Category Archives: PROCESS/AWARENESS

Awareness is of two kinds: language-related and learning-related. Crabbe (2003) describes language awareness as “any conscious attention to language that is intended to lead to an ability to explain or describe or gloss an aspect of grammar or sociolinguistic conventions.” He calls it “Language Understanding” or “Learning about Language.” The aspects of language should be expanded to include lexical, discourse, semantic, phonological and other dimensions. Here, we post ideas for any awareness raising about an aspect of the target language: tasks causing learners to consciously examine vocabulary, grammar, discourse and so on.

Crabbe (2003: 21) describes learning awareness as “any conscious attention to one’s own language learning that is intended to lead to a better metacognitive control over that learning, which would include a detailed representation of the task of language learning, an analysis of the difficulties encountered and an awareness of strategies to overcome the difficulties and achieve the task.” Thus, we post here any tasks which cause learners to review or reflect upon some specific aspect of their learning, aim to add or strengthen learning strategies, or promote learners’ autonomy.

Process is also divided into two aspects: rehearsal and feedback. Crabbe (2003: 21) describes rehearsal as “any activity designed to improve through deliberate repetition specific aspects of performance, including experimentation with pronunciation, memorisation of words or word patterns, and repeated role play of a piece of communication.” In terms of writing, it will include practicing specific components of the final product (e.g. writing an introduction) prior to generating the first draft. Tasks, tools and concepts for such pre-performance preparations will be posted here.

Crabbe (2003: 21) describes feedback as “receiving information relating to one’s own performance as a second language user, which may include indirect feedback (e.g., that one has not been understood) or direct feedback (e.g., that one has made a specific error).” We therefore post here different tasks and tools whereby learners receive feedback on their spoken or written performances. This will include feedback from peers, from instructors, from other speakers of the target language, and from technology (e.g. spellcheck, autocorrect).

Reflections on the Needs Assessment and Curriculum Design Project

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The Needs Assessment process is something I had not considered prior to taking this course. I knew that some courses were better than others, that some textbooks were better than others, and that some exercises and topics were more relevant than others, but I had never stopped to think about what made them that way. The first half of this course was therefore very eye-opening for me, in terms of what it is necessary to do in order to find out what students really need.

In hindsight, I don’t feel that my needs assessment was very good. During the second half of the semester my thoughts on it changed a lot. I was very focused at the beginning of the semester on trying to incorporate trips into the local community into my BUILD class. However, over the course of teaching an actual BUILD class at the same time, I discovered that students didn’t actually want to take the time and effort to do this, despite having said on the survey that they were very interested in doing it. It made me realize first-hand that what students say they want on a survey and what they actually want may be two very different things. Also, I did scouting trips to each of the places I had hoped to take my class, and I realized that they did not really present very language-rich environments. For example, I went to three different Arab or Middle Eastern restaurants, and not one of them actually had a menu written in Arabic. In hindsight, I have realized that the whole idea of frequent trips into the community was not something which arose naturally out of my needs assessment, but something I artificially tried to shoehorn in. It was not the students’ priority but something they said yes to on the survey because I prompted them to say it.

During the second half of the semester I was also a student in a Chinese BUILD class, which gave me fresh eyes on the BUILD experience from a student’s perspective, as well as close observation of another classroom. From that experience, I learned that what students are primarily interested in in BUILD is the language itself. This helped my to refocus my last several classes in constructive directions.

So, if I was going to do it again, I would try to design a better and more thorough survey for my students that delved more into their opinions and learning styles without leaving room for  my predetermined directions.

 

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 –

Equipo Español- Needs Assessment Reflection

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A little belated, but so it goes…

We were very fortunate in many ways through the process of writing our needs assessment. Our first bit of good fortune was geographical: unlike several of our colleagues, the target context for our curriculum design project was local, just 20 minutes or so away at Bolsa Knolls Middle School in Salinas. Due to the convenience and proximity of this site, we were able to visit the school and have an in-person interview with the teacher of the Spanish for Heritage Speakers class. Upon arrival, we realized another bit of good fortune had come our way: Chandra had previously visited this very same class for Classroom Observation in the Fall, and had written an observation report which served as valuable information in the final needs assessment.

We felt lucky to be able to work on such an interesting local project, and especially to work with Kristal Gaskell, the teacher and MIIS alum, who was incredibly helpful, responsive, and gave us the freedom to really do what we wanted with the curriculum. She even took class time to administer our Google Forms survey to her students, which was the third major component of our needs assessment. However, while we wanted to acknowledge the many ways in which the needs assessment was a positive experience, this is not to say that we didn’t face any challenges. A major challenge for us has been the time constraints that we face as grad students, with many time commitments from school and work, and that made it difficult for us to meet with Kristall and unable to visit the class while it was in session this semester, while we would have liked to. This also affected our needs assessment in terms of a lack of revision and careful planning on the survey we gave to the students; after receiving the data back, we realized that there were some questions that didn’t reveal as much as we had hoped, other questions that should have been worded differently or in a different format, and additional questions that we wished we had thought to ask. While we did receive some valuable insights from that survey, we feel that we could have done a better job of designing that tool in order to maximize the usefulness of that data.

Our additional challenges have been more in the form of figuring out what to do with the information that we gained from the needs assessment; there were many limitations that we did not forsee, such as the issue of a too-strong web filter that blocked many educational and video-streaming sites that we would have liked to use, and the limited classroom resources. However, we have tried our best to rise to that challenge and develop a curriculum that takes advantage of the many strengths and hidden resources of that classroom.

Overall, the needs assessment process was a great learning process for both of us. We gained valuable insights from what we were able to do, and probably learned even more from our mistakes and struggles during the process. We are very grateful that we were able to spend as much time as we did on the needs assessment portion of this project, and hope that our investment in that portion will show in the final product at the Trade Fair!

-Chandra and Tom, Equipo Español 🙂

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

 

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.

“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

Terrific Trade Fair

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Andrew Sansone & Danna Agha

What an experience!  The trade fair for our class was a blast to participate in, and really rewarding for all the participants.  It was great to check out everyone’s work and see the creativity expressed in all the activities.  It was so interesting to see how everyone came up with different classroom activities which could be easily applied to a language classroom environment.

We felt as though everyone did a really good job with their presentations.  Each one was really interesting, and everyone’s presentations showed off a particular element of their personality.  It was so cool to see the creative and engaging ideas that everyone worked so hard on developing come to life.  It was also very cool to learn that many kinds of symposiums and conferences include these sorts of activities.  We think that a focus on readily adaptable, dynamic, and practical lesson components is an important part of teacher development.  Getting new ideas that can be immediately applied in the classroom is such a critical part of the field- it’s nice to discover that many symposiums have a strong focus on this.

While we enjoyed our experience synthesizing our our own ideas for our project (Shiri Tori), a lot of the other lesson ideas were really impressive.  One of the lessons that was particularly engaging- Escape from the Chinese Room- was especially impressive.  It involved placing students in a scenario where they were trying to find a key hidden in the room based off of several clues provided by the teacher.  The activity incorporated realia- in the end, the key was actually hidden underneath a potted plant- but also encouraged students to think outside the box.  Students also were given clues in L2 being taught, which further acted as an excellent comprehension exercise.  This activity would also work great in an FL teaching environment in China.  Businesses called ‘secret rooms’ are increasingly common in many Chinese cities.  Usually themed after horror tropes or Sherlock Holmes, these places include puzzle and code solving elements in themed rooms.  For example, patrons would be asked to unlock a door using a code hidden inside a book.  Students who already enjoy the secret rooms experience would doubtlessly love Escape from the Chinese Room.

We certainly found that everyone’s efforts and hard work showed immensely through their posters. One that stood out in particular was Chandra’s Spanish book-making idea, which presented the idea of adding a noun phrase after a conjugated Spanish verb, creating a story. This would vary depending on the level of the students and their proficiency in the language. The reason I liked activity so much was because it could pan across any language and all proficiency levels (and it looked fun!).

The trade fair was truly a fun, interesting, and engaging experience and I can whole-heartedly say that I am so proud of everyone and their projects, progress over the semester, and their dedication to creative thinking in the TESOL/TFL program.

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Glory to Arstotzka! Multimodal Learning, Learner Autonomy, and Video Games

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Andrew Sansone

Video games are a new addition to the toolkit used by language educators, and a great deal of their effectiveness is a result of their focus upon learner autonomy and contextualization.  It also offers new ways to engage learners who themselves enjoy video games in their leisure time.

One example of learner autonomy is the use of Papers, Please in a lesson focused on travel document vocabulary.  Normally, this lesson would be conducted using a textbook and traditional approach, including vocabulary presentation, contextualized reading, and listening comprehension activities.

However, this lesson could be enhanced by using multimodal learning.  Papers, Please involves a simple conceit- you take on the role of an Arstotzkan (a lightly disguised version of East Germany) border guard.  Your job is to decide which people enter your country, and which are rejected.  Your basic salary is based upon the number of people you process, and is usually insufficient- but you can earn extra money by reporting ‘criminals’ and taking bribes.  Your family requires money for food, medicine, and heat.  Students get to use the TL in a new and creative way- and given the role playing aspects of the game.  Students are asked to spot forged passports and visas by checking the issuing city, biographical details of the subject, and by analyzing their conversation with those looking to enter Arstozka.  The following PDF illustrate the various visa/passport/biographical details that students must juggle and engage with with playing the game. Obviously, all of these factors use the TL in a natural and authentic way.

Passport and Visa Details

Students in a class can play collaboratively, with the teacher controlling the mouse and the students telling him or her what to investigate or do.  Student autonomy is central to the success of the lesson, as the directions players take in game can shape the atmosphere their character inhabits. For instance, students who take bribes to allow resistance members into Arstotzka can personally profit, but weaken the foundations of an immoral state.  Those who choose to follow the ‘party-line’ will find the state strengthened, but their own moral compass malignly affected.


After playing the game, students then fill out a response to how they feel about the game and what they learned.