the full range of language "modalities" - the language-teaching profession's term for speaking, writing, reading and listening. While modern pedagogy, as expressed for example in the many sets of "learning outcome" statements produced by single institutions and entire school systems, does nod its head toward both group work and presentational speaking, the greater concern is devoted to writing, and within that to academic writing (with, of course, considerable attention to remedial writing). Even greater is the disparity between the attention paid to reading and that to listening - that is, when the means of communication is the native language of the learner. While adults are sometimes annoyed that children and teenagers "don't listen", scarcely anyone ponders whether learners (except those with identifiable hearing problems) need training in listening comprehension. This is true even when the learners are listening to audio clips; they made be reminded to take careful notes, and there may be helps with unfamiliar vocabulary, but it is unheard of to offer them help with aural comprehension of the vocabulary and structures that are constant sources of difficulty to learners of second language - partly because those learners are operating at much more primitive level of language proficiency, and partly because audio resources in second languages, even when the context is everyday speech, cause great learner anxiety, where those in the native language do not, unless the resources are highly specialized in content and terminology and the student is working under high-stakes conditions.

To put it more concretely, and with an eye to explaining which language "input" resources are appropriate to most STEM + languages activities: In their first language most students, including those in K-12 and even the relatively early grades, can readily comprehend a short news feature about commonly-discussed STEM-related topics. Examples would be a radio story about changes in local recycling procedures, perhaps with an interview with a public official telling why the new procedure has been adopted, or an on-line text of several paragraphs which compares two new mobile devices according to their cost, basic technical specs, distinctively "cool" features, drawbacks, and eye-candy appeal. Comprehending the equivalent materials, drawn from authentic second-language resources, would push or exceed the limits of learners whose proficiency in listening and reading is at the ACTFL Advanced level. Conveying, in speech or writing, what has been comprehended, would be disastrously beyond the capability of learners who are Intermediate-High in speaking or writing, even if the task were put in a seemingly casual context, such as chattering with close friends or sending an equivalent text message while visiting the technology store at the mall.

A particularly important feature is STEM resources and activities the realm of concrete, everyday objects and processes. It is not necessary that abstracts be avoided, but if they are part of the goals and activities they should be strongly linked to what is ••tangible. Considerable use of "hands-on learning" is regarded as good practice in STEM instruction, even beyond the early grades. For STEM + language learning hands-on activities are important because at the Intermediate level (and certainly below that), the learner operates in a world of everyday, physical entities that can be described with the simplest of words. The research has shown over and over that, whatever the order of presentation by the teacher, in real-time communicative activity the students learn and use the particular before the general; when dealing with time and sequence they default to the present tense and straightforward chronological (and still very stressful) narration.The example of trees and pollution offered above illustrates the point.

Another example can be drawn from mathematics, and after the discussion more immediately above can hint at what a STEM + languages learning activity for geometry should be conceived. The word for "circle" is commonly included in core vocabulary for the Intermediate-High or at least Advanced-Low level, and certainly the learner, even well below that level, acquires, for everyday use (and without thinking at all about geometry), the words for several objects that illustrate a circle: "cup", "glass", "bottle", maybe even "wheel". It is unlikely that most Intermediate-level learners acqurie (or even encounter) the words for "triangle" or "square", but learning them in German is not difficult at all. Most beginning students learn the word for "corner" (Ecke) as part of dealing with city layouts and transportation, and all first-year language programs teach the simple numbers. In German, the regular polygons have "transparent" names: a triangle isa "three-corner" (Dreieck), a square is a "four-corner" (Viereck), and so on to however many side one might wish to ascribe to a polygon ("many-corner" or Vieleck). Beginning learners of German can understand (and create) the German word for "heptagon" ("seven-corner", Siebeneck) even if they do not know the English word.

But - now the main pedagogical point about geometry + language learning - the simplicity of the German terms can not be allowed to encourage an inclination to short-circuit the STEM-learning process and overestimate the learners' second-language capabilities by jumping right up to activities about polygons, polyhedra, etc. The Intermediate-level language learner (and the ordinary citizen too) do not encounter, in ordinary life, the abstract figures of geometry, aside from an occasional reference to the Pentagon and such. Circles and squares and maybe hexagons are common, ellipses and decagons rare (and a STEM math activity that sought to use the Susan B. Anthony dollar to convey the geometry and language of the hendecagon [or undecagon] - German Elfeck - would be regarded as, to say the least, odd and probably boring). The same geos for process words, which are also necessary in hands-on learning (and which - even the most basic ones - learners of second languages at the Intermediate level are still struggling to learn). "Choose", "separate", "pass" are still wobblyor non-existent for Intermediate-Highs, though "give" and "take" are probably present. Even "draw", and certianly the much more abstract verbs "rotate" and "reverse" are much higher than Intermediate-High - which sets limits to what can be done with STEM + language activities.

To put it another way, STEM math activities that help learners reinforce basic arithmetic, explore geometry, calculate area, and prepare for exponentials by hands-on deliberation about value-for-size in pizza buying or learning about ceramic tiles for remodeling a kitchen or bathroom, are just what is needed for STEM + language. And certainly some such resources are readily available, with minimal need to adjust their basic features for second-language learning (though systematic reinforcement of vocabulary will always be helpful).

Two reassuring obversations can be offered here: 1) There are plenty of existing STEM instructional materials whose original language - whether English or some other - clusters at the Intermediate-High level (or which can be adapted to do so). 2) There are, in many languages, and certainly in German, plenty of authentic media resources that have been created for ordinary use, rather than educational purposes, and whose linguistic level is Advanced-Low, or well below that. This Project's demonstration materials include examples of such media.

As for the desideratum that the STEM instructional materials for STEM + language use include rich communicative features: ••

games OK but not necessary

enrichment activities can be different

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