Some WL-specific books this time.
Blaz, D. (2001). Collections of performance tasks & rubrics: Foreign languages. Larchmont, NY: 2001.
The value of this book in a collection should be self-evident--the more examples of performance assessments that one has to hand, the more effectively one can design them. Besides, I'm finding it tough to know if my performance assessments are really actual assessments, or not. But what I'm really dying to see is the examples of rubrics that they give.
Shrum, J. L., & Glisan, E. W. (2009). The teacher's handbook: Contextualized language instruction [4th ed.] Thompson and Heinle.
(Bibliographical note: I don't have the book in front of me, and I'm having a devil of a time figuring out where Heinle is based. As an international textbook company and a subdivision of Thompson, I'm guessing their main offices are in New York with branches in London, Berlin, Sydney, possibly Beijing, and several other major cities around the world.)
On the ACTFL Language Educator listserv, Randy B. recommended this as a college-level WL textbook, saying that his/her students found it to be relevant to their lives. Catherine J. B. and Jessi Y. concur. Eileen Glisan chimes in to say "Thanks for recommending our book!" It seems like this book would be similar to Curtain's Langauges and Children: Making the match, but on the listserv, everyone who's read it recommends it highly. My biggest question is: Contextualized language instruction? How else would you do it?
There are seven or eight other methodology textbooks I'd like to look at: Omaggio's Teaching language in context, Brown's Teaching by Principles, etc. But the two above are at the front of the list.
Update, 10 minutes later: This is the textbook's companion website. I haven't looked through it yet--it's very possible that the website is useless without the textbook. Probably not, though.
Showing posts with label communicative methodology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label communicative methodology. Show all posts
Monday, July 12, 2010
Sunday, May 9, 2010
What a language teacher's job is
On Thursday, I had a long, intense conversation with my colleague Kris. She's our instructional coach this year, and I strongly hope that she will continue that role in the years to come, even as she returns to full-time teaching duties. She expressed the concern that I jump the gun in my classes--I move too quickly from building buy-in, directly to speaking Spanish. She worries that the students don't get why they're doing what they're doing, and thus never engage, and thus never really learn. I take her observation to heart, because I'm pretty sure my kung fu is strong, but my students are not learning Spanish at the rate they should be. Good practice done badly is bad practice, and if my students aren't learning, I'm not quite doing something right.
According to Krashen, as cited in Lee and Van Patten (1995), "...as long as there is motivation and the right affective environment (e.g., low anxiety), a person cannot avoid learning a second language if there is sustained comprehensible input" (29). They cite other researchers that say this is overstating the case somewhat, and they themselves stake out the position that using the language in communicative settings is necessary for learning languages. However, to the extent that this statement is true, it has powerful implications for language learning and, by extension, language instruction. The whole rest of their book is dedicated to outlining what those implications are.
But for now, I just want to worry at that one sentence for a little while, pick it apart and apply it. I'm writing lesson plans right now, so the action items are immediately applicable--I can go from this blog screen to my unit plan, to my weekly plan, and apply what I figure out.
It looks like this:
motivation + affective environment + sustained COMPREHENSIBLE input = language learning.
According to a source I don't remember right now (it was in an audiobook I borrowed from a friend, which I've since returned), as cited by Sprick (2007), motivation is a function of value times expectancy of success. So, if students value what they're learning, their motivation increases. If the students expect to succeed at a given event, their motivation to do it increases.
The updated equation looks thus:
(value of learning X expectation) + affective environment + sustained comprehensible input = Language Learning
I don't know enough about what Lee and VanPatten mean by "affective environment" to perform any cute faux mathematical operation on it. I believe, though, that this largely refers to classroom management issues, about which I've typed extensively.
Lee and VanPatten dedicate most of their book to outlining the concept of sustained comprehensible input. They later add "meaning-bearing" to the list of qualities of valuable communication.
(value of learning X expectation) + affective environment + sustained, meaning-bearing comprehensible input = Language Learning
This means that a student has to catch that there is a meaning she is supposed to understand in the utterance. The student also needs to be able to understand some portion of the communication.
This is a pretty clear description of a language teacher's job. These work out to these action steps:
1.) Sell the value of the learning. This means explaining reasons that a student should learn languages, but also why a student would want to. (I always think of the Rosetta Stone ad: "He was a farm boy from Iowa. She was an Italian supermodel. He had one chance to impress her.") This corresponds to increasing the value of learning.
2.) Increase the expectation of success. Celebrate baby steps. Define milestones, and move heaven and earth to drag your students towards them. Once they get there, make a big deal over it.
3.) Run your classroom well. I've had a lot to say about this. Marzano has a lot to say about this. Jackson has a lot to say about this, Wong and Wong have a lot to say about this, and Sprick has a whole lot to say about this. It sort of boils down to these.
4.) Give your students language they can chew. Lee & VanPatten say that if your students are at level N of comprehension, then you should communicate with them at N + 1. That's a hard number to hit consistently, especially with a class of 20, 30, 40 language learners. (Not that I have a class of 40 people, but it's probably not far off for many of my colleagues.) Lee & VanPatten have things to say about that, too.
So, there. I've defined what a WL teacher's job is. Not exactly my original goal, but that's okay. My next trick: Matching this up with Marzano's 10 reflection questions from The Art and Science of Teaching, Jackson's 7 principles of master teachers, Kryza's "Chunk / Chew / Check" lesson-planning and differentiation model, the National Board's teacher assessment tool, and Kris's "Hook your students" principle. Also, what this means to what my class looks like.
Resources:
Jackson, R. (2009). Never work harder than your students. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Lee, J., & VanPatten, B. (1997). Making communicative language teaching happen. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Marzano, R. (2008). The art and science of teaching. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Sprick, R. (2008). Interventions audio. Eugene, OR: Northwest Publishing.
According to Krashen, as cited in Lee and Van Patten (1995), "...as long as there is motivation and the right affective environment (e.g., low anxiety), a person cannot avoid learning a second language if there is sustained comprehensible input" (29). They cite other researchers that say this is overstating the case somewhat, and they themselves stake out the position that using the language in communicative settings is necessary for learning languages. However, to the extent that this statement is true, it has powerful implications for language learning and, by extension, language instruction. The whole rest of their book is dedicated to outlining what those implications are.
But for now, I just want to worry at that one sentence for a little while, pick it apart and apply it. I'm writing lesson plans right now, so the action items are immediately applicable--I can go from this blog screen to my unit plan, to my weekly plan, and apply what I figure out.
It looks like this:
motivation + affective environment + sustained COMPREHENSIBLE input = language learning.
According to a source I don't remember right now (it was in an audiobook I borrowed from a friend, which I've since returned), as cited by Sprick (2007), motivation is a function of value times expectancy of success. So, if students value what they're learning, their motivation increases. If the students expect to succeed at a given event, their motivation to do it increases.
The updated equation looks thus:
(value of learning X expectation) + affective environment + sustained comprehensible input = Language Learning
I don't know enough about what Lee and VanPatten mean by "affective environment" to perform any cute faux mathematical operation on it. I believe, though, that this largely refers to classroom management issues, about which I've typed extensively.
Lee and VanPatten dedicate most of their book to outlining the concept of sustained comprehensible input. They later add "meaning-bearing" to the list of qualities of valuable communication.
(value of learning X expectation) + affective environment + sustained, meaning-bearing comprehensible input = Language Learning
This means that a student has to catch that there is a meaning she is supposed to understand in the utterance. The student also needs to be able to understand some portion of the communication.
This is a pretty clear description of a language teacher's job. These work out to these action steps:
1.) Sell the value of the learning. This means explaining reasons that a student should learn languages, but also why a student would want to. (I always think of the Rosetta Stone ad: "He was a farm boy from Iowa. She was an Italian supermodel. He had one chance to impress her.") This corresponds to increasing the value of learning.
2.) Increase the expectation of success. Celebrate baby steps. Define milestones, and move heaven and earth to drag your students towards them. Once they get there, make a big deal over it.
3.) Run your classroom well. I've had a lot to say about this. Marzano has a lot to say about this. Jackson has a lot to say about this, Wong and Wong have a lot to say about this, and Sprick has a whole lot to say about this. It sort of boils down to these.
- Have a very few rules which apply all the time. Be consistent about reinforcing them positively and correcting them when necessary.
- Have procedures for everything. Teach them explicitly and rehearse them. (Behaviorism at its finest, but it will help if the students create their own procedures.)
- Make your classroom a place where it's okay to make mistakes, and teach students how to make GOOD mistakes. As Kryza likes to say, "This is a risk-taking, mistake-making classroom." In fact, Corder (as cited in Lee and VanPatten (1997)) says that mistakes are "indispensable to the learner himself" (in Lee and VanPatten, p. 22.)
4.) Give your students language they can chew. Lee & VanPatten say that if your students are at level N of comprehension, then you should communicate with them at N + 1. That's a hard number to hit consistently, especially with a class of 20, 30, 40 language learners. (Not that I have a class of 40 people, but it's probably not far off for many of my colleagues.) Lee & VanPatten have things to say about that, too.
So, there. I've defined what a WL teacher's job is. Not exactly my original goal, but that's okay. My next trick: Matching this up with Marzano's 10 reflection questions from The Art and Science of Teaching, Jackson's 7 principles of master teachers, Kryza's "Chunk / Chew / Check" lesson-planning and differentiation model, the National Board's teacher assessment tool, and Kris's "Hook your students" principle. Also, what this means to what my class looks like.
Resources:
Jackson, R. (2009). Never work harder than your students. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Lee, J., & VanPatten, B. (1997). Making communicative language teaching happen. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Marzano, R. (2008). The art and science of teaching. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
Sprick, R. (2008). Interventions audio. Eugene, OR: Northwest Publishing.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Activity analysis: "¡Somos Arqueólogos!"
One of the things I should do a lot more of is examining my activities to see if they're doing what they should, and how to improve them. My methodology teacher, Michael Braun (maybe more about him someday--he also taught me Spanish in high school, and looking at his classes would probably go a long way towards explaining why I think about teaching Spanish the way I do), suggested keeping a binder with assignment sheets in it, and writing notes on post-it notes. I'm going to work on having that system in place by the start of the next school year, but in the meantime, I offer you this:
¡SOMOS ARQUEÓLOGOS!
Imagínate que eres arqueólog@, quinientos años adelante de hoy. Tú (arqueólog@) descubriste la casa en que tú (estudiante) vives.
¿Cómo es este domicilio tan raro? Identifica 5 cosas en la casa. ¿Cómo son estos artefactos? ¿Para qué crees que sirven? (Acuérdate: Tú vives en el futuro. El mundo es muy distinto. Imagina que no sabes nada de la vida actual.)
[Imagine you're an arqueologist, five hundred years from now. You (the archaeologist) have discovered the house in which you (the student) lives.
What is this strange structure like? Identify 5 things in the house. What are these artifacts like? What do you think they're for? (Remember: You live in the future. The world is very different. Imagine you don't know anything about life today.)]
LEVEL: This project was designed for 2nd-year high school students. There's no reason it couldn't be adapted for 1st-year students, or indeed for any time a description of the house becomes necessary.
OBJECTIVE: Students will describe objects in their house from the perspective of someone who doesn't know what they're for. This will help them think of common household objects in Spanish, contextualize vocabulary of common household objects, and establish background knowledge for comparisons of common household items in their house and a house in a Spanish-speaking country. It will also provide students with the vocabulary and language necessary to describe their houses to other students in Spanish.
ASSOCIATED STANDARDS:
1.1.N.RW.g Ask questions in writing about the attributes of places and things in their immediate environment and answer using a list of traits
1.2.N.R.c Understand written interpersonal communication on topics of personal interest such as preferences, family life, friends, leisure and school activities, and everyday occurrences (email, letters, messages, notes, and text messages)
1.3.N.W.c Write brief personal descriptions on familiar topics in Spanish such as self, friends, family, home and school
ASSUMED KNOWLEDGE: Students are expected to have an awareness of, but not yet be entirely comfortable with, the vocabulary of household items, and have a good working knowledge of words that describe physical features of objects (size, color, etc.).
ASSESSMENT: Students show their comprehension of the knowledge by successfully communicating with other students about the objects in their house. This is a formative assessment of vocabulary; it's also a practice activity for other activities to come.
STUDENT OUTPUT: Students' responses ranged from 3-5 word descriptions for each item to a bullet-pointed list in English.
THOUGHTS: I continually butt up against the difference between World Languages and core-content classes, just in terms of learning matter. In this activity, students aren't expected to learn anything new, they're expected to think about what they already know in a different way. This is designed to permit students' minds to focus exclusively on the language acquisition. I recently went to a conference that suggested it might be better on all levels if students are engaging in the culture at the same time as the language.
CHANGES: First, I need to clarify the expectations. Students did not know what was expected of them. Second, rather than having students imagine their own house a different way, it might be better to have them "excavate" a typical house of the Spanish-speaking world, being sure to include a few things the students probably don't have in their own house. (I still think it's important for students to look at their own activities in a new way, but maybe this isn't the format for it.)
¡SOMOS ARQUEÓLOGOS!
Imagínate que eres arqueólog@, quinientos años adelante de hoy. Tú (arqueólog@) descubriste la casa en que tú (estudiante) vives.
¿Cómo es este domicilio tan raro? Identifica 5 cosas en la casa. ¿Cómo son estos artefactos? ¿Para qué crees que sirven? (Acuérdate: Tú vives en el futuro. El mundo es muy distinto. Imagina que no sabes nada de la vida actual.)
[Imagine you're an arqueologist, five hundred years from now. You (the archaeologist) have discovered the house in which you (the student) lives.
What is this strange structure like? Identify 5 things in the house. What are these artifacts like? What do you think they're for? (Remember: You live in the future. The world is very different. Imagine you don't know anything about life today.)]
LEVEL: This project was designed for 2nd-year high school students. There's no reason it couldn't be adapted for 1st-year students, or indeed for any time a description of the house becomes necessary.
OBJECTIVE: Students will describe objects in their house from the perspective of someone who doesn't know what they're for. This will help them think of common household objects in Spanish, contextualize vocabulary of common household objects, and establish background knowledge for comparisons of common household items in their house and a house in a Spanish-speaking country. It will also provide students with the vocabulary and language necessary to describe their houses to other students in Spanish.
ASSOCIATED STANDARDS:
1.1.N.RW.g Ask questions in writing about the attributes of places and things in their immediate environment and answer using a list of traits
1.2.N.R.c Understand written interpersonal communication on topics of personal interest such as preferences, family life, friends, leisure and school activities, and everyday occurrences (email, letters, messages, notes, and text messages)
1.3.N.W.c Write brief personal descriptions on familiar topics in Spanish such as self, friends, family, home and school
ASSUMED KNOWLEDGE: Students are expected to have an awareness of, but not yet be entirely comfortable with, the vocabulary of household items, and have a good working knowledge of words that describe physical features of objects (size, color, etc.).
ASSESSMENT: Students show their comprehension of the knowledge by successfully communicating with other students about the objects in their house. This is a formative assessment of vocabulary; it's also a practice activity for other activities to come.
STUDENT OUTPUT: Students' responses ranged from 3-5 word descriptions for each item to a bullet-pointed list in English.
THOUGHTS: I continually butt up against the difference between World Languages and core-content classes, just in terms of learning matter. In this activity, students aren't expected to learn anything new, they're expected to think about what they already know in a different way. This is designed to permit students' minds to focus exclusively on the language acquisition. I recently went to a conference that suggested it might be better on all levels if students are engaging in the culture at the same time as the language.
CHANGES: First, I need to clarify the expectations. Students did not know what was expected of them. Second, rather than having students imagine their own house a different way, it might be better to have them "excavate" a typical house of the Spanish-speaking world, being sure to include a few things the students probably don't have in their own house. (I still think it's important for students to look at their own activities in a new way, but maybe this isn't the format for it.)
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Revisiting flashcards
This was inspired by a conversation with a student from Germany who isn't in my Spanish class, about how to teach vocabulary in a World Languages course.
I don't use flash cards most of the time. I try to incorporate communicative activities in my classroom as much as possible. So I try to avoid using "memorize the Spanish word / memorize the English translation" activities as much as possible. My students still have a vocab list with the Spanish on one side and the English on another, because they get nervous if they can't see their vocabulary. But I use it as a security blanket, not as a primary source of vocabulary. (That's the intent, at least.) I see flashcards, as a rule, as an extension of memorizing translations. Studies show that this is an ineffective method of learning a language over the long term.
Instead, my students do glossary entries--they write the Spanish word and its translation, write a definition in Spanish or use the word in an example sentence, and draw a picture that illustrates the word. The idea is that by using the word in a meaningful sentence, they give it a meaningful context; by drawing a picture of it, they engage in non-lingustic representation, which helps with both retention and contextualization. I'll try to find the research on non-linguistic representation on vocabulary. The research is on the effects of vocabulary on L1 content learning, but it makes sense that L1 vocabulary acquisition strategies would work on L2 vocabulary, as well. The idea is that the students do one of these a day.
But this student, who learned English in Germany before coming to the United States, suggests a mechanism for using flash cards of the "L2-on-one-side-L1-on-the-other" effectively. It works like this--The student gets a box with 5 numbered compartments and 10 vocab cards. You run through the vocab, and every word you can translate and pronounce correctly moves up a compartment. Every day 10 or so new vocabulary cards go into Compartment 1. You study Compartment 1 every day, moving cards you know up. Compartment 2 gets studied every other day, with cards moving up as you go. Compartment 3 gets studied every week; compartment 4, every other week; Compartment 5, every month. After you know the vocabulary from Compartment 5, you can throw the card away, because you know the vocabulary forever.
Comparisons: If done correctly, both of these methods have students spending 10 minutes a day studying vocabulary, which is extremely helpful for long-term acquisition. (Source needed.)
Contrasts: The flash card box has a mechanism for revisiting old vocabulary; I ask my students to revisit their glossary, but have no way of making sure they do. The flash cards ask students to memorize vocbulary, while the glossaries ask them to use the vocabulary. Flashcards have students going over a large number of words each day, while glossary entries ask students to go over one word and use it in 3 different ways (including the one I purport to reject as effective). lashcards focus on 1-word-at-a-time acquisition, while glossaries ask students to use the words in sentences. The flashcard box places a specific value on knowing how to pronounce the words for advancement, and the glossaries do not.
Refinements: Flashcards could include pictures instead of words, where practical. (Turns out it's tough to draw a picture that represents conjunctions and words like "however.") I could include vocab quizzes for glossary entries, or some ongoing showing-off-glossary-entry speaking projects. Both projects could be modified to make them computer-based; this would use less paper and increase useability, but then accessibility would be a factor.
Mini-study idea: While presenting new vocabulary, half the class gets a flash card box and half the class gets a refined glossary entry project, with a limited set of vocabulary to choose from. Each assigment should be filled daily, and appropriate controls are put it to encourage and enforce compliance--the teacher checks the flash card box for changes, and checks in glossary entries, every day. After 1 week, the students take a vocabulary test that focuses on students' abilities to comprehend vocabulary; resulsts are compared. The test is re-administered after another week, and 1 month after the beginning date of the project, to test long-term retention.
I don't use flash cards most of the time. I try to incorporate communicative activities in my classroom as much as possible. So I try to avoid using "memorize the Spanish word / memorize the English translation" activities as much as possible. My students still have a vocab list with the Spanish on one side and the English on another, because they get nervous if they can't see their vocabulary. But I use it as a security blanket, not as a primary source of vocabulary. (That's the intent, at least.) I see flashcards, as a rule, as an extension of memorizing translations. Studies show that this is an ineffective method of learning a language over the long term.
Instead, my students do glossary entries--they write the Spanish word and its translation, write a definition in Spanish or use the word in an example sentence, and draw a picture that illustrates the word. The idea is that by using the word in a meaningful sentence, they give it a meaningful context; by drawing a picture of it, they engage in non-lingustic representation, which helps with both retention and contextualization. I'll try to find the research on non-linguistic representation on vocabulary. The research is on the effects of vocabulary on L1 content learning, but it makes sense that L1 vocabulary acquisition strategies would work on L2 vocabulary, as well. The idea is that the students do one of these a day.
But this student, who learned English in Germany before coming to the United States, suggests a mechanism for using flash cards of the "L2-on-one-side-L1-on-the-other" effectively. It works like this--The student gets a box with 5 numbered compartments and 10 vocab cards. You run through the vocab, and every word you can translate and pronounce correctly moves up a compartment. Every day 10 or so new vocabulary cards go into Compartment 1. You study Compartment 1 every day, moving cards you know up. Compartment 2 gets studied every other day, with cards moving up as you go. Compartment 3 gets studied every week; compartment 4, every other week; Compartment 5, every month. After you know the vocabulary from Compartment 5, you can throw the card away, because you know the vocabulary forever.
Comparisons: If done correctly, both of these methods have students spending 10 minutes a day studying vocabulary, which is extremely helpful for long-term acquisition. (Source needed.)
Contrasts: The flash card box has a mechanism for revisiting old vocabulary; I ask my students to revisit their glossary, but have no way of making sure they do. The flash cards ask students to memorize vocbulary, while the glossaries ask them to use the vocabulary. Flashcards have students going over a large number of words each day, while glossary entries ask students to go over one word and use it in 3 different ways (including the one I purport to reject as effective). lashcards focus on 1-word-at-a-time acquisition, while glossaries ask students to use the words in sentences. The flashcard box places a specific value on knowing how to pronounce the words for advancement, and the glossaries do not.
Refinements: Flashcards could include pictures instead of words, where practical. (Turns out it's tough to draw a picture that represents conjunctions and words like "however.") I could include vocab quizzes for glossary entries, or some ongoing showing-off-glossary-entry speaking projects. Both projects could be modified to make them computer-based; this would use less paper and increase useability, but then accessibility would be a factor.
Mini-study idea: While presenting new vocabulary, half the class gets a flash card box and half the class gets a refined glossary entry project, with a limited set of vocabulary to choose from. Each assigment should be filled daily, and appropriate controls are put it to encourage and enforce compliance--the teacher checks the flash card box for changes, and checks in glossary entries, every day. After 1 week, the students take a vocabulary test that focuses on students' abilities to comprehend vocabulary; resulsts are compared. The test is re-administered after another week, and 1 month after the beginning date of the project, to test long-term retention.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Disappointing feedback
One of my students came back from an absence today. He said to me, "What did we do yesterday?" I replied, "We did a series of listening activities to teach you the new vocabulary." His reply: "Oh, so nothing important."
I have failed to make it clear to my students the ABSOLUTELY VITAL role of listening comprehension in the role of linguistic development.
Back to the drawing board.
I have failed to make it clear to my students the ABSOLUTELY VITAL role of listening comprehension in the role of linguistic development.
Back to the drawing board.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Day-to-day consistency and lesson planning
I'm never really been sure as how to structure a class so that it looks the same every day, what with the wide variety of events that might happen in a school day. I know that part of that is designing and teaching a procedure to get back on task after interruptions, but the interruptions range in intrusiveness such that one procedure, even two or three or procedures, to get them back on task continues to escape me.
So my lesson plan has been an ad-hoc document, an objective followed by a list of activities designed to achieve the objective. That's probably fine as far as it goes, but it means that Wednesday doesn't look much like Monday. (Also, Wednesday doesn't often look like Wednesday's plan.) This makes it hard to model the same 3 or 4 classroom-management phrases in Spanish every day, which makes it nigh impossible for me to conduct class entirely in Spanish, which is the goal.
So, I've spent some amount of time looking for a way of making plans that would help establish a more consistent daily class structure. And I finally found a document that was handed to me during the New Teacher Academy meetings, and probably during my teacher education courses in college, based on Hunter (1984):
READINESS
Here's where my issue lies: In the Communication column of my standards, each lesson has to take two things into consideration: context and communicative mode. (Ideally, a lesson should also include some Cultural context; get a student to make Connections between this lesson, other classes, and their own lives; help a student make communicative and cultural Comparisons, and then help move their learning into their Communities. But one step at a time.) If a unit has 3 communicative contexts, it means that there are 18 different lessons that happen in an ideal world: a spoken / listening conversation; an written / read conversation; a listening comprehension; a reading comprehension; a spoken presentation; and a written presentation. Even if you tie together a few (or even all) contexts together for the presentational communication mode, there's still a heap of lessons that should occur.
Given all that, is it even theoretically possible to make tomorrow like today? Probably not, but it's worth the try. But up until now, I've had a different understanding of the structure of a unit. This is a day-to-day model, which seems to sacrifice a big-picture understanding for an illusory class-structure uniformity. I've always understood a unit to be a different kind of thing: a presentation, modeling, and practice of vocabulary in a wide context, followed by a closer examination of the vocabulary and grammar necessary for specific communicative tasks. Communicative practice activities, a few activities that tie in all the different contexts, a day of review, then a test.
Anyway, I'll try this "new" lesson plan format and see if I can make it work for me. It will probably be rough going for a while, but once I get the hang of it, I think it will tie objectives, instruction, practice, and assessment a lot closer together. (That's the point of the format, after all.) Also, I think it will increase my students' capacity for taking Spanish as the primary classroom language in the future.
Update: Two minutes of further reading revealed Marzano's claim that this lesson plan structure "is best suited for kessons that address procedural knowledge" (180). Good for some situations, but not all. I'm still going to try it for a little while; there's a lot of procedural-type stuff in communication: how to say you're going to do something, how to listen for key vocabulary, how to identify the main idea of a passage. I think vocabulary learning may more neatly fit in with "declarative knowledge," which is a different ball of wax.
WORKS CITED:
Hunter, M. (1984.) Knowing, teaching, and supervising. Using what we know about teaching. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Modified by Wilson-O'Leary for teacher conference.
Marzano, R. (2007.) The art and science of teaching: a comprehensive framework for effective instruction. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. 181.
So my lesson plan has been an ad-hoc document, an objective followed by a list of activities designed to achieve the objective. That's probably fine as far as it goes, but it means that Wednesday doesn't look much like Monday. (Also, Wednesday doesn't often look like Wednesday's plan.) This makes it hard to model the same 3 or 4 classroom-management phrases in Spanish every day, which makes it nigh impossible for me to conduct class entirely in Spanish, which is the goal.
So, I've spent some amount of time looking for a way of making plans that would help establish a more consistent daily class structure. And I finally found a document that was handed to me during the New Teacher Academy meetings, and probably during my teacher education courses in college, based on Hunter (1984):
READINESS
- Warm-up:
- Objective:
- Instructional input:
- Modeling:
- Activities/Questions Strategies
- Guided practice
- Independent practice
- Closure
Here's where my issue lies: In the Communication column of my standards, each lesson has to take two things into consideration: context and communicative mode. (Ideally, a lesson should also include some Cultural context; get a student to make Connections between this lesson, other classes, and their own lives; help a student make communicative and cultural Comparisons, and then help move their learning into their Communities. But one step at a time.) If a unit has 3 communicative contexts, it means that there are 18 different lessons that happen in an ideal world: a spoken / listening conversation; an written / read conversation; a listening comprehension; a reading comprehension; a spoken presentation; and a written presentation. Even if you tie together a few (or even all) contexts together for the presentational communication mode, there's still a heap of lessons that should occur.
Given all that, is it even theoretically possible to make tomorrow like today? Probably not, but it's worth the try. But up until now, I've had a different understanding of the structure of a unit. This is a day-to-day model, which seems to sacrifice a big-picture understanding for an illusory class-structure uniformity. I've always understood a unit to be a different kind of thing: a presentation, modeling, and practice of vocabulary in a wide context, followed by a closer examination of the vocabulary and grammar necessary for specific communicative tasks. Communicative practice activities, a few activities that tie in all the different contexts, a day of review, then a test.
Anyway, I'll try this "new" lesson plan format and see if I can make it work for me. It will probably be rough going for a while, but once I get the hang of it, I think it will tie objectives, instruction, practice, and assessment a lot closer together. (That's the point of the format, after all.) Also, I think it will increase my students' capacity for taking Spanish as the primary classroom language in the future.
Update: Two minutes of further reading revealed Marzano's claim that this lesson plan structure "is best suited for kessons that address procedural knowledge" (180). Good for some situations, but not all. I'm still going to try it for a little while; there's a lot of procedural-type stuff in communication: how to say you're going to do something, how to listen for key vocabulary, how to identify the main idea of a passage. I think vocabulary learning may more neatly fit in with "declarative knowledge," which is a different ball of wax.
WORKS CITED:
Hunter, M. (1984.) Knowing, teaching, and supervising. Using what we know about teaching. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. Modified by Wilson-O'Leary for teacher conference.
Marzano, R. (2007.) The art and science of teaching: a comprehensive framework for effective instruction. Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. 181.
Saturday, September 27, 2008
What drives what we teach?
"Why, Señor Cosby, the curriculum, of course," cry a thousand aggrieved administrators and education specialists. The curriculum is a document (or probably several documents) which outlines the learning objectives of a particular course, and it does this in various levels of specificity. Importantly, it leaves specific implementation unaddressed, so teachers can implement a lesson plan that best addresses their students' needs and fits their own teaching style. It addresses the goals of the class, what the students expect to be able to do at the end of the class.
Where it all falls down is the "specific implementation" portion of that. Most teachers and classes have a textbook of some kind. We're smart enough and we've been trained well enough that we now know that textbook /= curriculum. Even so, I (and I'd guess a lot of other teachers) still turn to my textbook first when I have no idea what I should do the next day. I have my curriculum document, a list of the 65 learning goals per her class, which I tweak, realign, and try to implement more fully during the summer. I create unit plans, with learning goals and assessments and teaching strategies. I make weekly lesson plans during the week. And through all this process, I use the textbook as a place where I can steal materials from and then rip them apart and re-assemble them in a way that actually works. But when the chips are down, and my three-tiered planning system fails to take something into account (and yes, like all teachers, I make my plans knowing that they won't work), and everything falls apart (I plan on this happening most weeks about halfway through Wednesday of any given week), I grab my textbook and pick bookwork activities out. There are any number of problems with this.
Grammar-based fill-in-the-blank activities have been shown to be not a very good way of teaching Spanish at all. Vocabulary-based drills--a sentence in Spanish with a key word missing--are better than grammar-based drills, because they provide input and modeling as well as making a student utilize newly acquired vocabulary. The vocab sentences are like Spanish crosswords, only they look like what we think homework should look like. However, it takes no analytical ability at all to see that, in my particular textbook, two pages of grammar instruction and mechanical practice exist for every one page of vocabulary practice. And that's not even counting the supplemental materials, where the ratio is closer to 3:1. In deference to the "communicative methodology" craze sweeping the nation, my textbook has taken all the practice activities that used to be plug-and-chug writing activities and turned them into speaking activities. Same basic formulation, different communication skills. Still not so good. So the first failing of my textbook is that it dedicates too much space to pedagogically flawed activities.
The way the students interact with the textbook also leaves a great deal to be desired. It's as if the textbook is the embodiment of school work. We now have a lot of format options for activities of all kinds--we can make activities on Moodle, or turn them into whiteboard activities or overhead transparency activities or board games, all with relative ease--and while the students still know that they're doing work, it seems to feel less onerous. But pull out the textbook, especially first thing, and the students know that they're in for a day of what my high school Spanish teacher referred to as gruntwork. [Interesting mini-study idea: Take a textbook project. Give it to the students in 3 or 4 different formats, including straight out of the text. Compare completion ratios and success rates. Control for instructional strategy and classroom management issues.]
But because I'm a big-idea type of guy, I have a more fundamental reason for distrusting my textbook, and that's that textbook companies are sort of the devil. In his article "The Muddle Machine," Ansari (2004) takes down the textbook industries in a number of areas, including the way pedagogical philosophy is artificially tacked on as a marketing ploy, the manner in which materials are recycled from other textbooks, and the way textbooks are designed to sell lots and lots of copies and Texas and California, which leads to an almost-uselessly homogenized blend of content. The way that textbook companies operate guarantees that any particular textbook is not going to be as useful as it should or could be, because there's no overhead in a book serving any particular interest. I understand that textbook companies have to make money (and there's a LOT of money in this publishing model). I get it. But I also have to be aware that the textbook companies are motivated by something other than my students' learning.
But for all of this philosophical and practical objection to my textbook, it's still my go-to source for gotta-have-it-now classroom content. My units for my high school Spanish I and II classes are more or less tightly tied to the units outlined in my text. I use the vocabulary lists from the text as my core vocabulary lists, and add or subtract vocabulary as necessary. I present grammar content in the order it comes up in the book, plus or minus a couple of days. (I think it's crazy, f'rinstance, to teach a student to describe where they're going before teaching them how to say where they are.) If the curriculum is the bedrock of the instruction, then my text is the foundation of the house. If the curriculum is the map to the finish line, the textbook is the schematic for the car that will take us there. And as much as I struggle against this professionally repugnant and pedagogically flawed state of affairs, turning to the text comes so naturally.
I wonder what would happen if, for a week, for a unit, for a year, I refuse to use the textbook at all....
Where it all falls down is the "specific implementation" portion of that. Most teachers and classes have a textbook of some kind. We're smart enough and we've been trained well enough that we now know that textbook /= curriculum. Even so, I (and I'd guess a lot of other teachers) still turn to my textbook first when I have no idea what I should do the next day. I have my curriculum document, a list of the 65 learning goals per her class, which I tweak, realign, and try to implement more fully during the summer. I create unit plans, with learning goals and assessments and teaching strategies. I make weekly lesson plans during the week. And through all this process, I use the textbook as a place where I can steal materials from and then rip them apart and re-assemble them in a way that actually works. But when the chips are down, and my three-tiered planning system fails to take something into account (and yes, like all teachers, I make my plans knowing that they won't work), and everything falls apart (I plan on this happening most weeks about halfway through Wednesday of any given week), I grab my textbook and pick bookwork activities out. There are any number of problems with this.
Grammar-based fill-in-the-blank activities have been shown to be not a very good way of teaching Spanish at all. Vocabulary-based drills--a sentence in Spanish with a key word missing--are better than grammar-based drills, because they provide input and modeling as well as making a student utilize newly acquired vocabulary. The vocab sentences are like Spanish crosswords, only they look like what we think homework should look like. However, it takes no analytical ability at all to see that, in my particular textbook, two pages of grammar instruction and mechanical practice exist for every one page of vocabulary practice. And that's not even counting the supplemental materials, where the ratio is closer to 3:1. In deference to the "communicative methodology" craze sweeping the nation, my textbook has taken all the practice activities that used to be plug-and-chug writing activities and turned them into speaking activities. Same basic formulation, different communication skills. Still not so good. So the first failing of my textbook is that it dedicates too much space to pedagogically flawed activities.
The way the students interact with the textbook also leaves a great deal to be desired. It's as if the textbook is the embodiment of school work. We now have a lot of format options for activities of all kinds--we can make activities on Moodle, or turn them into whiteboard activities or overhead transparency activities or board games, all with relative ease--and while the students still know that they're doing work, it seems to feel less onerous. But pull out the textbook, especially first thing, and the students know that they're in for a day of what my high school Spanish teacher referred to as gruntwork. [Interesting mini-study idea: Take a textbook project. Give it to the students in 3 or 4 different formats, including straight out of the text. Compare completion ratios and success rates. Control for instructional strategy and classroom management issues.]
But because I'm a big-idea type of guy, I have a more fundamental reason for distrusting my textbook, and that's that textbook companies are sort of the devil. In his article "The Muddle Machine," Ansari (2004) takes down the textbook industries in a number of areas, including the way pedagogical philosophy is artificially tacked on as a marketing ploy, the manner in which materials are recycled from other textbooks, and the way textbooks are designed to sell lots and lots of copies and Texas and California, which leads to an almost-uselessly homogenized blend of content. The way that textbook companies operate guarantees that any particular textbook is not going to be as useful as it should or could be, because there's no overhead in a book serving any particular interest. I understand that textbook companies have to make money (and there's a LOT of money in this publishing model). I get it. But I also have to be aware that the textbook companies are motivated by something other than my students' learning.
But for all of this philosophical and practical objection to my textbook, it's still my go-to source for gotta-have-it-now classroom content. My units for my high school Spanish I and II classes are more or less tightly tied to the units outlined in my text. I use the vocabulary lists from the text as my core vocabulary lists, and add or subtract vocabulary as necessary. I present grammar content in the order it comes up in the book, plus or minus a couple of days. (I think it's crazy, f'rinstance, to teach a student to describe where they're going before teaching them how to say where they are.) If the curriculum is the bedrock of the instruction, then my text is the foundation of the house. If the curriculum is the map to the finish line, the textbook is the schematic for the car that will take us there. And as much as I struggle against this professionally repugnant and pedagogically flawed state of affairs, turning to the text comes so naturally.
I wonder what would happen if, for a week, for a unit, for a year, I refuse to use the textbook at all....
Saturday, September 13, 2008
Procedures and structure in the World Languages classroom
Everything I've read ever suggests that the single most important element of classroom management is to establish and teach procedures consistently and well. (Wong & Wong 2005, Marzano 2007, Flannery 2008, and an e-mail I just got from the State Education Association illustrate the point, but I'm pretty sure that that's far from exhaustive.) It's an aspect of teaching that I've had to get a lot better at in my classroom, since I'm not inclined by nature to be procedures-driven.
At the same time, communicative language theory suggests that you start speaking the target language immediately and more or less constantly (Lee & Van Patten 1995, to name one). The act of a student understanding a language they're learning is referred to in the literature as "comprhensible input," and its importance in the language classroom cannot be exaggerated. The mor of it, the better. This is an aspect of my job that DOES come naturally. I love speaking Spanish, and to be perfectly frank, I like the sound of my own voice.
However, I've always had a problem with these two key elements of my job, because they seem to come into direct conflict with each other. I base a lot of early-stage language education on playing off of prior knowledge--my students know that they're students, they know I'm a teacher, and they know they're in school. In the younger grades, that's 4 sessions worth of lesson plans, after you get done adding songs, pictures, TPR activities, and the like. Even for the 1st-year high school students, that and peripherals make for a good chunk of vocabulary acquisition. But procedures require great precision and absolute clarity. In order for a procedure to be effective, a student has to know when, where, how, and WHY. Beginning-of-class procedure doesn't work for coming back from a fire drill. In the same vein, if you're making up procedures as you go along, students are (rightly) going to think you're asking to jump through hoops; besides, the next day, I never remember which procedures I said were in effect. This is the antithesis of a procedure, it's the whim of a dictator.
So, marrying these two practices suggests that from day 1 a language teacher should teach procedures in the target language. But the chance for miscommunication in such occasions is great, and the consequences include misunderstood, misapplied, or ignored procedures. This as good as plunges a classroom into chaos. (At least, it did mine.) Another potential solution is to teach mostly procedures in English with some Spanish content instruction. This feels like a splitting-the-baby solution, one that satisfies neither the need for good procedures nor communicative theory. It's failed to work for a long time, though, so it's what I went with this year. We're two weeks into the school year, and my high school students seem to be pretty okay on the procedures, as well as on the smattering of Spanish we've covered so far. (I'm thinking about my Spanish I students here.) Not an ideal solution, but an okay stop-gap measure so far. One could, I suppose, simply ignore one beginning-of-the-year obligation or the other, but that sounds like the makings of a hard year.
A related subject to this is the level of structure during instructional time. I have boardwork at the beginning of class and I try to have an assessment on the lesson at the end of the class, but what happens in between varies wildly--instruction? practice? speaking activity? listening activity? vocab?. I imagine it's the same with other teachers, that it isn't simply my disorganization biting me in the tail yet again. Ideally, in order to maximize comprehensible input in Spanish, my students should know what to expect every minute of the day before the tardy bell rings. My plans are thorough, but they're not prescient. So balancing structure and comprehensible input again seem to come into conflict. It's an issue that I've noticed, but I haven't thought a lot about it yet.
I don't think that I've read anything that addresses this apparent contradiction. I'd hoped to acquire a copy of the ACTFL's Keys to the Classroom, a book designed for new World Language teachers, to see if the pros had any suggestions. So far, no dice. If anyone in the real world has seen anything like this, or otherwise has suggestions, I'd appreciate hearing them.
Works cited:
Lee, J., and VanPatten, B. (1995.) Making communicative language teaching happen. McGraw-Hill.
Wong, H., and Wong, R. (2005.) The first days of school. Mountain View, CA: Harry K. Wong Publications.
Flanery, M. E. (2008.) "When the ship sails adrift." NEAToday, 27 (1), 30-31.
Update: I just looked at the program for the State World Languages Association conference coming up one month, and there appears to be a session that strives to resolve the very conflicts I mention above. More about on this after the conference (assuming I can go).
At the same time, communicative language theory suggests that you start speaking the target language immediately and more or less constantly (Lee & Van Patten 1995, to name one). The act of a student understanding a language they're learning is referred to in the literature as "comprhensible input," and its importance in the language classroom cannot be exaggerated. The mor of it, the better. This is an aspect of my job that DOES come naturally. I love speaking Spanish, and to be perfectly frank, I like the sound of my own voice.
However, I've always had a problem with these two key elements of my job, because they seem to come into direct conflict with each other. I base a lot of early-stage language education on playing off of prior knowledge--my students know that they're students, they know I'm a teacher, and they know they're in school. In the younger grades, that's 4 sessions worth of lesson plans, after you get done adding songs, pictures, TPR activities, and the like. Even for the 1st-year high school students, that and peripherals make for a good chunk of vocabulary acquisition. But procedures require great precision and absolute clarity. In order for a procedure to be effective, a student has to know when, where, how, and WHY. Beginning-of-class procedure doesn't work for coming back from a fire drill. In the same vein, if you're making up procedures as you go along, students are (rightly) going to think you're asking to jump through hoops; besides, the next day, I never remember which procedures I said were in effect. This is the antithesis of a procedure, it's the whim of a dictator.
So, marrying these two practices suggests that from day 1 a language teacher should teach procedures in the target language. But the chance for miscommunication in such occasions is great, and the consequences include misunderstood, misapplied, or ignored procedures. This as good as plunges a classroom into chaos. (At least, it did mine.) Another potential solution is to teach mostly procedures in English with some Spanish content instruction. This feels like a splitting-the-baby solution, one that satisfies neither the need for good procedures nor communicative theory. It's failed to work for a long time, though, so it's what I went with this year. We're two weeks into the school year, and my high school students seem to be pretty okay on the procedures, as well as on the smattering of Spanish we've covered so far. (I'm thinking about my Spanish I students here.) Not an ideal solution, but an okay stop-gap measure so far. One could, I suppose, simply ignore one beginning-of-the-year obligation or the other, but that sounds like the makings of a hard year.
A related subject to this is the level of structure during instructional time. I have boardwork at the beginning of class and I try to have an assessment on the lesson at the end of the class, but what happens in between varies wildly--instruction? practice? speaking activity? listening activity? vocab?. I imagine it's the same with other teachers, that it isn't simply my disorganization biting me in the tail yet again. Ideally, in order to maximize comprehensible input in Spanish, my students should know what to expect every minute of the day before the tardy bell rings. My plans are thorough, but they're not prescient. So balancing structure and comprehensible input again seem to come into conflict. It's an issue that I've noticed, but I haven't thought a lot about it yet.
I don't think that I've read anything that addresses this apparent contradiction. I'd hoped to acquire a copy of the ACTFL's Keys to the Classroom, a book designed for new World Language teachers, to see if the pros had any suggestions. So far, no dice. If anyone in the real world has seen anything like this, or otherwise has suggestions, I'd appreciate hearing them.
Works cited:
Lee, J., and VanPatten, B. (1995.) Making communicative language teaching happen. McGraw-Hill.
Wong, H., and Wong, R. (2005.) The first days of school. Mountain View, CA: Harry K. Wong Publications.
Flanery, M. E. (2008.) "When the ship sails adrift." NEAToday, 27 (1), 30-31.
Update: I just looked at the program for the State World Languages Association conference coming up one month, and there appears to be a session that strives to resolve the very conflicts I mention above. More about on this after the conference (assuming I can go).
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