Why asking our students to self-correct the errors in their essays is a waste of time…

June 13, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Error correction, Uncategorized

The Language Gym

In this very concise article I will argue that involving our learners in Indirect Error Correction on its own is an absolute waste of valuable teacher and learner time. By Indirect Error Correction (henceforth IEC), I mean highlighting or underlining the errors in our students’ written pieces (with or without error coding), pass the essay back to our students who will make the corrections and pass it back to us for any necessary amendments to be made. In addition, some of us will ask the students to rewrite the whole essay incorporating the corrections.

It sounds like a very time-consuming activity!

The pedagogic rationale behind this approach seems pretty clear: the students get cognitively involved in the correction process. They are not just the passive recipients of the teacher’s correction but they are actually doing something about it. Moreover, by working on their mistakes they will become more aware of…

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Mapping out the foreign language writing process

June 12, 2015October 8, 2015 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Uncategorized, Writing skills

In this article I take on the very difficult task of illustrating the cognitive processes that take place in the brain of a second language student writer as s/he produces an essay. Why? Because often, as teachers and target language experts, we forget how challenging it is for our students to write an essay in a foreign language. Gaining a better grasp of the thinking processes essay writing in a second language involves, may help teachers become more cognitively empathetic towards their students; moreover, they may reconsider the way they teach writing and treat student errors.

A caveat before we proceed: this article is quite a challenging read which may require some background in applied linguistics and/or cognitive psychology.

A Cognitive account of the writing processes: the Hayes and Flower (1980) model

Hayes and Flower’s (1980) model of essay writing in a first language is regarded as one of the most effective accounts of writing available to-date (Eysenck and Keane, 2010). As Figure 1 below shows, it posits three major components:

Task-environment,

Writer’s Long-Term Memory,

Writing process.

Figure 1: The Hayes and Flower model (adapted from Hayes and Flower, 1980)

The Task-environment includes: (1) the Writing Assignment (the topic, the target audience, and motivational factors) and the text; (2) the Writer’s Long-term memory, which provides factual knowledge and skill/genre specific procedures; (3) the Writing Process, which consists of the three sub-processes of Planning, Translating and Reviewing.

The Planning process sets goals based on information drawn from the Task-environment and Long-Term Memory (LTM). Once these have been established, a writing plan is developed to achieve those goals. More specifically, the Generating sub-process retrieves information from LTM through an associative chain in which each item of information or concept retrieved functions as a cue to retrieve the next item of information and so forth.The Organising sub-process selects the most relevant items of information retrieved and organizes them into a coherent writing plan. Finally, the Goal-setting sub-process sets rules (e.g. ‘keep it simple’) that will be applied in the Editing process. The second process, Translating, transforms the information retrieved from LTM into language. This is necessary since concepts are stored in LTM in the form of Propositions (‘concepts’/ ‘imagery’), not words. Flower and Hayes (1980) provide the following examples of what propositions involve:

[(Concept A) (Relation B) (Concept C)]

{Concept D) (Attribute E)], etc.

Finally, the Reviewing processes of Reading and Editing have the function of enhancing the quality of the output. The Editing process checks that grammar rules and discourse conventions are not being flouted, looks for semantic inaccuracies and evaluates the text in the light of the writing goals. Editing has the form of a Production system with two IF- THEN conditions:

The first part specifies the kind of language to which the editing production

applies, e.g. formal sentences, notes, etc. The second is a fault detector for

such problems as grammatical errors, incorrect words, and missing context.

(Hayes and Flower, 1980: 17)

In other words, when the conditions of a Production are met, e.g. a wrong word ending is detected, an action is triggered for fixing the problem. For example:

CONDITION 1: (formal sentence) first letter of sentence lower case

CONDITION 2: change first letter to upper case

(Adapted from Hayes and Flower, 1980: 17)

Two important features of the Editing process are: (1) it is triggered automatically whenever the conditions of an Editing Production are met; (2) it may interrupt any other ongoing process. Editing is regulated by an attentional system called The Monitor. Hayes and Flower do not provide a detailed account of how it operates. Differently from Krashen’s (1977) Monitor, a control system used solely for editing, Hayes and Flower’s (1980) device operates at all levels of production orchestrating the activation of the various sub-processes. This allows Hayes and Flower to account for two phenomena they observed. Firstly, the Editing and the Generating processes can cut across other processes. Secondly, the existence of the Monitor enables the system to be flexible in the application of goal-setting rules, in that through the Monitor any other processes can be triggered. This flexibility allows for the recursiveness of the writing process.

Hayes and Flower’s model is useful in providing teachers with a framework for understanding the many demands that essay writing poses on students. In particular, it helps teachers understand how the recursiveness of the writing process may cause those demands to interfere with each other causing cognitive overload and error. Furthermore, by conceptualising editing as a process that can interrupt writing at any moment, the model has a very important implication for a theory of error: self-correctable errors occurring at any level of written production are not always the result of a retrieval failure; they may also be interpreted as caused by detection failure (failure to ‘spot’ a mistake). However, one limitation of the model for a theory of error is that its description of the Translating and Editing sub-processes is too general. I shall therefore supplement it with Cooper and Matsuhashi’s (1983) list of writing plans and decisions along with findings from other L1-writing Cognitive research, which will provide the reader with a more detailed account. I shall also briefly discuss some findings from proofreading research which may help explain some of the problems encountered by L2-student writers during the Editing process.

The translating sub-processes

Cooper and Matsuhashi (1983) posit four stages, which correspond to Hayes and Flower’s (1980) Translating: Wording, Presenting, Storing and Transcribing. In the first stage, the brain transforms the propositional content into lexis. Although at this stage the pre-lexical decisions the writer made at earlier stages and the preceding discourse limit lexical choice, Wording the proposition is still a complex task: ‘the choice seems infinite, especially when we begin considering all the possibilities for modifying or qualifying the main verb and the agentive and affected nouns’ (Cooper and Matsuhashi, 1983: 32). Once s/he has selected the lexical items, the writer has to tackle the task of Presenting the proposition in standard written language. This involves making a series of decisions in the areas of genre, grammar and syntax. In the area of grammar, Agreement, Word-order and Tense will be the main issues for L1_English learners of languages like French, German, Italian or Spanish.

The proposition, as planned so far, is then temporarily stored in Working Short Term Memory (henceforth WSTM) while Transcribing takes place. Propositions longer than just a few words will have to be rehearsed and re-rehearsed in WSTM for parts of it not to be lost before the transcription is complete. The limitations of WSTM create serious disadvantages for unpractised writers. Until they gain some confidence and fluency with spelling, their WSTM may have to be loaded up with letter sequences of single words or with only 2 or 3 words (Hotopf, 1980). This not only slows down the writing process, but it also means that all other planning must be suspended during the transcriptions of short letter or word sequences.

The physical act of transcribing the fully formed proposition begins once the graphic image of the output has been stored in WSTM. In L1-writing, transcription occupies subsidiary awareness, enabling the writer to use focal awareness for other plans and decisions. In practised writers, transcription of certain words and sentences can be so automatic as to permit planning the next proposition while one is still transcribing the previous one. An interesting finding with regards to these final stages of written production comes from Bereiter, Fire and Gartshore (1979) who investigated L1-writers aged 10-12. They identified several discrepancies between learners’ forecasts in think-aloud and their actual writing. 78 % of such discrepancies involved stylistic variations. Notably, in 17% of the forecasts, significant words were uttered in forecasts which did not appear in the writing. In about half of these cases the result was a syntactic flaw (e.g. the forecasted phrase ‘on the way to school’ was written ‘on the to school’). Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) believe that lapses of this kind indicate that language is lost somewhere between storage in WSTM and grapho-motor execution. These lapses, they also assert, cannot be described as ‘forgetting what one was going to say’ since almost every omission was reported on recall: in the case of ‘on the to school’, for example, the author not only intended to write ‘on the way’ but claimed later to have written it. In their view, this is caused by interference from the attentional demands of the mechanics of writing (spelling, capitalization, etc.), the underlying psychological premise being that a writer has a limited amount of attention to allocate and that whatever is taken up with the lower level demands of written language must be taken from something else.

In sum, Cooper and Matsuhashi (1983) posit two stages in the conversion of the preverbal message into a speech plan: (1) the selection of the right lexical units and (2) the application of grammatical rules. The unit of language is then deposited in STM awaiting translation into grapho-motor execution. This temporary storage raises the possibility that lower level demands affects production as follows: (1) causing the writer to omit material during grapho-motor execution; (2) leading to forgetting higher-level decisions already made. Interference resulting in WSTM loss can also be caused by lack of monitoring of the written output due to devoting conscious attention entirely to planning ahead, while leaving the process of transcription to run ‘on automatic’.

How about editing? Some insights from proofreading research

Proofreading theories and research provide us with the following important insights in the mechanisms that regulate essay editing. Firstly, proofreading involves different processes from reading: when one proofreads a passage, one is generally looking for misspellings, words that might have been omitted or repeated, typographical mistakes, etc., and as a result, comprehension is not the goal. When one is reading a text, on the other hand, one’s primary goal is comprehension. Thus, reading involves construction of meaning, while proofreading involves visual search. For this reason, in reading, short function words, not being semantically salient, are not fixated (Paap, Newsome, McDonald and Schvaneveldt, 1982). Consequently, errors on such words are less likely to be spotted when one is editing a text concentrating mostly on its meaning than when one is focusing one’s attention on the text as part of a proofreading task (Haber and Schindler, 1981). Errors are likely to decrease even further when the proofreader is forced to fixate on every single function word in isolation (Haber and Schindler, 1981).

It should also be noted that some proofreader’s errors appear to be due to acoustic coding. This refers to the phenomenon whereby the way a proofreader pronounces a word/diphthong/letter influences his/her detection of an error. For example, if an English learner of L2-Italian pronounces the ‘e’ in the singular noun ‘stazione’ (= train station) as [i] instead of [e], s/he will find it difficult to differentiate it from the plural ‘stazioni’ (= train stations). This may impinge on her/his ability to spot errors with that word involving the use of the singular for the plural and vice versa.

The implications for language learning are that learners may have be trained to go through their essays at least once focusing exclusively on form. Secondly, they should be asked to pay particular attention to those words (e.g. function words) and parts of words (e.g. verb endings) that they may not perceive as semantically salient.

Bilingual written production: adapting the first language model

Writing, although slower than speaking, is still processed at enormous speed in mature native speakers’ WSTM. The processing time required by a writer will be greater in the L2 than in the L1 and will increase at lower levels of proficiency: at the Wording stage, more time will be needed to match non-proceduralized lexical materials to propositions; at the Presenting stage, more time will be needed to select and retrieve the right grammatical form. Furthermore, more attentional effort will be required in rehearsing the sentence plans in WSTM; in fact, just like Hotopf’s (1980) young L1-writers, non- proficient L2-learners may be able to store in WSTM only two or three words at a time. This has implications for Agreement in Italian, French or Spanish in view of the fact that words more than three-four words distant from one another may still have to agree in gender and number. Finally, in the Transcribing phase, the retrieval of spelling and other aspects of the writing mechanics will take up more WSTM focal awareness.

Monitoring too will require more conscious effort, increasing the chances of Short-term Memory loss. This is more likely to happen with less expert learners: the attentional system having to monitor levels of language that in the mature L1-speaker are normally automatized, it will not have enough channel capacity available, at the point of utterance, to cope with lexical/grammatical items that have not yet been proceduralised. This also implies that Editing is likely to be more recursive than in L1-writing, interrupting other writing processes more often, with consequences for the higher meta-components. In view of the attentional demands posed by L2-writing, the interference caused by planning ahead will also be more likely to occur, giving rise to processing failure. Processing failure/WSTM loss may also be caused by the L2-writer pausing to consult dictionaries or other resources to fill gaps in their L2-knowledge while rehearsing the incomplete sentence plan in WSTM. In fact, research indicates that although, in general terms, composing patterns (sequences of writing behaviours) are similar in L1s and L2s there are some important differences.

In his seminal review of the L1/L2-writing literature, Silva (1993) identified a number of discrepancies between L1- and L2-composing. Firstly, L2-composing was clearly more difficult. More specifically, the Transcribing phase was more laborious, less fluent, and less productive. Also, L2-writers spent more time referring back to an outline or prompt and consulting dictionaries. They also experienced more problems in selecting the appropriate vocabulary. Furthermore, L2-writers paused more frequently and for longer time, which resulted in L2-writing occurring at a slower rate. As far as Reviewing is concerned, Silva (1993) found evidence in the literature that in L2-writing there is usually less re-reading of and reflecting on written texts. He also reported evidence suggesting that L2-writers revise more, before and while drafting, and in between drafts. However, this revision was more problematic and more of a preoccupation. There also appears to be less auditory monitoring in the L2 and L2-revision seems to focus more on grammar and less on mechanics, particularly spelling. Finally, the text features of L2-written texts provide strong evidence suggesting that L2-writing is a less fluent process involving more errors and producing – at least in terms of the judgements of native English speakers – less effective texts.

Implications for teachers

Essay writing is a very complex process which poses a huge cognitive load onto the foreign language learner’s brain (on its Working Memory to be precise). This cognitive load is determined by the fact that the L2 student writer has to plan the essay whilst focusing on the act of translating ideas (propositions) into the foreign language. Translating, as I have tried to illustrate, is hugely complex per se for a non-native speaker, let along when the brain has to hold in his/her Working Memory the ideas s/he intends to convey at the same time. Working Memory being limited in capacity it is easy to ‘lose’ one or the other in the process and equally easy to make mistakes, as the monitor (i.e. the error detecting system in our brain) receives less activation due to cognitive overload.

Hence, before plunging our students into essay writing teachers need to ensure that they provide lots of practice in the execution of the different sets of skills that writing involves (e.g. ideas generation, planning, organization, self-monitoring) separately. For instance, a writing lesson may involve sections where the students are focused on discrete sets of higher order skills (e.g. practising idea generation; evaluating relevance of the ideas generated to a given topic/essay title) and sections where lower order skills are drilled in ( application of grammar and syntax rules, lexical recall, spelling). Only when the students have reached a reasonable level of maturity across most of the key skills embedded in the models discussed above should students be asked to engage in extensive writing.

Consequently, an effective essay-writing instruction curriculum must identify the main skills involved in the writing process (as per the above model); allocate sufficient time for their extensive practice as contextualized within the themes and text genres relevant to the course under study; build in the higher order skill practice opportunities to embed practice in the lower order skills identified above (the mechanics of the language), whilst being mindful of potential cognitive overload issues.

In terms of editing, the above discussion has enormous implications as it suggests that teachers should train learners to become more effective editors through regular editing practice (e.g. ‘Error hunting’ activities). Such training may result in more rapid and effective application of editing skills in real operating conditions as the execution of Self-Monitoring will require less cognitive space in Working Memory. Training learners in editing should be a regular occurrence in lessons if we want it to actually work; also, it should be contextualized in a relevant linguistic environment as much as possible (e.g. if we are training the students to become better essay editors we ought to provide them with essay-editing practice, not just with random and uncontextualized sentences).

In conclusion, I firmly believe that the above model should be used by every language teacher, curriculum designer as a starting point for the planning of any writing instruction program. Not long ago I took part in a conference and a colleague was recommending to the attending teachers to give his Year 12 students exam-like discursive essays to write, week in week out for the very first week of the course. I am not ashamed to admit that I used to do the same in my first years of teaching A levels. The above discussion, however, would suggest that such an approach may be counterproductive; it may lead to errors, fossilization of those errors, and inhibit proficiency development whilst stifling the higher metacomponents of the writing process, idea-generation, essay organization and self-monitoring.

12 metacognition-modelling strategies for the foreign language classroom

June 11, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Metacognition, Uncategorized

wilson-metacognition-460x345

Metacognitive skills are arguably the most important set of skills we need for our journey through life as they orchestrate every cognitive skill involved in problem-solving, decision-making and self-monitoring (both cognitive and socio-affective). We start acquiring them at a very early age at home, in school, in the playground and in any other social context an individual interacts with other human beings. But what are metacognitive skills?

What is metacognition?

I often refer to metacognition as ‘the voice inside your head’ which helps you solve problems in life by asking you questions like:

What is the problem here?
Based on what I know already about this task, how can I solve this problem?
Is this correct?
How is this coming along?
If I carry on like this where am I going to get?
What resources should I use to carry out this task?
What should come first? What should come after?
How should I pace myself? What should I do by when?
Based on the criteria I am going to be evaluated against, how am I doing?

The challenge is not only to develop our students’ ability to ask themselves these questions, but also, and more importantly, to enable them to do this at the right time, in the right context and to respond to those questions promptly, confidently and effectively by applying adequate cognitive and social strategies.

How does one become highly ‘metacognizant’?

Let us look at two subjects from an old study of mine, student A and student B, in the examples below.The reader should note that the data below were elicited through a technique called concurrent think-aloud protocol (i.e. the two students were reflecting on the errors in their essays, whilst verbalizing their thoughts).

Self-questioning by student A:

Question: What is the problem here?

Too many spelling mistakes
I must check my essay more carefully with the help of the dictionary
I also need to go through it more times than I currently do, I think

Self-questioning by student B:

Question 1: What is the problem in my essay?

There are too many spelling mistakes
I need to check my essay more thoroughly
I rarely use the dictionary I usually trust my instinct
I also need to go through it three or four times

Question 2: What are my most common spelling mistakes?

Cognates, I get confused
Longer words, I struggle with those, too
I usually make most of my mistakes toward the end of the essay
I also make mistakes in longer sentences

Question 3: But why in longer sentences?

Maybe because I tend to focus on verbs and agreement more than I do on spelling

Both students identify the same problems with the accuracy in their essays. They both start with the same identical question, but Student B investigates it further through more self-questioning. In my study, which investigated metacognitive strategies, most of my informants tended to be more like student A; very few went spontaneously, without any prompt from me, as far as student B, in terms of metacognitive self-exploration.

How did student B become so highly metacognizant? Research indicates that, apart from genetic factors (which must not be discounted), the reason why some people become more highly metacognizant than others is because that behavior is modelled to them; in other words, caregivers, siblings, people in their entourage have regularly asked those questions in their presence and have used those questions many a time to guide them in problem solving or self-reflection. I cannot forget how my father kept doing that to me, day in day out since a very early age: ‘why do you think it is like this?’, ‘how could we fix this?’, ‘why do you think this statement is superficial?’, ‘how can you write this introduction better?’ – he would ask. I used to hate that, frankly, as I would have preferred to just get on with reading my favourite comics or watching tv; but it paid off. The intellectual curiosity, the habit of looking at different angles of the same phenomenon, the constant quest for self-improvement that I eventually acquired were ultimately modelled by those questions.

This is what a good teacher should do: spark off that process, by constantly modelling those questions, day in day out, in every single lesson, so as to get students to become more and more aware of themselves as language learners: what works for them and what doesn’t; what their strengths and weaknesses are and what they can do to best address them; how they can effectively tackle specific tasks; what cognitive or affective obstacles stand in the way of their learning; how they can motivate themselves; how can they best use the environment, the people around them, internet resources, etc. in a way that best suits them, etc.

Twelve easy steps to effective modelling of metacognitive-enhancing questioning

But how do we start, model and sustain that process? There are several approaches that one can undertake in isolation, or, synergistically. The most effective is Explicit Strategy Instruction, whereby the teacher presents to the students one or more strategies (e.g. using a mental checklist of one’s most common mistakes in editing one’s essay); tells the students why it/they can be useful in improving their performance (reduce grammatical, lexical and spelling errors); scaffolds it for weeks or months (e.g. asks them to create a written list of their most common mistakes to use every time they check an essay produced during the scaffolding period); then phases out the scaffolding and leaves the students to their own devices for a while; at the end of the training cycle, through various means, the teacher checks if the target strategy has been learnt or not.

The problem is, with two hours’ teacher contact time a week, doing the above properly is a very tall order, and the learning gains in terms of language proficiency may not justify the hassle. I implemented a Strategy Instruction program as part of my PhD study; it was as effective as time-consuming and I could afford it because I was a lecturer on a 14-hour time-table. Would I recommend it to a full-time secondary teacher in a busy UK secondary school? Not sure…So what can we do to promote metacognitive skills in the classroom?

There are small and useful steps we can take on a daily basis which can help, without massively adding to our already heavy workload. They involve more or less explicit ways of modelling metacognitive or metacognitive-enhancing self-questioning. Here are some of the 41 strategies I have brainstormed before writing this article.

At the beginning of each lesson, after stating the learning intentions, ask the students how what they are going to learn may be useful/relevant to them (e.g. ‘Why are we learning this?’, ‘How is this going to help you be better speakers of French?’)
Before starting a new activity ask the students how they believe it is related to the learning intentions; what and how they are going to learn from that activity (e.g. ‘Why are we doing this?’);
On introducing a task, give an example of how you would carry out that activity yourself (whilst displaying it on the interactive whiteboard/screen) and take them through your thought processes. This is called ‘think-aloud’ in that you are verbalizing your thought processes, including the key-questions that trigger them (e.g.: I want to guess the meaning of the word ‘chère’ in the sentence “C’est une voiture chère”. I ask myself: is it a noun, an adjective,…? It is an adjective because it comes after the word ‘voiture’ which is a noun. Is it positive or negative? It must be positive because it I cannot see ‘pas’ here. Does it look like any English word I know? No, it doesn’t… but I have seen this word at the beginning of a letter as in ‘Chère Marie’… so it can mean ‘dear’ … How can a car be ‘dear’? Oh I get it: it means expensive. It is an expensive car!)
At the end of a task, ask students to self-evaluate with the help of another student (functioning as a moderator, rather than a peer assessor) using a checklist of questions, the use of which you would have modelled through think-aloud beforehand. For the evaluation of a GCSE-like conversation this could include: Where the answers always pertinent? Was there a lot of hesitation? Was there a good balance of nouns, adjectives and verbs? Were there enough opinions? Were there many mistakes with verbs? Etc.
Encourage student-generated metacognitive questioning by engaging students in group-work problem-solving activities. The rationale for working in a group on this kind of activities is that at least one or two of the students in the group (if not all of them) will ask metacognition-promoting questions and by so doing they will model them to the rest of group. If this type of activities become daily practice (in all lessons, not just MFL ones), the questions they generate might become in the long-term incorporated in one’s repertoire of thinking skills. Such activities may include: (1) inductive grammar tasks, where students are given examples of a challenging grammar structure and they have to figure out how the rules governing that structure work (see my activity on French negatives:https://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resource/inductive-task-on-negatives-6316942 ) ; (2) inferring the meaning of unfamiliar words in context; (3) Real life problem solving tasks: planning a holiday and having to reserve tickets online, find out a hotel that suits a pre-defined budget, etc.
Get students, after completing a challenging task, to ask themselves questions like: “what did I find difficult about it?”; “Why? ”; “What did I not know?”, “What will I need to know next time?”.
On giving students back their corrected essays, scaffold self-monitoring skills by getting them to ask themselves: “Which ones of the mistakes I made in this essay do I make all the time?”, “Why?”, “What can I do to avoid them in the future?”
Every now and then (do not overdo this), at key moments in the term, get the students to ask themselves questions about the way they learn, e.g. After telling them, concisely and using a fancy diagram (e.g. the curve of forgetting by Ebbinghaus) how and when forgetting occurs, ask them to reflect on what distracts them in class or at home and what one can do to eliminate those distracting factors;
At the beginning of each school year, to get them into a reflective mood and to gain a valuable insight into their learning habits and issues, ask them to keep a concise reflective journal to write at end of each week with a few retrospective questions about their learning that week. Avoid questions like: “What have I learnt this week?” Focus on questions aimed at eliciting problems about their learning and what they or you can do to address them.
Ask them, whilst writing an essay, to review the final draft of the essay and ask themselves the question: “What is that I am not sure about?” and ask them to highlight every single item in that essay evoked by that question.
Ask them, at the end of a lesson, to fill in a google form or just write on a piece of paper to hand in to you the answer to the questions: “What activity benefitted me the most today? Why?”
Ask your students to think about the ways they reduce their anxiety in times of stress (e.g. the run-up to the French end-of-year exams?); do they always work? Are there any other techniques they can think of to keep stress at bay? Are there any other techniques ‘out there’ (e.g. on the Internet) that might work better? I have done this with a year 8 class of mine and I was truly amazed at the amount of effort they put into researching (at home, of course) self-relaxation techniques and at the quality of their findings (which they shared with their classmates).

It goes without saying that there are classes with which one would be able to do all of the above and others where one will be lucky if one can use one or two of the above strategies. It is also important to keep in mind that by over-intellectualizing language learning in the classroom you may lose some of the students; hence one should use those strategies regularly but judiciously and, most importantly, to serve language learning – not to hijack the focus of the lesson away from it . The most important thing is that the students are exposed to them on a daily basis until they are learnt ‘by osmosis’ so to speak.

Metacognitive literacy and explicit instruction

Ideally, the modelling and fostering of metacognitive self-questioning will be but the beginning of a more explicit and conscious process on the part of the teacher, to, once s/he believes the student have reached the maturity necessary to do so, impart on them a metacognitive literacy program. By this I mean that, just as we assign a name, in literacy instruction, to each part of speech or word class (e.g. adjective, noun, ect.), we should also acquaint them with what each metacognitive strategy is called, what purpose it serves and which of the questions modelled to them over the months or years it relates to. The importance of sharing a common language is crucial in any kind of learning, especially when dealing with high order thinking skills. After all, as Wittgenstein said; “The limits of my language, are the limits of my world”.

Once that common language is well-established in the classroom, the implicit metacognitive modelling that the teacher has embedded regularly in his/her lesson can be made explicit and strategy training can be implemented using the framework that I have already outlined above and that I reserve to discuss at greater length in a future post:

1. Strategies are named and presented

2. Strategies are modelled

3. Strategies are practised with scaffolding

4. Strategies are used without scaffolding

5. Strategies uptake is verified by test and/or verbal report

Why reading comprehension tasks can be detrimental to L2-reading skills development

June 11, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Reading instruction, Uncategorized

The Language Gym

The enhancement of reading skills proficiency in foreign language learners has never been as crucial to their linguistic and holistic development as in the 21^st century classroom, due to the prominent role that digital technology and the Internet play in their lives. The Internet allows foreign language students easier and cheaper access to masses of information without having to purchase or borrow a book, and allows for a vast variety of choice of topics and text-types.

The goals of reading in the 21^st century classroom

With this in mind, in this day and age, more than ever, in their daily practice, curriculum planners, L2-instructional material writers and teachers need to have reading proficiency development in their focal rather than subsidiary awareness, striving, as much as possible, to enable learners to become competent autonomous readers. This means ensuring that they :

WANT to read independently – this implies experiencing…

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Parallel texts – How they can enhance learning and effectively scaffold reading proficiency development

June 11, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Reading instruction, Uncategorized

The Language Gym

A few days ago, one of my colleagues approached me in the MFL Department corridor to share a resource he referred to as ‘Parallel texts’ from Steve Smith’s www.frenchteacher.net . ‘This is excellent!’ – he said, showing me a worksheet (here: http://frenchteachernet.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/parallel-reading-texts-for-near.html) . This contained a text in French on daily routine on the left hand-side and its translation on the right; some comprehension activities were included, too. ‘My students find them very useful!’ he added.

I hardly needed any convincing as I had used Parallel Texts (French / Italian) myself in the past when working as a translator for the European Union in order to refine my English, day in day out for a few months – and it paid off; my English vocabulary, syntax and awareness of text-specific discourse features grew exponentially as a result. In this article I will show what the potential benefits of using…

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Five compelling reasons to ‘over-emphasize’ pronunciation at Primary school (or in the early stages of acquisition)

June 8, 2015September 5, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Speaking and phonology, Uncategorized

1. To facilitate and ‘speed up’ the development of speaking proficiency – as Levelt’s model of first language speaking production posits (see picture 1, below), spoken output requires the orchestration of many complex processes, some more complex than others, but all placing serious demands on our brain, in terms of processing efficiency. The speech production process starts in the conceptualizer that generates ideas and ‘sends’ them to the formulator which translates them into meaningful and grammatically correct sentences; then the monitoring system steps in checking the output accuracy before any sentence is uttered; finally, the articulator will orchestrate the use of the larynx, pharynx and mouth organs, whilst the monitoring system will have been overseeing speech production every step of the way.This process becomes even harder when the ideas generated by the brain (in the conceptualizer) need to be translated into speech in real time in a foreign language; the whole process slows down considerably – hence the hesitations and pauses in our language learners, even the more advanced ones, when speaking in the target language; and their errors, due more to cognitive overload than to carelessness (unless by ‘carelessness’ we mean lack of effective monitoring).

Picture1–Levelt’s model of language production (adapted from: http://homepage.ntlworld.com)

The complexity of the language production process and the challenges of performing it in a foreign language mean that our Working Memory has to juggle simultaneously all of the tasks that speaking involves and may lead less expert L2 speakers, as already mentioned, to slow down production and make mistakes due to processing efficiency. Hence, foreign language learners need to learn to master the lower order skills, i.e. effective control over larynx, pharynx and articulators as early as possible in order to ‘free up space’ in Working Memory for the kind of cognitive processing that happens in the conceptualizer and formulator; this will allow Working Memory to work more efficiently and focus only on the higher order skills, i.e.: the negotiation and creation of meaning, the transformation of meaning into the target language vocabulary, the application of grammar rules and self-monitoring.

Consequently, if we do not foster the automatization of pronunciation earlier on, through regular practice, we will delay our students’ development as fluent speakers. I have experienced this often in the past on taking on Year 7 classes which had been given very little pronunciation and/or speaking practice during two years of French/Spanish in Primary. Is this an argument against the Comprehensible Input hypothesis or The Silent way? Maybe.

2.Fossilization – On the other hand, if we plunge L2 learners into highly demanding oral tasks too soon, without focusing long and hard enough on pronunciation through easy and controlled tasks, their Working Memory will have less monitoring space for sound articulation, as they will focus on the generation of meaning (i.e. what happens in picture 1’s conceptualizer) with potentially ‘disastrous’ consequences for their pronunciation , in that they will resort to their first language phonological encoding to produce the target language sounds (language transfer). If pronunciation errors due to this issue will keep slipping into performance lesson after lesson, oral practice after oral practice, the mistakes will become fossilized and carried over to later stages of proficiency as fossilized errors tend to be impervious to correction.

3.Phonological encoding affects recall – the more the learners become versed in the articulation of the target language sounds, the faster and more effective will be their retention of target language words in their Long-term memory (encoding). Why? This is because of the limitations of the ‘phonological encoding device’ in our brain’s Working Memory, i.e.: the articulatory loop (see picture 2 below). The articulatory loop has limited space (or channel capacity as psycholinguists call it), hence, if a word is not pronounced ‘fast enough’ the brain may not simply be able to encode it. The faster the articulatory loop ‘pronounces’ the target language the easier it will be (a) to memorize new words, especially longer and more challenging ones (from a phonological point of view) and (b) for Working Memory to process longer units of language (phrases/sentences) – as the less space words take on in the articulatory loop the greater the chances will be for longer words to be held in Working Memory at any one time. This speeds rehearsal in Working Memory and, consequently, uptake as well retrieval and production.

Picture 2 – adapted from: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/SLA/STM.htm

4. Stigmatizing output may lead to simpler L2-input from L2-native speakers – I am not a fan of Stephen Krashen but I do admit that he has come up with some great ideas, such as Narrow Listening and the one that relates to the point I am about to make; the fact, that is, that if a beginner/intermediate learner has bad pronunciation, any L2 expert who will interact with him/her may actually send easier L2 linguistic input his/her way presuming that his/her level of proficiency and/or language aptitude – as signaled by his/her pronunciation – is low. This will have negative implications for learning as if you are exposed to simplified input when you are at the early stages of language learning you may not learn much from it, not enough to bring you to next level, so to speak.

I tend to agree with Krashen on this one as I have seen this happen several times. And I will add, that often, in naturalistic environments, something even worse may occur: L2 native speakers may avoid engaging in conversations with L2 non-native speakers with poor pronunciation, for fear of not being understood or not understand and having going through the awkward process of asking the interlocutor to repeat.

5. The critical age hypothesis – This applies only to the first years of Primary school, when children are 5 to 8 years old (or younger); the age, that is, where the sensory-motor skills which control the movement of the larynx, pharynx and the articulators are still ‘plastic’, i.e. amenable to modification. After that age, it seems that the child’s receptiveness to pronunciation modelling/instruction diminishes drastically. If this is true, as compelling recent research evidence suggests, it is at this age that learners must be focused on pronunciation and taught ‘phonics’, pretty much as happens in their first language lessons, through fun and engaging speaking activities, lots of singing, listening and computer assisted phonetic learning.

Five important flaws of GCSE oral tests

June 8, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Assessment, Uncategorized

Research has highlighted a number of issues with oral testing which examination boards and teachers need to heed, as they can have important implications not just for the way GCSE syllabi are designed, but also for the conduct and the assessment of oral GCSE exams as well as for our teaching. The issues which I will highlight are, I suspect, generalizable to either types of oral tests conducted in other educational systems, especially when it comes to the reliability of the assessment procedures and the authenticity of the tasks adopted. They are important issues, as they bring into question the fairness and objectivity of the tests as well as whether we are truly preparing children for real L2-native-like communication.

Issue n.1 – Instant or delayed assessment?

A study by Hurman (1996), cited in Macaro (2007) investigated to what extent examiners’ assessment of content and accuracy of candidates’ responses to GCSE role-play affected tests. Hurman took 60 experiences examiners and divided them into groups; one spent some time before awarding the mark and one did it instantaneously. Hurman’s findings indicate that waiting a few seconds before awarding the mark seem to result in more objective grading. This, in my view, is caused by the divided attention that listening and focusing on assessment causes – I have experienced this first-hand many times!

This has important implications for teachers working with certain examination boards. Cambridge International Examinations board, for instance, prescribes that, at IGCSE, the teacher/examiner award the mark instantaneously and explicitly forbids the practice of grading the candidates retrospectively or after listening to the recording. If Hurman’s findings were to be true of the vast majority of examiners, examination boards like CIE may have to change their regulations and allow for marking to be done retrospectively when the examiner’s attention is not divided between listening to the candidate’s response to a new question, when still marking the previous one – an ominous task!

Issue n.2 – What does complexity of structures/language mean?

This is another crucial issue, which I found year in year out when moderating oral GCSE/IGCSE candidate’s oral performance during my teaching career. Teachers listening to the same recording usually tend to agree when it comes to complexity of vocabulary but not necessarily when it comes to complexity of grammar/syntactic structures. Chambers and Richards’ (1992) findings indicate that this is not simply my experience; their evidence suggests that there was a high level of disagreement amongst the teachers involved in their study as to what constituted ‘complexity of structures’. They also found that the teachers disagreed also in terms of what was meant by ‘fluency’ and ‘use of idiom’ – another issue that I have experienced myself when moderating.

To further complicate the picture, there is, in my view, another issue which research should probe into, and I invite colleagues who work with teachers of nationalities to investigate; the fact, that is, that L1-target-language-speaker raters tend to be stricter than L2-target-language-speaker ones. This issue is particularly serious in light of Issue n.5 below.

Issue n. 3 – Are the typical GCSE oral tasks ‘authentic’?

I often play a prank on my French colleague Ronan Jezequel , by starting a conversation about the week-end just gone by asking question in a GCSE-like style and sequence until, after a few seconds, he realizes that there is something wrong and looks at me funny… Are we testing our students on (and preparing them for) tasks that do not reflect authentic L2 native speaker speech? This is what another study by Chambers (1995) set out to investigate. They examined 28 tapes of French GCSE candidates and compared them to conversations on the same themes by 25 French native speakers in the same age bracket. They found that not only, as easily predictable, the native speakers used more words (437 vs 118) and more clauses (56.9 vs 23.9), but also that:

The French speakers found the topic house/flat description socially unacceptable;
The native speakers found the topic ‘Daily routine’ them unauthentic and – interestingly – produced very few reflexive verbs
The native speakers used the near future whilst the non-natives used the simple future
The native speakers used the imperfect tense much more than the non-natives
The non-native speakers used relative causes much less than the French

Are these tests, as the researchers concluded, testing students’ ability to converse with native speakers or their acquisition of grammar?

Issue n.4 – The grammar accuracy bias

A number of studies (e.g. Alderson and Banerjee, 2002) have found time and again that assessors’ perception of grammar accuracy seem to bias examiners, regardless of how much weight is given in the assessment specification on effective communication. This issue will be exacerbated or mitigated depending on the examiners’ view of what linguistic proficiency means and by their degree of tolerance of errors; whereas a teacher might find a learner’s communicatively effective use of compensation strategies (e.g. approximation or coinage) a positive thing even though it leads to grammatically flawed utterances, another might find it unacceptable.

Here again, background differences are at play. Mistakes that to a native speaker might appear as stigmatizing or very serious might seem mild or not even be considered as mistakes at all…

Issue n.5 – Inter-rater reliability

This is the biggest problem of all and it is related to Issue n.2, above; how reliable are the assessment procedures? Many years of research have shown that for any multi-trait assessment scale to be effective it needs to be extensively piloted. Moreover, whenever it is used for assessment, two or more co-raters must agree on the scores and, where there is disagreement, they must discuss the discrepancies until agreement is reached. However, when the Internal moderator and the External one, in cases where the recording is sent to the Examination board for the assessment, do not agree…what happen to the discussion that is supposed to take place to reach a common agreement?

Another important issue relates to the multi-traits assessment scales used. First of all they are too vague. This is convenient, because the vaguer they are the easier it is to ‘fiddle’ with the numbers. However, the vagueness of a scale makes it difficult to discriminate between performances when the variation in ability is not that great as it happens in a top set class, for example, with A and A* students. In these cases, in order to discriminate effectively between an 87 and a 90% which could mean getting or not an A*, research shows clearly that the best assessment to be used should contain more than the two or three traits (categories) usually found in GCSE scales (or even A Level, for that matter) and, more importantly, should be more fine-grained (i.e. each category should have more criterion-referenced grades). This would hold examination boards much more accountable, but would require more financial investment and work, I guess, on their part.

Parallel texts – How they can enhance learning and effectively scaffold reading proficiency development

June 7, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Reading instruction, Uncategorized

How can they impact foreign language learning?

Benefit 1 – They encourage ‘noticing’

‘Noticing’ is a phenomenon first documented, in the L2 acquisition literature by Richard Schmidt. According to Schmidt’s (1990) ‘Noticing hypothesis’ the learning of a foreign language grammar structure cannot occur unless the learner ‘notices’ the gap between the way that structure is used in the target language and his/her own L1. In my classroom experience I have witnessed many a time that Eureka moment when a student said, almost thinking aloud, “Oh, I get it! ‘I went’ in French is actually ‘I am gone’. That would be an occurrence of ‘noticing’. Another common occurrence of this process is when our students process our feedback on error and notice the gap between our version and their erroneous output.

One of the benefits of parallel texts, when the translation is as faithful as possible to the text, is exactly that the co-occurrence, side by side, of the target language and the first language version on the same page facilitates ‘noticing’. What’s more, such noticing, occurs in an ‘authentic’ linguistic context (not on the board through teacher-led examples), under lighter cognitive load (as the translation facilitates information processing) and in a safe ‘environment’ (as the translation takes away the risk-taking that inference-making involves). It is advisable, obviously, when using parallel texts, to encourage and scaffold ‘noticing’ by asking, for example, metalinguistic questions on the text, which can become the springboard for an inductive or explicit grammar session on a specific grammar / lexical structure.

Bringing the importance of ‘noticing’ into the learners’ awareness as a powerful catalyst of language acquisition can, in my opinion, impact those students who are more motivated and metacognizant. In fact, if we aim at forging autonomous learners, fostering noticing is a must and I cannot think of any other reading or learning activity that lends itself as beautifully as Parallel texts to creating a context for learning to ‘notice’. They certainly worked for me as a learner.

Benefit 2 – They can effectively scaffold reading with less confident readers

This is especially true of less confident learners who are put off by texts with masses of words they do not understand. The fact that one knows that there is a translation one can fall back upon when one ‘doesn’t get it’, may lessen the anxiety levels of such learners and provide a solid affective scaffold. But won’t this, someone may argue, encourage over reliance on translation? It won’t if parallel texts are used sensibly, with the right students and emphasizing the importance of looking at the translation only when they are stuck or when they need to double check that their inferences are correct. The use of parallel texts as scaffolds for reading is recommended at the early stages of instruction; the translation support will be gradually phased out as the students become more confident.

Benefit 3 – Students learn vocabulary in context

Parallel texts are one of the most ‘authentic’ ways of presenting new lexical items, as the learners do not process the target vocabulary through artificial means (e.g. through flashcards) or in a vacuum (e.g. vocabulary lists), but in an authentic linguistic environment (e.g. articles, short stories, poems), without the direct mediation of or need for the teacher. Moreover the process is relatively effortless both for teachers and students, thanks to the translation. But would it not be better, instead of ‘spoon-feeding’ them, to get them to find out the target words meaning inductively? Surely, the cognitive investment would result in deeper processing and consequently ‘better’ learning, right?

The answer is: it depends on what you are trying to achieve. If my aim is to develop/enhance student reading strategy use, I will elect not to use parallel texts. However I will prefer parallel texts when they represent a first step in a sequence of vocabulary activities aimed at recycling ‘to death’ useful words/phrases I have identified in the text and I want my students to learn. Hence, being the ‘presentational’ stage in a planned sequence of tasks I will have my students process those items effortlessly, to start with (i.e. with the support of the translation). After this first stage, one can, for instance:

Gap the L2 or English version and ask the students to fill them in with the missing words (in the context of a multiple choice quiz)
Cut up / Jumble up the English text and ask the learners to rearrange it based on the French text;
Then the English translation may be removed and typical vocabulary building and reading comprehension activities can be carried out (e.g. matching lists of English words with L2 words in the text; matching lists of L2 words with synonyms in the text; true or false, questions and answers; summaries or even translations of specific parts of the text; etc.)
Another activity students enjoy is to be given a modified version of the original texts, where the L2 or the English text contains errors ‘planted’ by the teacher. The learners are told the number of mistakes in the translation and are given ‘X’ number of minutes to spot and fix them.

In order to sensitize the learners to the target words in the text, quizzes and other vocabulary activities can be carried out prior to reading the text, which focus the students on those words. This, in my experience, can significantly enhance retention of target lexis.

Benefit 4 – They facilitate access to more challenging texts

Often, at lower levels of proficiency, learners cannot access texts due not so much to the vocabulary per se, but because of the complexity of the grammar or syntax. Parallel texts make it possible for learners to access higher level texts by providing valuable support in this respect, by means of the bilingual translation.

Benefit 5 – Differentiation

Parallel texts can be very helpful in differentiation from a more practical point of view. Imagine you want to carry out one or more comprehension tasks on a text. You could first either download a parallel text from a source or create your own; then you could eliminate the translation altogether for the more able learners whilst keeping ‘bits’ for the less able. With a little bit of editing you will be able, in a few minutes, to obtain three or four differentiated versions of the original.

In conclusion, parallel texts are a very useful and versatile learning tool that can be used to (a) scaffold reading with less confident learners (by virtue of being ‘safer’); (b) to facilitate conscious or subconscious ‘noticing’ (thanks to the co-occurrence on the same sheet of the L1 and L2 version); (c) to differentiate (with little work on the teacher’s part) and (d) to present new vocabulary in context. The best examples of non-electronic parallel texts for lower levels of proficiency I have located on the web so far are found at http://www.frenchteacher.net . I hope that the author, Steve Smith, will carry on producing them targeting higher levels of proficiency, too. Great interactive online parallel texts can also be found at http://www.textivate.com.

Why reading comprehension tasks can be detrimental to L2-reading skills development

June 6, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Reading instruction, Uncategorized

The goals of reading in the 21^st century classroom

WANT to read independently – this implies experiencing success and enjoyment in reading tasks in the classroom as well as being conversant with the benefits of reading for the enhancement of one’s overall L2-proficiency;
Have effective approaches to reading independently – this requires learners to have acquired (a) effective reading strategies to compensate for lack of vocabulary knowledge; (b) learning strategies (such as using dictionaries effectively and knowing how to select accurately website resources for reading);
Have a wide enough vocabulary repertoire to be able to read independently;

To this we must add the need for students who may one day pursue a career as translators or interpreters to acquire translation skills.

The problem

To what extent do published instructional materials, MFL departments’ schemes of work and teachers explicitly, regularly and consistently focus on the above? Let us take a look at some of the typical reading activities in foreign language lessons (in totally random order):

Word-recognition tasks;
Searching the target text for the L2 equivalent of a list of L1 words;
Deciding if statements about a text are true / false (or not mentioned);
Closed / open-ended questions on a text;
Inferring how target grammar structures in a text work;
Partial or full translation of a text;
Practice of compensation strategies (inferring meaning from context);
Reading for gist (students summarize the main points);
Reading for pleasure;
Gap-fills;
Split sentences to match;
Matching questions and answers;
Looking for information we need to accomplish a typical real-life task;
To model the use of the discourse features and conventions which characterize a specific text-type;
Jigsaw reading (piecing a jumbled up text back together);

Research strongly indicates that most foreign language lessons in UK school settings focus mainly on reading comprehension tasks such as true or false, (closed) questions and answers, gap-fills, matching exercises and, to a lesser extent, split-sentences and jigsaw reading. Although there is a place for this kind of activities, they hardly serve the goals of reading instruction listed in points (1), (2) and (3) above.

What these activities do, is test students’ comprehension of the written text whilst implicitly modelling a perception that reading is about skimming and scanning texts for answers to questions. These tasks, do have the potential to enhance the foreign language learner’s reading proficiency, do not get me wrong, in that they require students to apply inference strategies to answers the questions they are asked and semantic analysis; moreover, if the students are allowed and encouraged to use dictionaries, they may learn some new language in the process. However, they do not always per se necessarily widen and consolidate learners’ vocabulary repertoire – unless each texts is recycled through a range of activities and has some pre-reading tasks building up to them and some post-reading ones aimed at consolidation.

Even at the level of strategies acquisition the learning gains of this practice may be overestimated. Research clearly indicates that for reading strategy instruction to be most effective, reading strategies need to be taught explicitly – which, in most cases, in my experience, doesn’t happen.

The most detrimental impact of exposing students mostly to reading comprehension tasks, in my view, refers to the affective domain: how do we motivate learners to enjoy reading for reading’s sake by perpetuating such practice day in day out? How can we model real-life-like reading behavior if students carry out reading tasks that do not really occur in the real world apart from trivia-quiz nights? Real-life reading tasks involve (i) comprehending the main points of text – not necessarily as directed by the questions formulated by the teacher/textbook; (ii) finding information one needs for the accomplishment of a task, to fill gaps in their knowledge or (iii) simply reading to learn new things for the sake of personal enrichment. Such tasks are more likely to motivate foreign language learners than comprehension for comprehension’s sake. Not to mention the negative consequences for the motivation to read when learners who are less good at making intelligent guesses or inferring details consistently score poorly.

The personal enrichment aspect briefly touched upon above is, in my view, the least tapped into in the typical MFL lesson, possibly because it entails that the learners would have to have a higher degree of involvement in choosing what is read in class – which some teachers may disagree with. But if we want to model independent learning, this has to happen and, thanks to the internet and mobile technology, this is easier to implement in the 21^st century classroom.

From a cognitive point of view, another harmful effect refers to the fact that we do not engage our students in extensive reading often enough. Yet, this is crucial to develop their autonomous competence as readers. Extensive reading, must be actively promoted and scaffolded in class as well at home, as often as possible for it to become a habit to carry over to out-of-classroom student practice. Scaffolding is the key word here, as students will need reminders to read and materials, worksheets, google documents, Edmodo, Padlet or other platforms to log in new words they found, to ask the teacher for clarification, to express their response to the content, etc.

Grammar, too, is rarely linked to reading activities. Yet, recent research has found that readers who are able to analyze the language occurring in a text structurally, i.e. through the application of their knowledge of the L2-grammar rule system do have greater chances to understand a text than those who do not. Reading skills enhancing activities should therefore also include tasks which demand learners to analyze texts metalinguistically (e.g.: sorting specific words in the text into nouns, gender, tense; asking questions as to why an adjective has an ending rather than other, etc.) .

Implications for the enhancement of reading skills

Top-down and Bottom-up processing skills – Reading skills instruction should aim at developing Top-down processing and bottom-up processing skills. The former refer to reading strategies involving using previous knowledge about the topic and context of the text-in-hand to infer meaning. Bottom-up processing skills refer to the way the learner reconstructs a text’s meaning through the knowledge of vocabulary, grammar/syntax and sociolinguist features. In order to practice both sets of skills, just giving students reading comprehension ‘quizzes’, marking them and giving scores is not enough to impact reading proficiency. I advocate the following tactics:

Pre-reading tasks which (a) elicit background knowledge of the topic and context of the target text and model useful reading strategies and (b) present and practice the key vocabulary occurring in the target text;
Recycling of the same text through several activities to exploit its full linguistic potential across the lexical, grammatical and cultural dimensions. Such activities will involve word-recognition; finding target language equivalent in the text of L1 word (see www.frenchteacher.net for examples) ; scanning the text in search of synonyms of a list of L2 words; grammatical analysis; comprehension questions, true or false and gap-fills. Text manipulation activities of the like found on www.textivate.com can also be very useful.
Post-reading receptive and productive tasks aiming at consolidating the vocabulary and the grammar ( odd one outs, categories, gap-fills, split sentences – see www.language-gym.com/work-outs for more example)

Real-life reading activities – in order to enhance student motivation and effectively scaffold independent Internet-based out-of-the-classroom reading, reading activities should also include the same activities the learners engage in real life, whether for pleasure (e.g. reading media gossip about a pop-star, synopsis of a movie, reviews of videogames, short stories, poems, magazines articles ) or to accomplish a task (checking the train schedule; researching information for a piece of homework; finding out where one can buy a given product at the cheapest price, booking a holiday online).

Student-driven text selection -teachers ought to give students a degree of choice as to what is read in the class. This can be done fairly easily in settings where students have tablets, personal computers or mobile devices. When this is not possible, the teacher could carry out a survey to find out what students are interested in and select the target texts accordingly. Teachers should not be afraid to be high jacked away from the topic under study a few lessons per term.

Reading longer texts – This should become a habit amongst our students, starting with simplified readers or using parallel texts of the likes found on the excellent www.frenchteacher.net and culminating in the use of longer short-stories. Reading clubs can be set up with the support of school librarians, parents or older students. I personally have found extensive reading to be very useful in enhancing reading and language proficiency overall.

Web-related learning strategies – students should be made aware of what the most effective approaches to developing reading skills on the web are. This will include advising them on where to find resources suitable for their level of proficiency; modelling ways to exploit such resources effectively; how to use online dictionaries or forums where to seek linguistic support (e.g. the wordreference.com one); how to store and organize effectively the new vocabulary they come across and even how to use it for self-teaching (e.g. by using quizlet or memrise).

In conclusion, textbooks and teachers should be more creative, eclectic and systematic in their approach to reading skills practice and enhancement. The development of an effective and motivated Internet-savvy autonomous L2 reader should be at the heart of any pedagogic approach to reading instruction in the 21^st century. This entails providing the learners with effective cognitive tools (reading strategies), adequate L2 declarative knowledge (vocabulary and grammar), an enhanced awareness of how the Internet can help them improve their reading skills (web-related learning strategies) and opportunities for reading-related enjoyment and personal enrichment.

Of SAMR and SAMRitans – How the adoption of the SAMR model as a reference framework may be detrimental to foreign language learning

May 31, 2015May 31, 2016 Gianfranco Conti, Phd (Applied Linguistics), MA (TEFL), MA (English Lit.), PGCE (Modern Languages and P.E.) Technology and L2 learning, Uncategorized

The Language Gym

Of SAMR and SAMRitans – How the adoption of the SAMR model as a reference framework may be detrimental to foreign language learning

I was about to write an article about the SAMR model when I stumbled into a blogpost that encapsulated most of what I meant to say – http://ictevangelist.com/samr-is-not-a-ladder-purposeful-use-of-tech/. What the article points out is that far too often Puentedura’s model is used as a ladder, with Redefinition as the level of student engagement with technology we should aspire to in lessons. The most crucial point the author makes is that App Smashing every day in order to hit the Redefinition level can be a waste of valuable learning time. Another great point is that technology is only as good as the person who uses it; technology will not make you a more effective teacher.

In this article I will discuss, why, in the light…

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