Differentiating Instruction

I’m pretty proud of my Duolingo streak, which is approaching 2,000 days. During that time, I have had a lot of opportunities to observe how foreign language games can differentiate instruction. Duolingo does a lot of things to motivate students. A couple of years ago they launched a monthly challenge. My mom, my son, and I are all working on the French Duolingo program. Initially, we all had the same challenge– complete 20 tasks in a month to get the badge in your profile. The tasks include things like “earn 20xp,” “get more than 90% correct in 4 lessons,” and “complete seven speaking exercises.”

Over time, I’ve noticed that my tasks have gotten more challenging at a different rate than my mom’s and my son’s. Right now, I have to complete 50 challenges a month to get the badge. My mom has to complete 30, and my son, who doesn’t go for the badges, still only has to get 20. My challenges involve completing legendary levels (the hardest levels) or learning for 15 minutes, while my mom might complete a challenge by speaking seven times, which takes about a minute in total. Learners have the chance to complete three challenges a day. If I’ve been completing all three challenges for several days, the challenges I’m offered are usually quite time-consuming or difficult to complete. If I take a break from them for a few days, they get easier. Duolingo differentiates by challenging students or meeting them where they are, depending on what they have observed from individual users’ prior behavior.

Daily Instructional Framework

I am a French foreign language teacher, which gives me a lot of opportunities to use an integrated curricular framework. Foreign language teaching has changed a lot over the last few decades, and one of the principal ways it has changed is that instead of teaching about the language, teachers use language to teach about something else. I also use a curricular framework for my daily lesson plans. This framework was popularized by Tina Hargaden and is based on Stephen Krashen’s monitor model theory (1981). Hargaden’s framework includes five basic steps: reading, creating, oral review, shared writing, and shared reading (2019). No matter what is being taught, from talking about an individual student in the class to having a discussion about the first French female doctor to serve during World War I, using this daily framework makes lesson planning easy for teachers, provides a predictable classroom environment for students, and maximizes the opportunity for listening, speaking, reading, and writing in French.

​

Hargaden, T. (2019). A Strong, Flexible, Infinitely Repeatable Daily Lesson Sequence that Helps Us Maintain Our Energy. Stepping Stones to Language Acquisition.

Multimodal Practices

My students fill out a graphic organizer every day in French class. They are asked to do a couple of very specific things on the organizer, like filling out the date. But the two biggest openings on the paper give them the chance to pick the mode of output that best suits them. The requirement is that they provide at least five pieces of information about what they are learning. They can do this in whatever manner best suits them including writing in English, drawing a picture, making a concept map, or writing in French. This is a very simple example of giving students choice and a sense of autonomy to know how to meet their own needs, thereby modifying while maintaining rigor (American College of Education, 2020). 

American College of Education. (2020). CI6103: Module 4: Presentation 2: Evidence-Based and Multimodal Strategies. Canvas.

Importance of Comprehensibility

The biggest factor in whether a lesson succeeds or fails is if the teacher makes the material comprehensible. This means that the reading that is selected must be something that the students can understand, or that it is made comprehensible with scaffolds and supports. The input that comes in the “create” portion of the lesson must also be comprehensible. If we are talking about the process that French Canadian farmers use to make maple syrup, students need to know the vocabulary for making maple syrup. If the material is not comprehensible, it is not successful for the students. As the year goes on, the complexity of the language generally increases, and it’s up to me as the teacher to make sure that I do not lose students as they progress at different rates.