For the last several years, my professional development has been focused on instructional techniques that are good for all teachers, with a particular focus on Sprick et. al. for classroom management strategies, and Marzano for most everything else. But in college, I mostly worked on strategies specific to second-language instruction, as that was going to be my focus. There is absolutely no question that I'm a better teacher for being familiar with these strategies.
But recent experience tells me that I need to go back and bone up on some of my Spanish teacher skills. Fortunately, last year I took a course for elementary certification, so I haven't forgotten how to do research. I've pulled out Lee and Van Patten's Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen (1st ed.), my gold standard for applied language acquisition theory. They're like Marzano sometimes, in that they do some more generalizing with specific support which are sort of more useful. But reviewing through it, I'm finding lots of things I've forgotten in my rush to be teacher of the whatever (an award I'm not winning anytime soon).
This week's focus: Have the learner do something with the input. "Learners cannot be passive recipients of language," Lee and Van Patten tell us. "Instructors should not simply talk at the learners or ask learners to simply read something. The learner must be actively engaged in attending to the input to encourage the processing of grammar." (p.107).
Showing posts with label Lee and Van Patten. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lee and Van Patten. Show all posts
Sunday, December 11, 2011
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.
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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