Using Literary Texts to Develop Language

In our MCM readings for this week there was a focus on how to use literature to develop language skills such as reading, writing, listening, and speaking. This also happens to fit under my group's multi-genre topic which is creative writing.

This week our group created a short story activity which uses the teaching-learning cycle. By using this cycle we are allowing our students to read and analyze the short story genre with some scaffolded instruction. This will eventually allow our students to construct an independent text. The reason why I mention this is because this activity involves most of the elements that are discussed in the MCM text.

At the beginning of our activity (which is meant for intermediate to advanced learners) students simply read a fairy tale. The reason why we chose this short story genre was that fairy tales usually adhere to a simple structure and this would make the analysis much simpler for them. Then after our students have thought about the genre we ask them to recreate the story by writing a modern version of it. This allows our students to rewrite the story in their own words and to make a connection with the text. In our MCM reading this week the authors say that, "it is important in selecting literary texts to ensure that the theme of the text is engaging for the students and that the text itself is not too difficult on either a linguistic or conceptual level" (322). So by allowing our students to find a connection with the text we hope that they become engaged in the learning process. If they are engaged then task such as determining the point of view, the structure of the story, and the kinds of vocabulary in the text become much more interesting and our students are more likely to remember what they are learning. I am not going to explain the entire activity that we created, but after a series of scaffolded instructions our students become less and less dependent on the teacher. Our activity's final goal is to have our students choose a character and independently write/act out the dialogue that they have created along with the other students to create a miniature play of the original short story. After finishing this activity our students will have not only become engaged in the learning process, but they will also have had some practice reading, writing, speaking, listening, and most importantly thinking about English.

Lightbrown & Spada: "Observing learning and teaching in the L2 classroom"

This is my 13th and most scary post, a little late for Halloween though... I found the eleven studies at the end of chapter five to be very useful and interesting. Since I don't have too much teaching experience I want to mention just a few of these studies and how I have noticed them in my own L2 learning.

The first study I want to mention is study #2 on page 128 (Recasts and private speech). In this short paragraph L & S state, "that learners noticed recasts when they were provided by the instructor. Furthermore, learners were more likely to react to a recast with private speech when it was directed to another learner or to the whole class". I think that this is worth mentioning because it reminds me of how a simple change in the instructor's reaction to a speech error can make all the difference. When learning my L2 I found that this method of recasting a student's error indirectly was used very often and it was very effective. The result that this had on me and other students was that we became aware of the fact that this was more than likely a common error that we all shared instead of an individual mistake on our part. It sort of unified the class. This way we were able and more willing to adopt the recasts and to work on our own errors without feeling stupid or behind the curve.

Another study that I'd like to mention is study #7 on page 132 of L & S. Here our authors discuss how closed questions from an instructor usually produce a "simple on-word response" from the student, while open questions produce "longer and more complex answers". I would agree with this in general, but I want to focus on how this type of questioning is used in beginning level L2 classrooms. I want to focus on this because for beginning level second language students it is often difficult to create complex answers because of their lack of vocabulary and grammatical forms. But with this difficulty in mind I also want to mention that beginning level L2 students can often surprise a teacher with their limited abilities. One thing that I noticed in my own L2 was how, even with very limited knowledge, I was able to express ideas beyond my L2 abilities by making the most use of the vocabulary and grammatical forms that I already possessed. Usually all it takes (or took) is for the instructor to assist their students by giving them a couple words of new vocabulary that interests them or by helping the students to make a more complete and complex sentence than they would have come up with on their own. This negotiation of meaning along with a few metalinguistic comments can help an engaged student to keep looking to the horizon of their abilities (+1).

The last thing that I want to point out which is fairly obvious but important is study #9 on page 133. At the end of that study it focuses on how important the home life is on a student's second language acquisition and education in general. Even though I think that this is obvious, it is something that we, as teachers, should always keep in mind.

"Sounds like someone's got a case of the Mondays"

Probably the most helpful thing that we did in class last week was the peer review. It mainly got a couple groups in the class to look at each others work and critique it, but it also provided some valuable feedback for each group. I think that being able to see a couple different approaches to the same project was also helpful because it gave my group some fresh ideas on where to take our project next. The only thing that I was left wondering after this portion of the class was: why didn't we devote a little more time to this activity since it was so helpful? I ask this question just because my group was not able to go into the details of the project which we were reviewing. We only got a chance to skim it over a couple times and we felt rushed with the written response. I would say that the most valuable feedback was the verbal response because it gave everyone enough time to point out most of what was discussed as we were reviewing the other group's project.

A couple other highlights from last Monday were Chris and Stephanie's presentation and Dr. Smidt's teachable moments discussion. The presentation went well and it allowed everyone in the class to focus on at least one component of a lesson plan. I'm not sure if we came up with a coherent and teachable lesson, but each area of the lesson plan that was written on the chalkboard was fairly well done. I just want to mention the teachable moments discussion because it focuses on a teacher's ability to work on their feet and react to unforeseen situations. I think that this is a very valuable ability that a teacher should acquire with experience because it allows a failed lesson plan to succeed sometimes and it can also make the class much more enjoyable for the students as well as the teacher. I've seen how experienced teachers have utilized this concept in the past and it allows the class time to pass by evenly and naturally instead of in a choppy pre-conceived order (although if it is used incorrectly it can cause the class to get off track).

Shakespeare in ESL??

The section of the readings that I'd like to focus on is the "Guidelines for Language Classroom Instruction" in the MCM text. The reason why I want to focus on that is because I think that it provides a useful and practical outline of the preparation for and the execution of an ESL lesson. It starts with the lesson planning, then states a variety of tasks (motivation phase, input/control phase, focus/working phase, application phase, testing, and some other aspects to think about when preparing to teach). Of course all of these suggestions may not be used in a single class, but being aware of the many different kinds of activities helps to get me thinking about what I might want to use in my classroom. 

An example is the translation activity in the Focus/Working phase section on page 34 of MCM. For the Multi-Genre project my group is focusing on creative writing and one of the activities that we are using to promote this genre is the translation of parts of Shakespeare's "Hamlet". Now this may sound like a difficult activity for our ESL students but in The Journal of Imagination in Language Learning and Teaching there is a great article about how this activity can be used for ESL students of varying proficiencies (if anyone wants this article I can cite it for you). The gist of the article is that by translating or rewording a small text from Shakespeare's play (such as the "To be or not to be?" scene from "Hamlet", which was quoted by our friend Bill from Saigon) into modern English the students get an insight into the culture of English while gaining confidence in their language abilities as well. I have yet to use this activity (I may use it with my tutee), but it seems like an activity that could engage students with the English language if done properly.

Video Reflections

Ok, so I saw this great use of the word "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" on Saturday Night Live (an American comedy show) and I had to add the link here so that everyone can watch it (I can't upload the video here because NBC is over protective about their shows). The title is "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is Fatal":

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/clips/mary-poppins/727503/

Speaking of videos though, I thought that Jodie's use of the "American Tongues" video was great. Not only did it enhance her presentation, but parts of it were pretty funny (i.e. the one woman who wouldn't have babies with a southern accent "crawling around inside" of her). It just goes to show how prejudice people in the US can be about other dialects, even when their own is strange to begin with. I had seen this video in my Introduction to Linguistics class that I took as an undergrad and I remember that we also watched a few videos about pidgin English too. I've always thought it would be fun to be able to teach some aspects of creole or certain English dialects like Irish-English, but I don't know what practical purpose that would serve to the general ESL/EFL student. I did manage to find an ESL website rather easily that gives quizzes on Creole-English though: 

http://iteslj.org/v/creole/

So it is obviously used by some ESL teachers.

The other thing that I'd like to mention about our last class was the fact that we got to work in our Multi-Genre groups for over 30 minutes. This helped immensely. My group (Adib, Stephanie, and I) got to throw around some ideas about how to make our next two genres better and being able to ask Esther some questions helped a lot also.

Ch. 8: Just Plain Interesting

Chapter eight of our HDB text was very short, but it was very enjoyable because it helped me to realize how many unique opportunities are out there for us as ESL/EFL teachers. I mean, coming into this field of study I already knew that there were a lot of opportunities worldwide for teaching English and that is the main reason why I decided to go to school for an extra couple years, but this chapter highlights many more unique situations that I wasn't really aware of. For example in the post-secondary/Adult Education section Brown talks about VESL (Vocational ESL), survival/social curricula, and at the beginning of the institutional context section he mentions courses offered in areas as specific as conversational English.

But the most practical information in the chapter (for me) was when Brown highlights the difference between ESL and EFL settings and what needs to be focused on in these different settings. It was practical for me because even though my degree will be in TESL I will most likely be teaching EFL in another country besides the US. That's not to say that I will never come back to teach in the US, but my primary reason for entering this program at MSU is to use my degree to travel and to gain teaching experience in other countries so the difference in approach will be critical when I begin to teach. Possibly the most interesting part of the chapter though was the section discussing English as an international language. This particular piece of information isn't anything new to me, but the second bullet point on page 136 about how English is used as "a tool for international communication" instead of a way to teach "U.S. or British cultural values" was interesting to think about because it stresses that there are many ways and situations that English is actually used in across the globe that don't require perfect native-like proficiency. Of course if someone was using English as their L2 for scientific purposes they may want to be more proficient than someone using it for tourism, but the idea that English is becoming an international or global language is just plain interesting to think about and I can't wait until I can actually view this phenomena in a realistic context outside of the US.

Another Week and Another Reflection

Dr. Smidt was right, "It's better late than never". Last week we had a visit from one of our local librarians and even though we had already finished the first draft of our annotated bibliographies I found the visit to be very helpful. It was helpful not only because we will have to do research for other classes, but I think that by knowing more about the details of the MSU database we might find an article for our Multi-Genre project that we had overlooked before. I've been visited by these librarians before in other classes, but since this was more specific to our current needs it helped to make me aware of information that I hadn't been privy (I think that's the first time I've ever used that word) to before.

A couple of other things that we did last week was Rachel's presentation and working on our classmate's example lesson plans. The presentation was done pretty well because I think it got most of the class to think about the readings and it was also fun, but the danger of having the men compete against the women is that sometimes the competition can make things get a little out of hand. I thought that working on another group's lesson plan was interesting because it helped to show our group a different way of attacking a lesson plan and it allowed us to work with new ideas which was helpful.

Oh, How We All Love Grammar.

In the readings for this week one of the things that stood out to me was the explanation of grammar to our ESL students. In our HDB text, Brown stressed that as teachers we should keep the focus off of grammar and we should focus on more communicative practices instead (with a few exceptions of course). From my experiences in my own L2 I've noticed that most of my teachers have followed this advice. Those classes were aimed at the beginning levels of German (Novice low to Novice high from Ch.7) and that maybe the most important reason why my L2 teachers never taught a lot of grammar. But when they did use it, it was always used to show us the important differences between English and German sentence structures. Of course there was always the one student in each of my classes who couldn't get enough of this, for what reason I could never comprehend, but even this minimalistic approach to grammar got slightly confusing to many of the students when it was taken further than just sentence structures. Proof, I guess, of the relative unimportance of too much grammatical explanation.

One difference though between these classes in my L2 and the ones that I will most likely be teaching is that in my classes we were learning from non-native speakers (except for one class in about six years) and so most of the instruction was in English instead of German. This allowed for more explanation of grammar, but I honestly don't think it contributed much more to my learning experience. It actually may have detracted from it. Since the lessons were mostly in English, it made it hard to fully grasp the new language and its grammar. I know that in my High School the most proficient L2 speakers were in the Spanish classes and coincidentally the teacher was a native speaker and (much more importantly) most of the classes were taught in Spanish with minimal grammar, which was not translated into English for easier digestion. Even in all my years of English study there was only one year (8th grade, age 13) when we discussed English grammar extensively and it wasn't even the main focus of that year, vocabulary was. It's not that grammar isn't important, it's just that I think English (and other language) grammatical structures should be internalized by the student rather than memorized. Once they become proficient at the language (as Brown says) then the students can benefit more from grammatical instruction because they already intuitively know what is and isn't correct. Then conscious awareness of grammar is a more useful and realistic goal.

Dr. Smidt or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Theory and Methods

Stanley Kubrick anyone? Love him or hate him, he changed cinema. And does using this movie title link our Theory and Methods class to the Atom Bomb?... Anyways... To the subject!

Which is my reflection for class on last Monday. Throughout the class I was trying to see how Dr. Smidt's activities were enlightening the class as compared to my activity (and a couple activities I wanted to do but didn't have time for) on the same chapters. One thing that I noticed was how she engaged the class by taking advantage of the ways we learn (Visual, Kinesthetic, & Auditory). I should give this subject a rest, right? Wrong, I just want to use the last class as a good example of what I was talking about previously. Particularly in the activity where we wrote down our thoughts and stuck them to the chalkboard for peer assesment: I thought that this activity was well done since it allowed for group socialization and communication, but at the same time it allowed students to work independently AND it was visual, we were allowed to "work with the text" by writing down our own ideas, & we had a discussion about the 12 principles prior to the activity. Of course it wasn't a perfect activity: we could have been told that what we were writing down was going to be scrutinized (but not harshly) and we could have been given a little more time to come up with more creative thoughts. But for the most part this activity was pretty well rounded.

The other difference in presentation that I'll briefly mention is that there was no lecture about the material. Not even for 5 min. In a class where we're learning how to teach it makes sense that we are learning by doing and I think that helps a lot as long as the activities don't get too repetitive. Since the purposes are to reinforce the material, giving us teaching tools, and trying to enjoy it at the same time I think that activities like this have been engaging and teaching the class much more than a simple lecture might.

Instantiation of my Presentation

My main goal for the presentation that I gave last Monday was to bring the twelve new abstract principles that we read in the book into a more concrete light. In other words, I wanted the class to be able to see how each one of these principles could be used in our future classrooms. Unfortunately I don't think I accomplished this goal.

I tried to get everyone involved at the beginning by having a few people say where they will be teaching and I think that that was a good start. After all who doesn't like to talk about the new places they will be experiencing or their home country? One thing I could have done differently though, to make this short activity go even further, would've been to have a couple people explain how they perceive the problems that they may encounter in a new culture or the ones that they know they will have to deal with in their native culture. This might've gotten the class to think more about teaching in an actual classroom and then we could've discussed a couple principles (not all 12) that we see as critical in solving some of the challenges that we will be facing in the near future as teachers.

But I did not think of this until afterwards and the result of my presentation was that a good portion of our class either tuned out or were uninterested. I know that if I was listening to myself during this presentation that I would've been unengaged also, probably because I had already read the bland text before class. But my biggest, and maybe most simple, realization about the presentation was that I didn't accommodate the variety of learning styles that we have in our classroom (Visual, Kinesthetic, and auditory). I now realize that my discussion was mainly auditory and that (according to principle 5: Strategic Investment/the learner's methods of learning) this wasn't a good strategy to get the class engaged while reinforcing the previously read material. Instead I should have had some elements from the other two principles integrated into the presentation. After class I thought "well duh", but I think that it is simple and practical ideas like this that many of us overlook which may be the most helpful when we begin teaching in an actual ESL classroom.

Tomorrow Morning

I want to start with a quote straight from our L&S text: "Knowing more about second language acquisition research will not tell you what to do in your classroom tomorrow morning." (194). This was probably the biggest problem I had when it came to engaging with this text because I was constantly trying to put the knowledge I was gaining into an immediate classroom context. I was hoping that I could use something from these chapters with my ESL tutee, but things as simple as error correction are hard to implement right after reading. I don't think that this difficulty stems from my inexperience as a teacher (although I've only met with my tutee once and inexperience is a factor), but like the text says, these are subjects that require some thought and experimentation.

In chapter seven one of the subjects that was touched on which I thought was interesting was number 14 on page 191 (When learners are allowed to interact freely, they copy each other's mistakes). This was interesting to me for two reasons: 1. I have done group work in my second language (German) and I didn't find it very helpful & 2. I wasn't sure if this statement was correct or not. I of course found out that according to L&S the learners do not copy each other's mistakes (which makes sense because I never adopted my partner's mistakes in my German class when I was aware of them), but I also found out that learners at similar levels of proficiency are usually unable to correct a partner's error (which also makes sense since I rarely ever told my partner his/her mistake if they made one. I didn't for a couple reasons: 1. I wasn't the teacher & 2. (like L&S say) I couldn't truly tell them WHY they were wrong. I could easily have told them that they were wrong, but I would've been unable to explain it in a clear way). So does this mean that tomorrow if I have more than one tutee (or in the near future, a class of students) I will absolutely avoid group work? Probably not, but because of my own experience in my L2 (along with the research from the text we read) I will be able to know what to expect from my students when they are engaging in group work... Keeping them on task will definitely be important.

Substantive Entry 2 of 2

To continue on what I was discussing in my first blog I went back to the readings from this week. I actually found a few instances where the article I found and the readings agreed with eachother, but I didn't manage to find the one I was looking for in particular.

The first portion of the readings that I want to link to the article I found was in the textbook: How Languages are Learned. On page 46 there's something called Processability Theory. This is similar to the article that I found in that it focuses on a person's ability to process information. In the article that I found the processing of language comes into play when a student is engaged with the class. According to the article a student can stay engaged simply because they have a larger storage space for short-term memory or it may be due to how the teacher engages their students.  And in the textbook the theory on page 46 discusses how "easy" some parts of language are to process as compared to others. So I think an interesting experiment might be to use some of these easily processed language features in conjunction with an engaging activity in order to see whether or not it significantly affects the student's comprehension of the subject being learned.

Of course if a student learns something in an engaging environment they will probably learn it better, but the extent to which they learn it is what interests me. On page 22 of the same textbook is an interesting example. It talks about a child named Jim who had deaf parents who couldn't interact with Jim through oral language and didn't use sign language with him either. Jim did watch TV and listen to the radio though, but it was not enough input to develop his language skills correctly. This caused Jim to fall behind in his use of language until he had one-on-one conversations with an adult tutor. In this example it seems that Jim learned the language much quicker simply because he was engaged in speech with another person. This way he got corrected whenever he used his speech incorrectly. I think it is interesting that since someone showed an interest in teaching Jim it caused him to engage in the subject completely. So maybe when we go out of this classroom to teach we don't have to have the most elaborate lesson plans ever created. Maybe all it takes to effectively engage a student in learning is the ability to show the student(s) that you sincerely want them (and each of them in a large class) to be able to learn something from you? I think that as teachers, if this is our goal, then our own enthusiasm for teaching will transfer into the students' enthusiasm for learning.

Substantive Entry 1 of 2

Ok, so I was all wrapped up in the Multi-Genre research this weekend that I forgot I had to write TWO blogs instead of just one. I did manage to find some great sources though. In the assignments syllabus it says that one of these reflections should be on our readings and the other (for grads) can be a reflection of what we've learned in class. For this first blog I'm going to start by discussing what I've learned in class so far:

Like I said, I devoted a lot of time to finding helpful sources for the multi-genre research paper this weekend and I think that what we discover by completing this project will be very helpful to how we will teach in the near future. Already we have gotten a taste for how difficult it will be once we start teaching (i.e. Veronika's blog about their presentation). Even though we will be focusing on what we want our students to learn we will also have to take how our students learn into consideration. This includes everything from the psychology of our students to the time management of our classrooms. Since I don't really feel like discussing time management, I'm going to say a quick word about student psychology.

Usually when I think about psychology I think about how people behave, but rarely do I mull how our brains actually work. This weekend I found an interesting article titled: The Influence of Working Memory on Reading and Creative Writing Processes in a Second Language. In the article it explains that working memory is just a more precise term for short-term memory, but the thing that I found interesting was that it claimed that a person's short-term memory or attention span affects their learning of a language. Salim (the author) states, "Researchers contend that the different shares of processing and storage may be the source of individual differences in reading comprehension. A skilled reader is a more efficient processor, so s/he has more information storage capacity. That is, s/he has more attention left for information storage." What I took from this little excerpt and the beginning of his essay was the fact that IF we can increase our students attention span or their enthusiasm for learning then it might be possible to teach them English more effectively. 

If I remember correctly I think that this subject was also touched on in one of our readings this weekend. So if I can find it then that will be my subject for the second portion of this week's blog.