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.
- Noticing – highlight ideas, look at subtitles, scan for content
- Awareness – look more closely at a text and make your language point explicit
- Guided practice – make them manipulate the grammar point in a fun and guided manner – he suggested riddles
- 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?
Aaron’s post