Let's concede first that implementing progressive approaches to language LEARNING is an even tougher nut to crack, except maybe with young learners. By the time they read middle school, the learners have already absorbed - from friends, parents, even popular entertainment (••movies!) – a notion of the language classroom that is very regressive. They mostly don't like what they expect, but they get very anxious when they don't get it. At least one presentation at HICAH 2014 addresses this issue. ••

But even more difficult is to get teachers ot change their attitudes and methods. That's why we sitll have to talk so earnestly about progressive pedagogy, even though the basic principles have been with for decades or longer. In North America we think primarily about the standards and (implied) methods associated with the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, but there have been other impetuses, and common-sense thinking about how to learn languages for practical use is nothing new.

Some features that we can readily associate with progressive language pedagogy:

1) ••function / communicative

2) Decreased fixation on analytic grammar and its fancy (and often inappropriate!) terminology. No, not rejection of teaching / learning the structures of the language, but rather restricting the grammar "syllabus" to what the learners can attempt to manage at each particular stage in their learning - and ALSO not prioritizing grammar by the messages delivered by our choices of resources, standards, and tests. Along with this goes judicious select of target levels, in terms not only of grammar but also function and context. For intro college Spanish, French, German it is inappropriate - to give just a few examples - to expect, in speaking and writing, the past perfect and double object pronouns, or to expect the learners to handle abstract topics at length in real time. You can present that stuff, and maybe you can get some of it back under carefully restricted circumstances and with a lot of cuing. But that's not proficiency. Rule of thumb: in first-year SFG, limit grammar to what is characteristics of the production of ACTFL Advanced-Low. Your learners won't actually reach AL, but to get to IM in speaking and writing, and to handle IH in listening and reading, they need a glimpse of AL structures and vocabulary.

3) Major emphasis on speaking, partly because speaking is a prominent part of communicative function, and partly to offset the assumption that grammar and speaking are quite separate (and thus, if the instruction fixates on grammar, that speaking is irrelevant).

(Here is a good place, since we're talking about students' views, to make the point that stating the goal of proficiency is not enough. If you preach it, you must teach for it; but if you teach for it, you must also grade for it; and if you grade for it you must - this is a matter of ethics as well as pedagogy - also test for it.)

4) Rich provision of "realia" - authentic materials from the culture(s) in which the target language is embedded, and particularly media that show the language in use at a level of "i+1" (Krashen's Input Hypothesis). But just showing the stuff is not enough - the learners must use it for practical purposes.

5) Student-centered learning - not just because that's on everyone's lips, but because proficiency meanswhat the learner can produce in real time without cuing. They have to practice, they have to take the initiative in communication (read the Guidelines for Intermediate!).

6) Tests, including scoring guides, that prioritize function over (but NOT in replacement of!) form, and the Big Picture over the individual brushstrokes.

7) Rich activities that integrate multiple language skills, are customizable to individual learners (levels and interests), and count significantly in grading.

8) Systematic consciousness-raising of learners' notions of language learning and of their progress (or lack of it), with provision for remediation.

9) Scope and sequence that follow how learners actually acquire language, rather than presenting the language as a logically-organized system to be analyzed and understood by academic linguists. Examples: b) Instead of organizing by parts of speech, organize by linguistic function - not grouping conjunctions together, separately from adverbs, and those separately from prepositions, but rather grouping together ways of expressing temporal sequence (then, later, afterwards, after + noun, after + S + V); b) creating distance between the many stages of acquiring negation: No, not; nothing; never; not any; nowhere, no one; not until/ before; neither nor; unless; not on your life; no way, José (yes way); nonetheless; none but the brave.

===============Examples of progressive approaches