Second Language Learning
Reflections on a lesson (the Critical Incident)
(348 Words)
John C. Flanagan talks about a ‘critical incident’ (Flanagan, 1954) that can happen. With respect to this theory from an observation I had for my lesson, once this class had finished I had a meeting with the observer and he mentioned my teacher training was more about discussion than actual instruction.
Although I was actually teaching the subject matter to a certain level, I assumed this was myself basing the lesson more on communication and giving the students access to have thoughts and opinions on the topic mentioned by me. All the same, this was now my ‘critical incident’. My observer had mentioned something that stunned me a little while making me contemplate and reflect upon. In the class, I was raising issues and theories about teaching and talking about those elements of being a teacher with the students, but my observer was highlighting that I should be wholly teaching the students the subject matter.
Although completely taking over the class could be unjust to the students, I felt this observation was quite true that the students should have been given more of solid background knowledge about the subject. I need to fully (if not more) do/complete my job and give them the whole picture. It could be the case that the students can be just speaking about the subject as they (could) do without any prior knowledge of teaching. Generally speaking, we can all talk about various topics as if we have knowledge of them.
This is why this ‘critical incident’ where my observer highlighted a factor in my teaching, I have now felt (after reflection) that I have to fully complete my task as a teacher and stand there in front of the students and truly show them what I know and how the subject of the lesson should be known. It means espousing my knowledge in ways that show the students I am a qualified, professional, and proficient teacher that clearly demonstrates the topic on a level that challenges and informs the students. Thus, the level of discussion will hopefully be raised thereafter.
Flanagan, J.C. 1954. The critical incident technique. Psychological Bulletin.
Vocabulary building in young learners
(933 Words)
For this writing task, I was asked to give my response to 5 statements about how young learners can help build their vocabulary. I will answer true or false statements 1- 5 and explain why.
1. In a young child, a single word may constitute a considerable degree of meaning.
Is this True or False?
2. Words categories and concepts normally exist in isolation from each other.
Is this True or False?
3. Vocabulary development comprises at least three stages.
Is this True or False?
4. All languages have the same relationship between time and tense.
Is this True or False?
5. Where possible we should draw upon as many of the senses as possible when teaching vocabulary.
Is this True or False?
1. In a young child, a single word may constitute a considerable degree of meaning. T/F
This is true. The ability to use words is partly tied to the young child’s ongoing cognitive development, so the use of words will have a degree of meaning. Thus, for a child, a word stands for a concept, but that concept is open to interpretation in that they select a category of relatively similar objects and apply the lexical item throughout. A child can learn the word dog or as a young child puts it ‘doggy’. This refers to a four-legged animal. This word can exist for any type of dog either big or small or type of breed. For example, a dog may refer to beagles and scotties, but not to poodles. This aspect of children’s thought associates a word with an object, but they may then, in the future, use that word to describe a number of other similar objects in their environment. The child can also use the word ‘doggy to mean ‘there is a dog’ Notwithstanding, it can mean ‘come here’ said with a rising tone. Young children tend to utilise rising intonation to signal yes-no questions.
2. Words categories and concepts normally exist in isolation from each other. T/F
This is false. Words do not live in isolation, individual words can be categorised in many ways that remove the word from the original meaning or at least a child’s only idea of the meaning. The word ‘game’ can be attached to words such as card (game), ball (game), Olympic (games), and also football (game). As such the Olympic Games conjure up thoughts of many competitors from around the world competing together, although a ball game can involve one person banging a ball against a wall. This looks at two ends of the game spectrum. Winning the Olympic Games has men and women getting gold medals; the ball game respectively has no winner or loser. Furthermore, the game of poker has skills of a different kind compared to kicking a football around the football pitch as well as less physical energy.
3. Vocabulary development comprises of at least three stages. T/F
This is true. Word learning is the product of a set of cognitive and linguistic stages that include the ability to acquire concepts, an appreciation of syntactic cues to meaning, and a rich understanding of the mental states of other people. These capacities are powerful and early emerging. Firstly the child must make sense of new vocabulary. When words are first met by young learners, there are concepts that are given labels in English and may be new to the child, or only partially developed. The teacher or parent may not be merely teaching vocabulary, but teaching concepts. The labels and concepts need to be incorporated into schemas that already exist. The child has to learn this new vocabulary. Learning and retaining new vocabulary is made easier by grouping words together into families. While learning all this new vocabulary the child has to retain and recall this vocabulary for the various situation they will find themselves in. The single most effective way of helping students build vocabulary is by increasing the amount that they read. The child revisits the groups of words; adding to them and reorganising them provide ways of giving learners both the repetition and the development that is needed as they grow into English through the primary years and stages.
4. All languages have the same relationship between time and tense. T/F
This is false. Various countries of different lexis in different parts of the world that have relatively little contact with each other, will have experienced a different environment. Each country will invent words for the things in its environment that matter to it, and naturally, they find words for different things in their country. England has four seasons, other countries have three. Some countries are dark for many months. Learners from different countries don’t have some words in their vocabulary because they have never encountered such aspects of life. Basically, the learners have to develop categories and concepts for the new words they encounter. For this situation, when children encounter new words teachers need to provide support for understanding. New vocabulary needs to be presented in a context that helps the child understand the meanings and associations that help explain time and tense.
5. Where possible we should draw upon as many of the senses as possible when teaching vocabulary. T/F
This is true. Children learn words by seeing, feeling, tasting, listening, enjoying, and experiencing. These various means at a teacher’s disposal bring the reality of words to the fore. For example, a child can know the word ‘apple’ but this does not show the learner every aspect of the object. They can learn that it is a fruit and other fruits are in the same family. They can see pictures of apples so they see the shapes and colours. They can eat an apple then they know the taste and feel. Is it soft? Is it hard? It can be shown that the apple starts going rotten after a while, but it is also good for your health before going rotten. An apple pie can be cooked for the child to show how apples can be used. Granny Smith apples come from England. Other apples come from other countries. They can go on a field trip and see apples growing. The child realizes they grow in trees. They can go shopping at a supermarket and buy apples. They can be shown they are bought in weight.
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What are ‘Instructional Objectives’ in the class?
(926 Words)
As any self-respecting teacher would know that in class if you do not know where your class is heading you will never get there. This is true for any teacher who enters a classroom intending to give their students an education that will further expand the students’ knowledge. This means that objectives need to be set. This means instructional objectives need to be attained. The methods and training that the teachers will implement during the class should be incorporated in reaching everyone’s goals and objectives. The teacher has to discover whether the students leaving the classroom have demonstrated their language/skills acquisition. It has to be clear in the teacher’s mind that the students will exit the class having broadened their ideas/knowledge in while being able to talk about something new.
There has to be a teaching approach that the teacher utilizes to formulate the students’ learning that enhances aptitude. One way is for the teacher to state what they would like the students to be able to do at the end of the class although the ‘in-between’ phase needs to be verified. This also relates to the students who should know what their objectives are. This is by stating exactly what they should be able to achieve in the specified time. This is done by explaining the objectives to the students. Objectives need to be stated. The first step is to write an objective. The teacher must know what they want the students to be able to do. Objectives are clearly stated using action verbs like ‘define’ and ‘describe’. Objectives look at the students showing/defining what they have learnt. The teacher will never know unless they see and hear for himself. The students’ learning is imperative and making objectives that are not achievable will not help their learning. The teacher must be clear in their head what the measurable objectives for the students are. An objective is a written statement, defining in precise terms, what the learner will be able to do at the end of the training and how well. A teacher is faced with setting out understandable objectives. A verb like ‘know’, which clearly does not allow the teacher to define the student’s capacity of knowledge, will not help achievement. So, many verbs can be open to interpretation such as ‘know, understand, and think’ clearly do not prove to the teacher that the student is in command of new expressions and terms. Verbs like ‘define and describe’ will undoubtedly illustrate to the instructor the depth of the students’ language acquisition. This means that teachers do not just have objectives per se but clear objectives that define the learning outcome. There has to be some form of accomplishment at the end of the class or term. A factor that has to be taken into account is; are the objectives achievable? It acceptable to have objectives but if they surpass what the student level is at, the objectives will not work. These have to be arranged in a format that will allow the students to learn. These objectives have to be measurable and observable.
The teacher also has to determine the domain in which the objective can be classified. There are generally 3 domains cognitive, affective, and psycho-motor. Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues (1956) developed a widely accepted taxonomy for cognitive objectives. The main domain is cognitive. Bloom further classified the cognitive domain into 6 levels. The lowest level is knowledge. This is the students’ ability to recall information. The teachers can the students to state, recall, tell, and define. The next level is comprehension. The students must be able to grasp meaning, explain and restate ideas. There is also evaluation during the course of learning where the teacher has to see how far the students have developed. Of course, teaching and student’s acquisition of language is not as straightforward as would seem. Some students need that extra bit of tuition which is standard. This is where feedback comes in. The teacher has to evaluate the students. The students have to develop through the instructional process and if this does not work first time the teacher has to have a plan to reinforce the objective and set the students on the right path. The students need to improve so as not too elongated learning where it becomes tedious. This also helps the group where everyone is working together. For a group/class, task analysis is used a lot by many institutions which progressively test the students to evaluate their level of acquisition and are they achieving the objectives. Robert Mager defined three conditions of objectives. Learning objectives determine the outcomes and how they are to be assessed with the all modules having clear, defined objectives, practice exercises, and mastery tests. A good learning objective has to have three primary components of an objective:
- An objective always describes the important conditions (if any) under which the performance is to occur.
- An objective always says what a learner is expected to be able to do; the objective sometimes describes the product or the result of the doing.
- Wherever possible, an objective describes the criterion of acceptable performance by describing how well the learner must perform in order to be considered acceptable.
I have shown how teachers should not only look have objectives but also make those objectives quantifiable for the students. This means that the teacher will get an enhanced picture of the students learning. This, of course, means that the teacher can focus not only each lesson but the whole term to achieve certain objectives.
Dictogloss
So, you may be one of those instructors who are very teacher centred and has a deductive approach to learning and teaching. However, it may well be a good idea to think about collaborative procedures that allow the students to make discoveries. Thus, there is the inductive approach where students (in a dictation lesson, for example) induce meaning through their own use of the English language. Here is where ‘Dictogloss’ comes in. Learners retain the gist of a story (from dictation) and then use their own grammatical knowledge to rewrite the story.
So, here is how it goes. Students are introduced to the topic and the related vocabulary. Techniques such as an open class discussion, group brainstorming, question and answer elicitation, predicting text content from pictures or vocabulary, are used to contextualise the lesson. Learners then listen to the text. The first time, they do not write anything. But, the second time they take notes, noting keywords. Then, the students work in groups of three or four to reconstruct the text with one student acting as a writer of their own group version. Once finished, students can then write their copy on the board where a comparison can be made with other groups’ ideas and of course the teacher’s original text. Above all, at this point, feedback through peer correction is encouraged for all students.
text → student reconstruction → comparison
input output feedback
Thornbury (1999:85) evaluates the dictogloss and reports that it ‘provides a useful means for guiding learners towards noticing the gap between their present competence and their target competence’.
Reference: http://www.academia.edu/323021/A_Classroom_Experiment_Using_dictogloss
GIVE IT A GO!!!!!
Literacy Review – Formative Assessment
Inside the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment By Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam
(535 words)
Giving an overall picture to the students’ learning, and them understanding clearly the subject matter and material in the lesson as an ongoing process, led me to focus on formative assessment for professional development, and subsequently on a small book called Inside ‘the Black Box: Raising Standards Through Classroom Assessment by Paul Black and Dylan William’ (1998).
The first main focus of this book was that outside of the classroom there are many factors/forces that push the teacher to do a proficient job. However, Black and Wiliam state that ‘learning is driven by what teachers and pupils do in classrooms’ (Black and Wiliam, 1998: 1). This highlights the classroom as the Black Box and what goes on inside is as important if not more than outside assessment. The teacher is the one who has that direct relationship with the students and that helps deal with progression within this sphere. The teacher is really the only one that can see what is happening on a day to day basis. For example, Black and Wiliam suggest ‘how can anyone be sure that a particular set of new inputs will produce better outputs if we don’t at least study what happens inside?’ Black and Wiliam (1998: 2). Teachers are always looking for ways to improve and formative assessment of the students’ on-going study means that the teacher can change factors to help suit the needs of the students.
Furthermore, the fact that students have tests at the end of their learning makes room for more formative assessment that can help highlight issues along the path of their learning actively helping them and adjusting their learning. Black and Wiliam state that ‘the practice of formative assessment produce significant and often substantial learning gains’ (Black and Wiliam, 1998: 1). There is a need for the students to be actively involved and the process of letting the students just complete work and then mark it reinforces underachievement. Students should be allowed to assess their on-going learning as well as the teacher. Black and Wiliam highlight this, as improved formative assessment helps low achievers more than other students and so reduces the range of achievement while raising achievement overall (Black and Wiliam, 1998: 4). Thus the teacher can adapt their teaching to fit the needs of the students. This gets away from summative assessment as the vital part of the learning process where the final result is more important than the path getting there. Black and Willams show that ‘the giving of marks and the grading function is overemphasized, while the giving of useful advice and the learning function are underemphasized (Black and Wiliam, 1998: 5). This then gets away from the students competing and puts focus on them actually looking at their personal improvement. It could be said to be true that ‘when the classroom culture focuses on rewards, gold stars, grades, or class ranking, then pupils look for ways to obtain the best marks rather than to improve their learning. (Black and Wiliam, 1998: 7). This puts the focus back on the students to change the culture into one where all the students involved can progress and achieve. The students can understand the main focus of being in the classroom.
Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (1998b). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom
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