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transition. Students fall through the articulation crack not simply for what they
don't know, but also for how they know what they do know. High school
programs typically spend a great deal of time, relative to college programs,
working on functional skills. College programs, on the other hand, typically
spend a great deal of time, relative to high school programs, on grammar. A
further challenge, then, was to address the differences in approaches in order to
allow students to move between programs effectively.
The solution at which we arrived derives from the emphasis in the
principles of the language learning framework (LLF) of section 1 on proficiency
(understood in the broad sense) and functional ability rather than on factual
knowledge. The principal cognitive reason for the difference in high school and
college programs just mentioned stems from the general level of cognitive
maturity of high school students. At this age24there is a general cognitive
preference for doing rather than analyzing ; in Piagetian terms, high school
students are often still in the concrete operational stage and not yet in the formal
operational stage of development.25
It turns out that there are also strong cognitive reasons for preferring to
focus heavily on procedural knowledge even in the first years of college
Russian: procedural knowledge, the ability to perform a skill and not merely to
recite forms or translate vocabulary items, takes a great deal longer to develop.
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Whereas declarative knowledge or factual information may be acquired
quickly, procedural knowledge such as language acquisition isacquired
gradually and only with extensive opportunities for practice. (O'Malley &
Chamot 1990)
Procedural knowledge initially requires controlled processing (that is, we
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have to pay attention to performing a task we have not mastered) and the
development of automaticity takes longer the more complicated the task. As the
above quote suggests, learning to use a second language is one of the most
complicated tasks that learners can tackle, and thus the time required to reach
the stage of automatic processing for a range of functional skills across a range
of topics is extremely long.
A corollary of this fact about the acquisition of procedural knowledge is
that if we can choose the area in which a student will be deficient, functional
abilities or structural knowledge, we should choose the latter. This is because
the time it will take to remedy the deficiency will be much greater if the teacher
must develop procedural knowledge rather than declarative. That is not to say
that either domain should be ignored, but simply that it is much more expensive
to ignore procedural knowledge.
24Generalizations about high school students are particularly difficult. Developmental
stages are, at best, only rough approximations, and the middle teens are especially fluid
times.
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