Monthly Archives: February 2016

Roy Lyster’s Talk

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On Friday, I attended Roy Lyster’s talk on Proactive and reactive approaches to integrated language & content. 

I was really impressed by his clarity in presenting ideas, the extent of his experience and research, as well as the wealth of information he’s gathered from his work. I particularly enjoyed his explanation of the proactive model to curriculum design. Here is what I took away from this discussion:

Immersion does not harm L1, it can actually enhance it. However, immersion students still had trouble with grammatical accuracy, lexical language, & sociolinguistic appropriateness.

These difficulties arose for immersion students’ because their input, from teachers, was limited in tense, aspect and other elements of language that native speakers are exposed to.

Roy’s research, and others’, shows that language can be learned by bypassing grammar and focusing on communicative competence (which is what happens in CBI courses and immersion programs sometimes). However, a direct and contextualized focus on grammar can help solve the non-native issues may immersion and language learners face.

CBI contextualizes language in content and builds pathways to language that are strongly associated with topics. To do this teachers should design their course (or cross disciplinary courses) so that the focus on content bookends the focus on language and grammar learning.

Roy’s proactive approach sequence:

noticing (language during content)

awareness (metalinguistic reflection,  noticing patterns)

guided practice (Ss use new grammar/lexical/language in meaningful content driven tasks)

Autonomous practice (a return to content information where Ss are expected to use the newly learned language skills as well)

 

I think this system is very useful for designing a curriculum because it can be used at the syllabus stage, the unit stage, the lesson plan stage, or even at the individual task stage. I think this approach would be very useful to use in the language classroom that has a focus on other areas of the culture (environmentalism, holidays etc.)

A first look at authenticity

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In response to a question about advice for teachers who are selecting and deploying materials in a content-based language course, the guest speaker endorsed the practice of tampering with authentic texts. According to my notes, he said “almost all texts should be doctored.”  Here’s the example that I found most interesting (and horrifying): history texts in French tend to use the historic present, thus depriving students of input in terms of the past tense (which is particularly tricky in French because it’s actually an auxiliary (either etre or avoir – the verbs “to be” and “to have”) plus a participle).  The counterbalancing move (language considerations versus content) is for teachers to adapt those texts, larding them with additional verbs, all in the past tense.

It will be in the last month of the semester when we discuss this in detail. My basic position will be this:  firstly, any time we change or adapt or doctor an authentic text, we run the risk of changing the discourse and actually making it harder for L2 students to understand.  Secondly, it is our responsibility to present to students the target language as it is currently spoken or written.  Therefore, with respect to our guest, if contemporary history texts are largely written in the historic present, then that’s how they will be presented in our content-based class.  It is not, for me, compatible with a content-based approach to have a grammatical agenda.  In the same way, teachers’ classroom speech should be natural, not scripted (warped, contaminated) with attempts to include multiple examples of a particular grammatical structure.

The series of guest speakers is named for my late friend and colleague Leo van Lier. In the mid-1990s, Leo published a book with became know as “the three A’s” – which are in the subtitle, Awareness, Autonomy and Authenticity. This presentation had some promising ideas about Awareness; however, language educators also need to enforce principles of Authenticity(authentic materials, authentic tasks and so on) and Autonomy.  That balancing act is what makes curriculum design a Wicked Problem.

Lyster idea for designing a unit

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For me the most valuable part of the Lyster presentation was the four step procedure for language awareness raising. In other words, he gave us a concrete classroom realization for our Precept Three and for Crabbe’s task category of “Learn about Language.”  These are the steps:

  1. NOTICING: using guidance from such tools as typographical enhancement (e.g. bolding key words and phrases in a written text; his example was determiner + noun phrases in a written text from a unit on the history of Quebec), the students’ attention is drawn to a particular lexical, morphological, syntactic or discourse feature of the input in a subject matter unit.
  2. AWARENESS TASK: at this step, the students organize the data in some fashion to focus their awareness. In his example, the students complete a table:

Noun ending

 Example

Masculine or Feminine?

-ure

 La nourriture F
-ment Le defrichement

M

[Note: the gender of nouns is French is a challenge to L2 learners, who make frequent errors with determiners.  While there are a number of exceptions, there are regularities – nouns ending in –ure are predicatably feminine, those with –ment are masculine.  Please ask Kendall for more details.]

3.  GUIDED PRACTICE: students turn declarative knowledge (being able to articulate the rule) into procedural knowledge by completing a task which requires them to put the rule or insight into practice. His chief example was a game in which students are given clues and come up with an answer which is a determiner + noun. So given the clue Settlers counted on this to provide building materials and make open spaces for agriculture, students would come up with “deforestation;” in French you have to provide the article, so “le defrichement.”

4.  AUTONOMOUS PRACTICE: this is not the “autonomy” we have discussed in Precept Four. This is part of Precept Two and what Crabbe categorises as Output in a classroom setting. His examples including students making a timeline (to both reflect their mastery of the history content and to practice the past tense) and writing a short piece in response to a prompt like How do present day attitudes to deforestation differ from those of the early settlers in Quebec?

We shall refer back to this procedure later in the course when we are working with unit and lesson planning.

 

Reflections on Roy Lyster’s talk: Proactive and reactive approaches to integrating language and content

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By Josiah Nilsen

Roy Lyster’s presentation really helped me to understand the difference between Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) and Content Based Instruction (CBI). CBI is a good way to teach content, but the students’ language acquisition can suffer as attention is directed solely towards content. CLIL, on the other hand, balances out this deficiency by turning some of the attention back onto language. Thus, the language is used to teach content, but at the same time, content is specifically used to focus on language.

In Content Based Instruction there is a risk that students will fail to be achieve grammatical accuracy, lexical variety, and sociolinguistic appropriateness, despite learning the content well and despite achieving native-like comprehension and high communicative ability. It is possible for students to understand and follow discourse without actually understanding the forms being used. Although such a situation is better than the reverse, where someone knows the forms but cannot communicate or understand, it is still not the ideal situation. As language teachers we should strive to enable our students not only to communicate and understand but also to properly use the right grammatical forms in a sociolinguistically correct way.

Dr. Lyster proposed four practical steps for integrating language and content in a proactive way. In his proposal, a teacher should include a noticing activity, an awareness activity, guided practice, and autonomous practice. It was really cool to see his concrete examples of what these activities could look like in the classroom. I look forward to being able to implement this approach in my teaching.

Part of his talk that also really stood out to me was when he talked about a reactive approach to integrating language and content. He did a great job of highlighting the different kinds of feedback and their relative effectiveness. It’s interesting that although recasts are used as much as all other kinds of feedback combined, they are less effective for most age groups and ability groups. This will be very useful for me as a teacher, and will be one of the things that I will take away from this presentation and remember well.

Another thing he mentioned was to show students the underlying patterns that govern language, and not scare them up front with the exceptions. Arabic has a lot of underlying patterns, which can grow huge families of related words out of a single root. Helping students to understand these patterns is really important, especially in Arabic.

It was very interesting to hear Dr. Lyster’s take on whether foreign language texts should be altered for learner use. Dr. Lyster took the position that altering authentic texts is not only permissible, but often desirable or necessary. In my classes here at MIIS, I have often heard “Change the task, not the text.” This has been so ingrained in me that I have begun to take it for granted. That’s why I didn’t expect to hear a prominent voice in the field take a diametrically opposed view. This is a helpful reminder to me that not all the experts agree, and that the conversation on these issues is ongoing. This is a issue which I need to look into more in order to determine my own position.

Jerry – Reflection on Dr. Roy Lyster’s Talk

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First of all, I like how Dr. Lyster begins his presentation with cognitive advantages of bilingualism and selective attention. He makes an interesting point that having to manage two languages and switch between them allows learners to hone cognitive skills, but this “two for one” ability does not come to learners for free. According to Dr. Lyster, attention of learners must be drawn to their L2 that is well manipulated and enhanced through content-based instruction. So, based on this idea of attention, I think that language teachers must consider psychological aspects of learning and then come up with effective ways for their students to fully concentrate on language learning before choosing appropriate contents.

The second interesting point Dr. Lyster makes is that L2 learners in French immersion curriculum demonstrate high communicative abilities and confidence as well as native-like comprehension skills but low production skills in grammatical accuracy, lexical variety, and sociolinguistic appropriateness. In other words, separation of language and content allow students to bypass grammar and lexicon. Just as Dr. Lyster proposes systematic integration of language and content over decontextualized language teaching, I believe it is imperative that teachers think about flaws of traditional language teaching such as subject-matter instruction and transfer-appropriate processing.

Third, Dr. Lyster introduces integration of language and content through what is called counterbalance. The crux of this concept is that there must be a proportionate influence of content and language in ways that reinforce connections in memory as well as increase depth of processing. I think it makes sense if teachers look at it from a psychological perspective because something can be remembered for a longer period of time if learners take more time to focus on it and then mentally process it. This idea of counterbalance seems to be the basis for Dr. Lyster’s proactive and reactive approaches to content and language integration.

Fourth and the most interesting point of all is Dr. Lyster’s instructional sequence for integrating language and content. To explain the noticing and awareness steps of his instructional sequence, he shows the video of a moon-walking bear that walks through two teams passing balls among the same team members. The first time I encountered a video of awareness test was in the cognitive psychology class back in my undergraduate, and I learned from the course that most of the viewers would not notice another object or person changing or moving if they did not know about selective attention in advance. Thus, it is interesting to see Dr. Lyster labeling certain grammar points like conjugation and gender as moon-walking bears, which can be learned more attentively to learners through guided and autonomous practices.

My last comment is on the notion of corrective feedback (CF). Dr. Lyster makes a rather surprising remark that teachers are reluctant to provide CF assuming that students prefer not to be corrected. Honestly, I feel uncomfortable to know that there are teachers who hesitate to correct their students. If CF is verified to be effective by four recent meta-analyses and even most effective during interaction among students, then I would strongly argue that after receiving proper training and information of CF types, all language teachers should at least consider trying to give CF to their students and then observe for its effectiveness. Personally, I would like to learn more about scaffolding functions behind recasts as well as output hypothesis and skill acquisition theory behind prompts.

Overall, I truly enjoyed listening to Dr. Lyster’s presentation on proactive and reactive approaches to integrating language and content. I must say that this topic makes me realize how much I have missed studying psychology ever since I got my Bachelor of Science in psychology. In this sense, language acquisition intrigues me very much as it connects two fields of study that I love the most: language and psychology.

Dr. Lyster’s Presentation

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We know students L1 is unaffected by content learning in L2 but seldom ask how good their second language actually becomes. Immersion students may outperform regular students and develop high communicative abilities, such as comprehension, but they have non-native like production skills in grammatical accuracy, lexical variety, and sociolinguistic appropriateness. The question becomes: how to improve this? As it turns out, immersion students are exposed to restricted forms in the L2 such as verb tenses. This is because teachers tend to keep language and content separate. When teaching history, for example, they don’t focus on the L2, only on history.
According to Dr. Lyster, if teachers don’t bring together content and language students will be deprived of opportunities to properly learn the L2. Classrooms should be interactive, communicative, and interaction based. The teacher should also create meaningful ways to focus on the L2 by creating a counterbalance: a pushing and pulling of language and content (as opposed to perfect balance). This could be done by emphasizing language and shifting students’ attention from content to language. Such a shift also strengthens the depth of processing. Thus assisting retention since learning required deeper mental processing.

Reflection on Dr. Lyster’s Presentation

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I was absolutely thrilled by Dr. Lyster’s talk yesterday on proactive and reactive approaches to content-based instruction. The ideas and questions that Dr. Lyster addressed in his presentation are fascinating to me and I appreciate the deeper insight into these issues that I gained yesterday.

Dr. Lyster covered two approaches to content-based instruction. The first is the “proactive” approach to content and language interaction. One of the aspects of this approach that I really appreciated is that he explained how to implement his ideas in a classroom setting and gave examples for how this can be done. Dr. Lyster’s sequence of steps for integrating language and content (noticing activity, awareness activity, guided practice, autonomous practice) helped me to make sense of the research that he focused on early in the presentation and see how the findings can be applied in the classroom. I look forward to reading more about his ideas and implementing them in my own classroom in the future.

The second part of the presentation focused on the “reactive” side of content-based instruction. Interaction and feedback is really important in a language class, so I really liked that Dr. Lyster included this topic in his talk. I now feel like I have a much better grasp on the different types of corrective feedback. Additionally, I really appreciated the distinction that was made between child versus adult learners and the different kinds of corrective feedback that tend to be more effective for each.

One of my favorite parts of the presentation was the description of grammatical gender as a “moon-walking bear.” When Dr. Lyster outlined the patterns for determining the gender of some of the nouns in French with certain endings, I was amazed. In fifteen years of learning French, I have never had an instructor that told me about these patterns. I was always told that it was a part of French grammar that simply needed to be memorized. This has huge implications for my teaching in the future!

Reflection on Dr. Lyster’s Presentation

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Yesterday I gave a presentation in my Chinese class regarding that language and culture cannot be separated. From today’s talk, I learned that content and language cannot be separated as well. The traditional approach restricts the inputs by teaching only the language features or the content. However, students are capable of learning “subject-matter content while bypassing grammar” (Lyster, 2015, presentation). Therefore, Dr. Lyster proposed the idea of integrating language and content through counterbalance.

There are two approaches: proactive and reactive. I appreciate that he gave concrete examples for the four steps in proactive approach to help us better understand. The four steps for planning the integration are noticing activity, awareness activity, guided practice and autonomous practice. It reminds me of the teaching method I usually use in weekend Chinese school. I always ask my students to highlight the new vocabularies while I was reading the text (noticing). After teaching the new characters, I made up a riddle; e.g. “hóu hóu hóu hóu, hóu zi dè hóu – “hóu” is the newly learned character; “hóu zi” is a word that contains the newly learned character (awareness). Then I ask them to pick their favorite ones to write a paragraph. I wonder whether this last step counts as guided practice or autonomous practice. My initial thought on the design was to create more opportunities for the students to practice and help them remember these characters. Now after hearing the talk, I realize that I have already started the integrating process of language and content.

Different from proactive approach, reactive approach focuses on giving corrective feedback during the process. We just had an engaging discussion on error correction in SLA class, and I was almost convinced that feedback could be harmful. Therefore, I was glad that Dr. Lyster pointed out that the effectiveness of corrective feedback has been confirmed by different studies. There are different types of corrective feedback, including explicit correction, recasts, request clarification, repetition, etc. Personally, I prefer repetition, so I can hear the error and fix it. However, in a real classroom setting, teachers cannot correct all mistakes or errors made by students. In order to not interrupt or humiliate students, I recommend the way my Spanish teacher gave feedback. While we were talking, he took notes on our errors and quickly categorized them. A few minutes before class ended, he summarized the errors on board using the content we provided earlier.

I have always believed that language learning is not about knowing the language, but using the language. I hope to continue learning from gurus of the field and working towards the direction.

“Proactive and Reactive Approaches to Integrating Language and Content.”

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Roy Lyster, of McGill University, entitled his talk “Proactive and Reactive Approaches to Integrating Language and Content.”

– Cognitive benefits of bilingualism – selective attention – the ability to focus on relevant information related to the immediate task and screen out irrelevant information; Benefits persist into adulthood; can slow down onset of Alzheimer’s.

– However, attention to language stuff needs to “manipulated” or enhanced during content teaching. + Linguistic objectives need to be planned alongside content based objectives.

– Initial attempt at CBI showed students did not have native like production skills in lexical variety, sociolinguistic appropriateness nor accuracy. – Resultant studies demonstrated that teacher talk/input/instruction only used a restricted lexical base and type of tense. (75% of tenses were present or imperative form; 15% in past tense; 3% in conditional dense)

We can understand discourse without precise syntactic and morphological knowledge ~ We can process meaning in ways that are not encoded in a specific language – body language, gesture, pitch variation, emphasis, props etc.

Form focused instruction – this was something that I heard for the first time. What does it mean?

Context in which learning occurs should resemble the context in which the learning will be put to use.

Doctor Lyster liked his idea of counterbalancing language and content.

Shifting attention between language and content is very good for depth of processing. 

He said typological enhancement- which pragmatically means bolding the faunt of a grammar usage you want to emphasize, or being extra sure to verbally enunciate and accent a point you want to distinguish.

  1. Noticing – highlight ideas, look at subtitles, scan for content
  2. Awareness – look more closely at a text and make your language point explicit
  3. Guided practice – make them manipulate the grammar point in a fun and guided manner – he suggested riddles
  4. Autonomous practice- free response prompting questions, but be sure that they still manipulate the grammar thingy well

 

Skill acquisition theory – declarative knowledge -> it is important to proceduralize knowledge during spontaneous language instruction.

He echoed what we just learned in SOE about teaching new vocabulary with gender markers, as chunks which get stored as 1 item in the lexicon. So for English – by the way, a dog, a cat, the dog, the cat, on the way,

Edu.glogster.com -Multimedia Interactive Poster – might be a really useful tool for online group projects

From Mr. Rogers query – use authentic text, but embellish it, or use in awareness raising work.

Usually need resources to do CBI well – more than a threshold level for the teachers, at least a threshold level for students, but it can be orchestrated to work with young learners as well.

Feedback –Prompting vs. Correcting

-corrective recasting is equally useful as prompting, for adults

Prompting is more useful than recasting for kids – there is already a great deal of repetition in circle time stuff, so kids may not be able to pick up when they are being corrected and when they are just being copied by the teacher

Other types are clarification requests – S. Billy ate five fried chicken. -> T. Billy ate five what?

Is the term epistemic feedback only used in writing, or just as another type of prompting feedback? E.g.  What did you mean by this, what were other examples?

 

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