Awesome experience.
- Wesley Schantz
That would be my testimonial. Some of the posters and things I made are probably still around there, examples of the work we would do with our students. Here are a few of the journal posts and reflections from the program, which has kept me busier than I expected over the past couple of summers and every semester in between. If even one student is able to attend TCS who wouldn't otherwise have been allowed, though, that will be all right.
What is your language learning/teaching background? Why are you here? What are your hopes for Summer Institute? What are your long-term goals for teaching English?
I speak English fluently. This is simply because of where and when I was born; however, as I have grown and become a learner and teacher of languages, I have worked to understand consciously what I once learned unreflectively. In some important sense, then, I am still a learner of English myself.
I took Spanish and Latin in high school. In college, I went to Spain for a semester abroad, then worked at summer camps in Mexico and Spain, traveling with friends. After graduating, I taught English on a Fulbright exchange in Uruguay. I also learned the basics of a few other languages, spending a summer in France and another in Brazil, working on Homeric Greek in graduate school, and practicing Old English and Old Norse through an online program centered on Tolkien studies. These experiences have helped me better appreciate the structure and development of English, too. Someday I’d love to learn Japanese, perhaps through Spokane’s Sister City exchange with Nishinomiya.
This brings me to my hopes for the Summer Institute: to better understand how to teach English effectively, and to understand the language of TESOL. I am hoping that by adding this endorsement I will be able to help bring more students from different language backgrounds to The Community School, where I teach. In the longer term, I hope to continue learning and teaching about language for as long as I am able to read and travel. Eventually, I may pursue a PhD in the area of literacy or comparative literature, should the opportunity arise.
What foreign languages have you learned and how will these experiences – or lack of them – influence your ideas about teaching a language. How important is it for language teachers to have learned a foreign language?
Growing up in the DC suburbs, I went to school with students from all around the world and had great opportunities to start learning other languages. I chose to start with Spanish, mainly because most of my friends spoke it at home and because older friends of mine were taking it in school. The public schools in my area offered French, Russian, Chinese, and even Latin. The first things I associate with language learning, then, are choice, freedom, and friendship, all very important elements I try to bring to my teaching.
Still, the basics I picked up in classroom settings and conversations on the way to soccer practice were just a stepping stone to traveling to Spain in college. Language immersion in a distinct place and culture, at least for me, was essential to make the leap from studying a language to really deeply learning it. Encouraging and facilitating opportunities for travel and cultural exchange for students who are serious about knowing another language will be a goal I set myself as a teacher.
Not just language teachers but any teacher -- or lifelong learner -- should have the chance to study a living language. I wouldn’t want to be prescriptive about it and say they must prove their proficiency, but experiencing what it is like to try to learn another language will certainly give them an important insight into what their students are likely going through.
What makes a good language teacher? What three qualities are most necessary in your opinion? Use concrete examples from your own experience to illustrate your opinions. What qualities are you missing that you’d like to cultivate?
I think about good teachers I have known, learned from, and read about: my friend who teaches Latin and Greek, James Myers; the fighter in the French Resistance and teacher of celebrities, Michel Thomas; and the extreme case of Jacotot, as presented by Ranciere. The first quality that impresses me is their dedication. Embodying totally different walks of life and working in a dizzyingly wide range of circumstances, all three seem to live for their craft. They are/were continually striving to improve their teaching in transformative ways for their students. Mr Myers started a Vergil Club to read the Aeneid alongside students who wanted to go beyond the Latin that was offered at our school. After his brother’s death, he dedicated a Loeb Classics Library to his memory on the campus.
My friends and mentors project total calm and confidence, along with tireless energy and patience. I don’t know a single word for this combination, but I suspect it is all wrapped up with their confidence in, and love of the activity of, teaching. In his audio recordings, Michel Thomas talks about taking full responsibility for the success of the lessons, so that learners need feel no pressure. As we talked about in class, a certain amount of good stress might be helpful for some, but this zen-like calm is more my learning and teaching style.
Finally, good teachers trust their students. For this, I appeal to Jacotot/Ranciere, who in The Ignorant Schoolmaster develop a remarkable method for teaching languages and other subjects which the teacher him- or herself does not know. It depends entirely on student engagement and motivation. Besides apparent contradiction with my second example, this would obviously need considerable modification for a public school setting, but the account is inspiring! In a very different context, the literacy scholar Gholdy Muhammad describes a similar approach in her Cultivating Genius. So to sum up, I’ll strive to be dedicated, confident, and trust in the genius of my students.
What makes a good language learner? Give examples from the class you are observing or from your own experience. Be specific.
I’m curious first about the distinction between acquisition and learning: our text claims the former is unconscious while the latter takes intentional effort (341). This sounds to me like William Blake/Philip Pullman’s framework of innocence and experience, which I think is more poetic than literal. But if we grant the premise, then the first thing needed for a good language learner is a certain level of consciousness, of thinking about the process of learning itself. Otherwise, we’re still at the level of acquisition.
Noticing how in the second language things that come naturally suddenly begin to require conscious effort could be frustrating. So on the heels of the conscious effort, there has to be an openness to seeing everything in a new light. This takes curiosity and patience. I suspect a certain poetic turn of mind is actually helpful, too, since finding such wonder in everyday experiences, in language, is a big part of what poets do.
So far, I have been thinking mainly in the abstract, but I’m also remembering the time I spent in Spain, immersed for the first time in a new language. That led me to reflect on everything--food, music, relationships, nationality, history--from a new perspective. If I can draw an analogy from that to what newcomers are experiencing in the language classroom this summer, I would definitely add mathematics into the mix. The RAMP UP activities around patterns, reasoning, and prediction are all much less rigid than the way I was taught. Perhaps learning new ways of thinking about mathematics, or any content, in a second language, rather than focusing solely on the language itself, is crucial for internalizing both language and content. The student has to be willing to abide in ambiguity at times, however, because there will always be words and concepts that are beyond them at first. (Probably more than i+1 beyond them!) This is coming back to poetry again (Keats’ negative capability) and philosophy (Socrates’ perplexity).
Describe the Summer Language Program class you are in or you have observed. Include information about the SLP class name/level, the students, the lesson plan including observable lesson objectives and activities, and focus on how input is made comprehensible, e.g. simplifying instruction, scaffolding, modeling, explaining 3x3 ways, using comprehension checks. Etc.
I think moving into the RAMP-UP program will ultimately be worth it, though it meant missing the first couple of days of morning classes with you all. The curriculum is designed for long-term ELL 9th graders. We have adapted it for our newcomers mainly by taking more time to preview vocabulary, check comprehension, and coach writing. This has meant we move more slowly through the activities, but the most important thing is helping the students find success; the researchers have made it clear that they’re getting plenty of good data and feedback, so our adjustments are welcome.
The students’ level of English ranges from beginner to intermediate. All of the vocabulary, then, has to be made visual, and even tactile in some cases. For instance, with a problem about handshakes, we had students shake each other’s hand. This was also an opportunity to ask about greetings in their first language/ culture. Comprehension checks involve modeling activities and then eliciting the sequence of steps back from the students.
The best part of the class is listening to the students’ talk in pairs and small groups, as these conceptual (as opposed to procedurally-focused) activities all do a good job of building in collaboration and engagement. They have even become used to sharing their thinking out at the board. With such a small class, it is impossible to hide, so everyone has been getting a lot of talk time.
Give a brief overview of the cultural/linguistic groups in your SLP classroom. What socio-cultural elements/factors have you observed and how do they impact (language) learning and classroom behavior, both positively and negatively?
The students come from a variety of backgrounds: speakers of Ukrainian, Karen, and Pashto, along with one or two each from China, Marshall Islands, and Congo. The small data set makes it difficult to generalize, but with that said and allowances for individual differences, there are certainly aspects of student interaction that seem safe to attribute to the cultures they come from. The newcomers all have in common a positive attitude and willingness to participate. This is not so common among native speakers, particularly in a typical math classroom. Their motivation to learn and practice the language is powerfully working to leverage their mathematical thinking. It almost makes me want to teach math in Spanish for my native speakers of English.
The students who have friends that speak the same language tend to help each other (or distract each other) frequently. They also do a good job including others by recasting in English, but students are also curious about how to say things in their first language, to the point that some Chinese words and Pashto phrases have been making the rounds. The boys are more outgoing, the girls more reserved, across most cultural groups. The students without a language cohort around them, for whatever reason, do seem more serious. We try our best to get them to smile more. We’ve also challenged our Marshallese student to try to convince her friends to show up, but so far without success. My co-teacher has been talking about making a home visit, but after all it’s an optional thing for them to attend. Across most cultures, summer break is highly prized!
What did you learn by observing other teams’ Lesson Presentations? What did you learn not to do? How will this affect your teaching in the future? Give concrete examples.
I found the warmer and lesson presentations to be a really valuable window into what was going on around the program. As my classmates shared their lessons, they also practiced the skills of teaching and pacing their material. Getting to observe and reflect on this process was also very instructive. What made the lessons real, though, and made our feedback useful, was the fact that they were going to actually teach them to students in the afternoon within a day or two. The structure of the program as a whole, with the close connection between theory and practice, is yet another aspect which I observed and learned from.
The main takeaway from the lesson presentations was the importance of being earnest with respect to content while being flexible with respect to time. I mean that the student-teachers did a great job of fully entering into the role of teacher, letting us pretend to be the students, and conveying the content they had chosen as if it were new information to us, and of the utmost significance that we should practice it. They tied it to their class themes and real-life purposes and provided plenty of activities for students to interact, from reading and writing recipes (for adult learners) to singing about animal superpowers and adaptations (for 1st or 4th graders). Even in our morning classes, of course, we rarely if ever got through all the content. But this was because the discussions and activities, with their purpose of fostering relationship and a sense of being a community of learning, took precedence over coverage. We had the flexibility to work in this way, however, only because there is not a content-focused standardized test at the end of the program (thank goodness).
Free topic: What interesting things have you observed that you would like to comment on? Write your own observation task question and then write your answer.
What effects do grants and research have on the teachers and students involved in the programs they fund?
As I’ve been reflecting on the throughlines for the summer language program, one unexpected theme that keeps coming up for me is the importance of funding. I saw this in so many ways, between the grant that allowed SPS teachers like me to join the program at no cost to us, the research pilot RAMP UP math curriculum, and the longstanding partnerships between GU, the district, and donors that have allowed the program to continue through and beyond the pandemic. I know that it’s above my pay grade to understand or deal with any of the factors that go into such grants, but as I have benefitted from them and, in the case of RAMP UP especially, participated closely in their implementation, I am left wondering, you know, how do these things work?
My guess is that there is a combination of theory and practice, just like in good teaching, that goes into a successful grant. There is probably a balance between hard facts (numbers of students served, learning outcomes, rate of pay for teacher stipends, etc.) and softer forms of power and persuasion (reputation, testimonials, personal relationships, and so on). And my hope is that with the inclusion of more teachers who play the role, so to speak, of student-teachers, that process of mentoring will in turn receive some reflection and adjustment to better support all the good that these programs do. This piece in particular has been on my mind as The Community School stands to go on a future bond for funding that could enable us to do more as a “Lab School” in collaboration with local universities and schools of education.
After watching The Birth of a Word and The Linguistic Genius of Babies, write a reflection/response in which you address at least two of these questions:
What to you were the most intriguing findings of the two researchers? Were you surprised by any of their findings? What further questions does this research raise for you?
Both Kuhl and Roy claim that (first-language) language acquisition is mediated by human interaction. Summarize the claims and discuss what, if any, implications there may be for language acquisition generally – for example, in classroom learning contexts.
Do you find their research convincing? Are there any potential problems with bias or validity that you can detect? In other words, do you think their research can be applied to all humans, regardless of context and culture?
You are welcome to use examples from your own experience (e.g. observing young children you know learning their first language).
The most intriguing evidence put forward by Kuhl regards the rapid acquisition of language (more sound recognition than production), even one the child has never heard before, which happens through in-person interaction at a critical period of development. Her work draws on the low-tech universality of 'motherese' and on the most recent brain-imaging machinery, and it is presented in the form of very simple-looking graphs which must condense an immense amount of data. In Roy's talk, analysis of 'the largest home video collection in the world' traces the process of social interaction in the home between child and caregivers. His work suggests that feedback loops between them accompany the acquisition of individual words, subconsciously decreasing and then increasing the complexity of communication that includes each new word.
As much as the content of our communication may driven by media and the wider social environment, as Roy claims, both researchers agree that human interaction is the crucial vehicle for language acquisition. This suggests that language learning is less about language per se and more about how it is used, or what it might feel like to the embodied participant when it is used. This also raises further questions about how paradigmatic we can take the learning Roy and Kuhl describe for the learning that is grafted on much later by young adult and adult learners in a classroom context.
I think all research is bound to be biased, however much it may strive to be objective. The audience laughs when they see the extravagant apparatus surrounding the head of the child at the end of Kuhl's talk, and it is unclear how tongue in cheek she is being about the child being unfettered and having 'celestial openness' of mind, when the test subject is clearly restrained physically and no doubt prone to all the very unpoetic tantrums and general human grossness of any little kid. In Roy's case, the subject is his own children and family. There is no possibility of unbiased research, but this may be going a little far. One of the pioneers of such research, though, Piaget, took a very similar approach, and his work is still foundational for a number of educational fields, though hardly unchallenged. In general, science seems to aspire to the universality of mathematics, music, or indeed poetry, and makes claims that cannot stand the scrutiny of the scientific community, but much to our benefit, are challenged and improved in their turn.
After reading Wright (2010), pp. 23 -48 and Nava & Pedrazzini, (2018) Ch. 1, reflect on why it is important for teachers - of English or of other content areas - to have at least a basic understanding of linguistics and the language acquisition process. Give specific examples from your own experiences or from the materials we have covered in class.
Wright gives a number of examples to illustrate the importance for teachers to have some familiarity with linguistics and language acquisition. He goes on to distinguish some important aspects of the study of language, such as morphology and syntax, which serve to bring into focus features of which we are largely unaware in everyday use. My main takeaway about the importance of thinking about these factors, even if teaching some other subject, is two-fold: for teachers to be cognizant of how much work students still learning the language are doing, and to appreciate more deeply the complexity of the medium which so often seems transparent between us, the language itself. In a subject like math, the importance of discourse for showing evidence of thinking on the part of students, and not simply rote imitation of a procedure, for solving problems has gained attention. The RAMP UP program over the summer, visual thinking strategies (VTS), and approaches to group work in the math classroom based on Building Thinking Classrooms that get students out of their seats and talking about their ideas at whiteboards have all made my teaching more engaging. All recur to an insight that I should have had more in the front of my mind, though it's a long time since I was immersed in a second language myself: that that was the most impactful learning experience I had ever had, precisely because it made me aware of the language I was using and engaged me more completely in my learning than a class setting could. The closer I can approximate that immersion in math and talking about math, the better and more effective my teaching will be.
After reading Gibbons (2015) and Nava & Pedrazzini, (2018) Ch. 2, compare how language is scaffolded/made comprehensible for L1 children and children/adults learning L2. What are the main similarities and differences? Give specific examples from your experience or from materials we have discussed in class.
Gibbons adopts a "field, tenor, mode" conceptual apparatus and situates language learning in a larger Vygotskyan framework, while Nava and Pedrazzini speak of "form, meaning, use," hewing more narrowly to second language acquisition, but in both cases they recognize the importance of scaffolding for the actual learning process to get rolling. The main differences for L1 acquisition and L2 is, to adapt Krashen's formula, the size of the i to which we are adding our nominal 1 (1 what? I need units! And this is especially fun given that i usually stands for an imaginary number, the square root of negative one...). Crucially, too, the L1 is usually learned mostly from caregivers, at least until more abstract levels of academic discourse, while the L2 is conveyed by a variety of other sorts of relationships wherein care is generally not the main focus. It is interesting that the vogue in education, even up to the secondary level, has been to emphasize more and more a caregiving model in SEL being taken up, particularly in the wake of the pandemic. In some way, this seems to acknowledge that students i, again in academic terms, is likely more limited than past generations' and requires more thoughtful scaffolding for more students. Once we accept that one size does not fit all, though, what effects will this have on larger structures and institutions of teaching?
I think that the RAMP UP program had a lot of great scaffolds built in, like the stair-stepping problem was intentionally chunked in smaller sets of stairs so that students could observe patterns. We took advantage of our surroundings and had the students go walk up and down the grand staircase and look at patterns in the stained glass windows. We set up word walls and "found pattern" tables. As far as the connection to the mathematical imaginary number, I hope you didn't take my mention of imaginary numbers as dismissive of your work measuring i in terms of SLA! I'd push the analogy further at the risk of overdoing it: one cool application of the concept is for graphic representations of complex numbers, whose coordinates are real and imaginary (rather than the usual x and y being two real numbers). There we get fractals, structures whose properties involve infinite repetitions of self-similarity. All of which is just to say, maybe one way to think about i in the SLA sense is as a measure of the complexity or intricacy speakers are capable of, rather than the raw quantity of their production or fluency; say, an ability to produce hypotheticals or counterfactual statements ("imaginary numbers"), as well as statements of what is ("real numbers").
In your view, what are the key differences between usage-based and dictionary-and-grammar theories of language acquisition? How would practitioners (teachers) teach differently if they espoused one view or the other?
Dictionary-and-grammar theories assume that students need words and structures in order to translate their thoughts from L1 to L2. I've learned and taught this way all the way through my public school experience and as a substitute teacher in Spanish classes. Some conceptual anchor or theme unifies the material, such as "food" or "travel"; a vocab list is filled out and drilled; one or two new grammar points are practiced, such as "-ar verb conjugations in the present tense" or "me gusta + verb," and these are assessed with quizzes and tests whose main function is to check that students can produce, more or less memorized, the words and structures taught them, orally and in writing. In usage-based theories of language acquisition, a third quality of use is connected with the categories of meaning and form roughly acknowledged by dictionary-based methods. Having a purpose for using the language dramatically enlarges the meaning of meaning beyond dictionary definitions or translations, and the form of forms beyond top-down grammatical structures. In public schools, the use is to get a grade. In study abroad experiences, the use is much more immediate and authentic, but simulating this in a classroom is possible, particularly if the L2 is used for building real relationships between learners and connecting them with cultural topics of real interest. As they use the language, they notice the patterns that otherwise would have been provided to them whole-cloth, and they internalize meanings and connotations of words by practicing them in context rather than in isolation or with reference only to L1. In shifting towards teaching this way, of course, we have to overcome students' prejudices about how learning a language is supposed to look. It takes time and may not be supported within administrative structures dealing with inertia and standardized test anxiety.
After reading Nava & Pedrazzini, (2018) Ch. 3 and skimming Schmidt (1990) and/or Schmidt & Frota (1986), reflect on how important attention/awareness is in the process of language acquisition. Do you think that input processing and corrective feedback help learners to "notice the gap"? Give examples from your experience or from materials we have discussed in class.
Input processing, with its connotations of computers crunching numbers, becomes a little more palatable when combined with the organic warmth of attention and awareness. As the research summed up in ch 3 suggests, certain aspects of language are generally noticed by all learners, such as the primacy of nouns, and particularly first nouns in a phrase. This is reminiscent to me of both Chomsky's framework of the brain wired for language acquisition, and of the account of Augustine in his Confessions, taken up by Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations, of how he learned language: by essentially pointing to things and naming them. It helps explain the accepted "method without a theory" of providing dictionary and grammar instruction which remains more or less the default in language classrooms. When input processing, or the thoughtful emphasis on using L2 with students in light of these findings, is combined with corrective feedback, attention can be brought to bear on particular elements of the language that might otherwise escape students' notice. I'm thinking of my recent attempts to learn Japanese and how closely its phonemic palette is echoed by Bemba, as you pointed out in the demonstration lesson, down to a word like "nani" even being used in a similar way. Paying attention to the input of the spoken language, then seeing the written form, then making a connection with meaning, has helped that cluster of new phonemes stick, even after just a single lesson. For "noticing the gap," though, nothing has quite the impact for me as socratic questioning in seminar discussion of texts, which dominated my learning and teaching for about a decade before moving to Spokane. I still use this format with a text like Flatland in my project based classes today, though admittedly I don't find many opportunities with beginners in my language study wellness to dig into texts in an L2.
After reading Nava & Pedrazzini, (2018) Ch. 4 and skimming Ellis, R., Loewen, S. & Erlam, R. (2008), reflect on the role(s) of implicit and explicit knowledge in language acquisition. Give examples from your experience or from materials we have discussed in class.
If I'm following the discussion in ch 4, drawing on the likes of Ellis et al., and interpreting the upshot of your research into L1 and L2 speakers catching errors correctly with the online test--a big if--then the role of implicit knowledge predominates in the everyday use of language. In real interaction, there is no likelihood of pausing to apply an explicitly learned rule; rather, following Helprin and related theories, we are most likely reaching for some handy prototypical chunk of language and adapting it to our needs in the moment. When errors arise and are noticed, it is because something "sounds a little off," not because a rule is broken so much as because an atypical form wanders into our field of attention, which compares awkwardly with our more familiar prototypes. The main use of explicit knowledge seems to be in service of surfacing what is already implicit, or helping something new to more readily settle in that range of the implicit from which we are prone to pull language in a given scenario. It is helpful for reflecting, as we're doing here, and thinking about our thinking, but plays an ancillary role in the interactions outside a classroom or research setting. This is important to bear in mind, given that so much teaching still tends to emphasize the explicit knowledge of rules and vocabulary over the productive use of L2.
After reading Nava & Pedrazzini, (2018) Ch. 6 and skimming Klingner (2008), reflect on three of the “Common Misconceptions” (p. 6-7 of Klingner (2008) Have you held or encountered any of these? How could you use your knowledge of SLA principles & processes to advocate for MLLs?
"Errors are problematic and should be avoided; [learners] are not ready to engage in higher level thinking until they acquire basic skills; all learn at the about same rate; a slow rate of learning indicates a possible disability." These common misconceptions are rife in schools, both for language learning and for other subject areas. The case of AI is instructive here, too: because the models can produce language, seemingly effortlessly, we assume that they must be intelligent. Whatever kind of intelligence that might be, though, it is not the human intelligence with which we have to deal as teachers. Errors, higher-order thinking, and different ways and speeds of processing material are all just as much evidence of intelligence and learning. Thinking about the section on automaticity and fluency in ch 6, SLA in Action and the research it summarizes make clear how much cognitive work is going into the production of speech in a second language. The table on 167 would be the sort of thing that might give teachers pause before they leapt to the conclusion that MLLs were in any way deficient, as it lays out the complex processes underlying even seemingly relatively fluent L2 speech in a series of stages L1 speakers most often completely take for granted.
After reading Kumaravadivelu (2003) ch. 3 reflect on what it means to maximize learning opportunities. Give examples from your experience or from materials we have discussed in class.
The paraphrase of Alexander Von Humboldt (by way of Chomsky) with which Kumaravadivelu opens his chapter on learning opportunities provides one of those examples where both content and form serve to exemplify the point under discussion. Language, turned to think about itself, is rife with these. What Von Humboldt is saying, and what K develops throughout the chapter, is that the teacher's main role is to facilitate, rather than to control, the learning process. We can accomplish this with all sorts of strategies, including by seeking out the sorts of community connections that drive projects at TCS, but the primary or underlying one seems to be to get out of our own way and making more openings for student talk time. In the case of an author, this might look like seeding a chapter with a quotation for readers to follow up on if they choose. Students, even those who are strong readers, always say they have trouble liking any book they're assigned or "forced" to read, but they might love to browse freely in the local library and stumble on a book like Magnificent Rebels, by Andrea Wulf, and say to themselves, "Oh, there's that name Von Humboldt..." (In my case the order of events was reversed, but I think the point stands). Such breadcrumbs and apparent loose ends open out the assigned reading into avenues for exploratory, chosen reading. Even the textual activities of students, which appear traditional, can in this way lead into the kind of involvement K envisions as maximizing learning opportunities: asking authentic questions, even about controversial topics, in the target language. In a meta sense, the English language itself is a vehicle for maximizing learning opportunities, as K points out in the interview on canvas. Learning a language is at least in part facilitated by thinking about language, and in the case of English this includes concepts of power, global influence, and linguistic cachet. As your example of the Arabic-speaking women suggests, though, it can also open up the space to talk about ideas that are normally unspoken in the L1 due to cultural factors whose authority, for better or worse, English as the global language has the power to dissolve.
What is the teacher’s role in negotiating interaction in the classroom?
Kumaravadivelu posits three levels of interaction: textual, interpersonal, and ideational. As he discusses these in terms of input and interactional hypotheses, they clearly overlap and build on one another. Taken together, the movement up and between the levels of interaction paints a picture of the teacher as scaffolding not just isolated lessons or concepts, but co-constructing with students a whole edifice of chutes and ladders (with plenty of "U-shaped curves") in four dimensions. When students can have conversations, even simplified or basic ones, involving the ideas that really matter to them, their practice will feel more meaningful, as well as being more effective at actually helping them learn the use, form, and meaning of their L2. The teacher's role includes intentional efforts to move learners into interpersonal and ideational interactions, both through planning and through opportunistically seizing any chance to switch up the lesson should the students seem willing; checking for comprehension and eliciting further thinking with questioning and layers of input; and helping raise students' consciousness of the patterns or errors they may begin to notice. Perhaps most importantly, the teacher negotiates their own interaction to raise student voice and mitigate the likelihood of the teacher voice over-managing or determining the flow of conversation.
Have you ever seen any examples of the deficit model in action, either as a learner, a parent, or an educator? If so, what did you do about what you observed, if anything? How would you advise others? My add on: The example can be from any scenario.
The deficit model remains the default, both in theory and practice, against which we all constantly struggle. From learners, we hear them saying they can't do math problems, even right after we've given a mini-lesson on the topic. Asset mapping, an activity where they brainstorm their strengths, whether academic, social, or other, is one way we've tried to shift their mindset. We also have them write autobiographical vignettes from their past math experiences in an attempt to trace their journey, as well as hopefully jogging their memories and prior knowledge. On the staff side, professional development based on the work of Gholdy Muhammad has been illuminating for me, hearing from teachers around the state about the support or lack thereof for addressing deficit-based thinking about students of different races. Her framework highlights embedding historical strengths in lessons and projects, again positioning students as critical and capable thinkers. The main deficit I worry about in my own practice is simply time. I don't see a good way to recover it, but I do try to keep some time set aside for reading and learning to keep from entirely forgetting what that feels like.
Prior to reading, I would not have put oral comprehension on the same level as reading comprehension when it comes to the "active construction of meaning" on the part of listener/reader. Along the same lines, I would not have seen as much overlap between automaticity in the two domains. For me, reading and writing are so much further from automatic vs speaking and listening, or that is how I have always thought of them. I would not have considered genre as important in the context of oral communication. With all these analogies between the written and spoken word, I keep thinking of how technological change is blurring the distinctions between literacy and oracy as time goes on. I think back to the striking passage in Augustine's autobiography where he wonders what Ambrose can possibly be doing, reading silently. Perhaps he is saving his voice? he imagines. And the similarly striking passage at the moment of his conversion, accompanied by the playful, angelic voice chanting "take and read." It's presumptuous to be sure, but I think of our society now and the individuals who make it up as standing at a similarly paradigm-shift sort of moment in history, one whose transition is not to silent reading but to the possibility of only ever engaging with "literature" via audio-visual media; and one in which the playful voice chanting "take and read" is the voice of a video game character or AI companion, not a neighbor or an angel.
As an introductory assignment in my language and code elective class, I had students make conversation cards. I asked that they include their name and pronouns, languages (human or machine) that they were interested in studying this semester, and any reflections about prior language/code study they had done. Finally, I asked that they share a goal they had (near or short term, ie. travel, cultural understanding, job skills, etc.). None of this directly bears on the metalinguistic awareness examples listed in Lems, but I did find it a helpful activity for starting students thinking about why they had chosen the class, metacognitive in that sense. For me, the hardest part of learning a language is understanding humor, actually getting a joke in real time, but playing with words to make "jokes" is something that comes relatively early. Teaching English (ELA) to native speakers, I have used the poem "Jabberwocky" as a way to surface many of these ideas, such as real words, syllables, patterns and how they help us "automatically" discern or guess at the meaning and function (parts of speech) of words. This was with 7th graders. In the context of working with lower levels of understanding of the language or academics overall, songs and games provide a way to build metalinguistic awareness as well as building a positive class culture.
I feel bad for missing this past Thursday at Yasuhara. I didn't have time that day to check in with my team, but I hope the Watermelon Game warmer went well. The rearrangement of letters is not quite a morpheme game, but it comes pretty close. That is, in playing, you'll likely arrive sooner or later at a variety of morphemes spelled with some of the letters and find that you're able to reuse and recombine them in various ways. You'll notice, perhaps, that certain chunks function as morphemes in some cases and not in others. Water is one morpheme. The -er part can be broken out and used with "lone" to form "loner". There its meaning is something like "one who does x" with the structure "x-er". Confusingly perhaps, water is not one who wats. The word "ate" is a morpheme, too, but not in the word "water," where it is pronounced totally differently. But the morphemes "won" and "one" are pronounced the same... It's such a brilliant game for flagging and noticing all sorts of fun things, so I'll at least try to discuss it with the students next time. A variation for next Halloween might be brainstorming scary words together: fright, trick, treat, ghost, etc. and then taking turns combining them in the format "x-or-y" to see if anything more silly than "trick-or-treat" can be produced. My guess: yes! One strength of these sorts of warmers is that they get students writing in a low-stakes way.
