teaching approach involves two-thirds of instructional time being devoted to language learning and one-third of instructional time being devoted to culture.
In the program implemented by Stones, all language activities were conducted in French, while cultural content was presented in English. Student learning was assessed using a point system. Vocabulary was learned through games, with active participation earning students extra points.
In planning games using Stones approach, attention must be paid to providing a variety of competitive, collaborative, sitting, running, individual, partner, and group opportunities in each lesson. She states that it is important that all planned activities must incorporate speech.
Stones (1991) found that creating games was relatively easy, while developing activities to emphasize particular grammatical points was somewhat more difficult. In Stone's program, students recorded all new material in a graded notebook for reference, and oral tests using materials used in class were observed to be useful for evaluation. An effort was made to focus on material and learning that bridged the curriculum methods to those used in later grades.
One of the added benefits of focusing on the culture of the language being learned was that the culture course content was found to be very popular with students' parents. Moreover, evaluative data indicated that students systematically learned about significant events in French and medieval history from Roman Gaul to 1945, and good success was found for linking all events to activities associated with American culture, thereby providing students with feelings of identification for the French culture as well as increasing their understanding of it.
An example of the many benefits of teaching foreign language at the middle school level can be seen in Sherer and Biemel's (1987) discussion of the foreign language program developed by the Upper Arling...