Encouraging students to engage with the French language was not always an easy task. One of the ways I tried to break down the barriers between students and a sense of success was through a pedagogical tool I called Friday Free Writes.

In my middle school French classroom, many of our lessons followed a Comprehensible Input (CI) structure. My classes were conducted primarily in French, and students relied on gestures, expressions, visuals, and other supports to make sense of the language—without direct translation. (If you are curious about this approach, you can explore more in my teaching portfolio.)

Every other Friday, we did an activity called the Friday Free Write. Students had five minutes to brainstorm—using notes, resources, and even friends—to gather all the French they had been learning recently. This brainstorming phase was recorded in the “Brain Storm” section of their paper and could include French, English, or a mix—whatever helped them organize their thoughts quickly. After that, they had ten minutes to write continuously in French as much as they could.

Importantly, there were no formal requirements for the writing: students did not have to commit to a topic, connect their sentences, or even tell the truth. “Le ciel est rose,” (the sky is pink) was perfectly acceptable! What mattered was producing language.

The intent behind this exercise was to allow students to see how much they could produce even from a beginning level in a language. So often we see high attrition rates in language learning courses and one of the reasons that may resonate with anyone whose tried to learn a language is feeling like they cannot use it. This exercise is a way to focus students on what they can do by limiting the scope of what they will be writing. (This is very deliberately not a creative writing or structured narrative assignment as each of these may lead students to try to use constructions that they are not yet able to produce at this level.) Based on the CI routines in my classes, there was a wealth of things my students could use and produce especially when using supports.

When it came time to review their work, I created a hybrid rubric using parts from the International Baccalaureate language acquisition rubric and the work of literacy consultant and outspoken proponent of CI in the language classroom Tina Hargaden. With this rubric, available below, both the students and I could track progress in a few different ways. The first was word count. Was it increasing, staying steady, or decreasing? After the immediate focus of getting students to feel empowered getting words on the page we then would look more reflexively at their samples. Here, I encouraged students to look beyond quantity. Were their sentences becoming more complex? Were they using conjunctions like “because” or “and” to connect ideas? In this way, I could meet students where they were in the language learning process and help them to see growth in the areas they were ready to tackle next. 

This structure created an early opportunity for students to reflect on their own learning and pushed back on the idea that there is only one way to grow in language learning. Regardless of the outcome, the brainstorming time gave every student a chance to prepare—and often led even hesitant writers to produce a few sentences. Maybe not the epic story they wished they could tell, but still something.

Unfortunately, classroom demands often crowded out the reflection piece of this assessment. At a certain point, the only consistent data point I tracked was word count. That is one of my biggest regrets from my classroom years. I wish I could go back five years and tell myself to worry less about the “urgent” things and give students more time to reflect—and more agency in their own assessment. If I could go back, I would try to implement more practices such as  providing various success samples for students to review as a foundation for this reflective practice and have students take an active role in assessing samples so they better understood my purpose and what I was looking for from this practice (Wiggins, 2022).

While the Friday Free Writes were cumulative – students who maintained or improved their level generally received a “meeting expectations” score – I wish I had built in more ways for students to interact with their own data. Letting them reflect on progress and present it in student-led conferences would have created more autonomy and ownership. With that small change, this assessment could have become more meaningful and accessible.

Reference

Wiggins, G., & Frontier, T. (2022, April 1). How to provide better feedback with rubrics. ASCD. https://ascd.org/el/articles/how-to-provide-better-feedback-through-rubrics