Category Archives: DESIGN

Surviving Chinese Measure Words

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I demonstrated my lesson plan on Chinese measure words for trade fair as I found the activity incorporates several concepts I learned in Curriculum Design this semester.

The class will start with inductive approach. Students will be given a number of Chinese noun phrases, such as a car, a cat, a laptop, etc. It will be easy for them to notice that in Chinese, a measure word has to be inserted in between the numeral and the object. Then I will ask students to walk around and group authentic materials using the same measure word together. For instance, book, magazine, exercise book should be grouped together as they share the measure word “běn”, usually used for book-like objects. This activity involves TPR and the use of authentic materials. In addition, students will conclude the characteristics of each measure word on their own. Some are obvious but some requires the teacher to give additional explanation. Measure word is one of the most difficult grammar points in Chinese as there are not exact rules for how measure words should be used.

After introducing measure words, the teacher will guide the students to use it into the “I have…” sentence structure that was already learned. At first, students will say “I have books”. Now, they are able to produce “I have a book” using the correct measure word. Then, students will practice with their possessions.

The last 15 minutes of the lesson, students will be engaged in an Island Survival Game, in which they will be told that they are on an isolated island and they can each choose five items that they consider to be the most necessary for survival. They may choose from bread, clothes, tents, logs, fresh water, money, passport, etc (represented by candies, origami and other crafts). Afterwards, the teacher will draw a survival situation from an envelope, for example, the next boat arrives on the third day, survivors need to have three bread (the latter part of the sentence will be in Chinese). Student who chooses three bread will announce “I have three bread…” and pick the next survival situation.

The original lesson is planned for 50 minutes. If I have extra time, I will also introduce the question form so the last activity will be more interactive. Students may ask “how many/much … do you have?” and others respond. The question form will allow the activity to take on a TPR approach. Students may walk around, ask each other questions and write the survivors’ name next to the survival conditions.

From P&P to CD, I realized that fun activities work for everyone. As teachers, we need to integrate age- & level-appropriate content into these activities in order to make them effective.

 

Reflection on the overall curriculum designing

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Early in the semester, we began the course with a discussion of the wicked problem. If we agree on both problem and solution, then the problem is rather simple. The problem becomes more complex if we do not agree on either problem or solution. Curriculum design is actually like a wicked problem because we often disagree on both problem and solution. I think that this analogy clicked right away at the moment because we need to perform needs assessment in order to find out what the problem exactly is, and then designing an effective curriculum is the solution to the needs of language learners. One interesting thing that I remember from this discussion is that the needs assessment must account for different stories, not different versions of different stories.

Another interesting discussion was horizontal segmentation. Of course, there is neither hierarchy nor one perfect / ultimate product on curriculum, syllabus, and lesson levels. Thinking back to the spaghetti sauce analogy, I recall that having about 3 to 4 clusters within a class actually produces a higher rating of learning satisfaction than running an entire class as one cluster. It is also important to have several choices for students to choose from.

The needs assessment interviews were conducted using the following 4 types of questions: descriptive, structural, contrastive, and explanatory. The questions I asked to the student interviewees consisted of all 4 types, while the interviews with a Korean teacher and a BUILD administrator were conducted in a semi-structured manner. Although my group of interviewees was really small in number to adopt the Wave Model, the set of questions were revised a couple of times before they were used for the interviews. An ample amount of data was still collected for meaningful analysis.

The second half of the course started with a discussion of current language education and classical tradition of language education. The current language education favors differentiated instruction, flexible syllabus with light details, reflection on self or peer assessment, and autonomy including projects. The traditional language education, on the other hand, promoted deductive training and grammar translation that were intertwined with economical / political motivation (social reconstruction). The brief history of how group work and bilingualism came about was an interesting transition to curriculum designing.

In class, we created sample curriculums / syllabi in a specific context such as Mercian problem and content-based syllabus design. Selection and grading make up an important process together, for teachers must make choices of what to teach in what order within a given time frame. I had to go through this exact process when I was designing my horizontal curriculum for MIIS B.U.I.L.D. Korean.

On the whole, I learned a great deal about the complicated, but fun, steps of designing a language curriculum. I never imagined that a curriculum can be related to so many analogies that my perception on curriculum designing has totally changed; it is no longer a boring subject. In fact, I now look forward to designing a Korean language curriculum for my future students! This course will be missed.

– Jerry Kim –

Needs Assessment

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Needs assessment is a great tool for diagnostics, improvement, and research among other things. It was fascinating to hear from ESL students and the MIIS faculty and instructors what makes MIIS great and what could be improved. I’d love to just keep talking with the students, to find out what makes a good language program, language teacher, etc.

Designing the weekly schedule required the most brain power because we would look at the current schedule and wonder what was the reasoning and logic behind EVERYTHING. Why make class an hour and twenty minutes instead of an hour and a half? Or an hour and ten minutes? Or just an hour? Why is one course only three times a week when everything else is four? Is there a reason content courses are last in the afternoon rather than first thing in the morning? In the end we made some tweaks. But not too much. No point fixing what’s not broken.

Since it was the amount of classes and the amount of time per day which came up as complaints, we focused on that. If I were to attend a language program, I’d think the current set-up is too easy too. I’d go for as many electives as I can and seek out every opportunity to use the language. But we know not everyone is so ambitious, which is why options are good.

It’d be cool to go back to everyone we’ve talked with and show them what we’ve designed to find out what they think about it. See what they think is a good idea and what wouldn’t work. Actually, if we had the time, this should be the next step…looks like there’s still more work to be done!

Georgia Reading Team NA

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Our project is a reading course based in Tbilisi, Georgia out of the LCC International University in Kalaipeda,  Lithuania. The program itself encompasses all four skill sets, but our group is focusing solely on the reading course. As for the needs assessment, our only contact is Dr. Gingerich who is the director of the English Department. The program is in the early stages and will be piloted starting in May, and classes will officially start in fall.

The NA consisted of email questionnaires sent to Dr. Gingerich. We were able to obtain an overview of the program as a whole, student background information, student TOEFL scores, student writing samples, and some sample syllabi from past programs. More importantly, we also found out that the teachers have not been decided upon yet, and there could be additional students that may get admitted over the next few months.

The TOEFL scores for the students ranged from 300-550, so there is a wide range of proficiency levels that we need to address. And the program would like to focus on literature, academic English, and reading strategies – all things that we will address in our course design.

by Ben, Sally, and Willow

 

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.

 

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.

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!

“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?

 

Aaron’s post