Sunday, November 27, 2011

Improving your teaching



Having the possibility to receive feedback on one’s teaching from different perspectives seems to me a wonderful way to improve one’s professional practice.  The model presented in chapter 13 seems very helpful since it provides teachers with opportunities to reflect on their practices by obtaining information from different sources (the observer, the students, him/herself, the video).  The information brought by each of these sources is invaluable for the reflective teacher since it allows him to understand his teaching as it is perceived by all those involved/interested in the classroom.

I was particularly interested in the way getting information from students (even though this was not discussed extensively in the chapter) can help us understand how the type of discourse we use in the classroom, the way we address our students, the way we give instructions, the learning opportunities that we acknowledge (or not) affect our pedagogy and the students’ learning process.  I have found that the distance between our pedagogical purposes and attitudes and how these are perceived by the students is too big.

Getting a better understanding of how our attitudes, activities, explanations, methods and classroom management strategies are interpreted by students can totally help us improve these and be more effective teachers. And who else can give us first-hand information on these if not the students.  Of course, one must be aware that the students, as direct participants in the classroom, may be biased in providing this feedback, but once we are aware of this, and also once we have set the right atmosphere for this to take place, this can give profound insights on how to improve our teaching.

Also, conferencing with observer colleagues can help gain an equally but differently informed view of the things we do in the classroom, but a reflective teacher, who may not have always access to this kind of feedback, will find it very valuable to videotape his/her classes. It is hard to know how much you can gain from this unless you do it. The first thing one will feel is probably embarrassment. But once one has overcome that stage and gets used to observe him/herself in the video, one will become aware of the ideologies one brings into the class and the decisions made. This is a critical way to approach your own teaching that could prove very successful to become a better teacher. 

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Assessment and the washback effect


I will use this blog entry to discuss briefly one phenomenon in classroom evaluation practices that, even though is not explicitly mentioned in chapters 33, 34, 35, poses great challenges to language teachers in practically all educational settings: the washback effect.

The washback effect refers to the extent to which different forms of assessment (normally but not exclusively testing) affect processes of learning and teaching.  The simplest forms of the washback effect can be seen in students’ attitudes towards evaluation processes when they focus their efforts to ‘learn’ those things that they believe are going to be assessed by the teacher, or in the way teachers tailor their teaching to provide students with tools to do well in assessment procedures.

Probably one of the most easily recognizable and more detrimental forms of the washback effect can be seen in educational settings where standardized, universal testing is mandatory. Teachers, due to accountability and transparency issues (the need to demonstrate to educational authorities that students are actually learning according to institutionalized standards), adapt their teaching practices and curricula to respond to the challenges posed by these evaluations, even if they have nothing to do with the students’ realities. In these cases, actual learning blurs away and becomes learning to take tests, leaving aside the transformational nature of education. This way, we see how some teachers, in a desperate attempt to respond to these impositions, end up using their class time to ‘train’ students to succeed in these tests.

However, in cases where assessment is more contextually-centered and considers learners’ potential and necessities, there can be positive washback effects. If the goals of the learning units are sensible enough to respond to the learners’ needs, if students are aware of the nature of the learning goals and the relevance of these to their own life, having students practice the skills necessary to perform well in traditional and non-traditional forms of assessment can have positive effects in students’ learning.

In my opinion, two concepts are central to transform the negative effects of assessment into positive ones. The first one is the students’ awareness of the reasons why and how different forms of assessment are used in the classroom, and what and whose purposes it serves. The second is the nature of the tools of assessment. This is to say, whether these evaluation practices has been designed as a possibility for learning that is aligned with the learning outcomes of the class rather than as a gate-keeping process. 

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Critical Language Awareness


One of the aspects that called my attention most from the reading was the exercise on doublespeak on page 167. Kume cites Lutz to say that doublespeak is ‘language that makes the bad seem good, the negative appear positive, the unpleasant appear attractive or at least tolerable.’ The reason why this sparked my interest is because one of the fields that I’m interested in is Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). CDA is a branch of studies in discourse analysis that looks at the way language is used as a tool of power for social, political and economic control. In my experience learning about CDA and doing my undergrad thesis using this approach, I always thought this was a great way to teach students about how the language works and how there are certain strategic choices language users make to promote or hide social representations. My first impression was that it was better-suited for first language learning since it seemed to be a very complex approach for second language teaching.

However, I found and tried ways to address this issue in the L2 classroom by using two simple grammatical concepts that are normally addressed from a LA perspective: these are the difference between the use of the passive and active voice and the processes that influence the word-choice decision-making progress. Just a couple of examples of how I’ve used this in the classroom (with not much success though):

Active voice: Protestors halt port causing shipping companies to lose millions.
Passive voice: Protestors tent encampment has been evacuated. Two protestors are injured.

Basically, what we can do here with students is to discuss why they think the active or passive voice is used. Here we see, how the subject-agent distinction is problematized by the use of the passive voice. In the first example, it is very clear that it was the protestors who stopped operations and the port. Then we can see how a consequence is included right after to make it clear to the audience that the protestors have brought a problem to something that is considered very important for a society: its economy. In the second example, the subject-agent distinction of the sentence is unclear. We know what the grammatical subject of the sentence is, but we do not know who the agent of the action is. Additionally, we also have access to the consequence of the evacuation, but the agent of the action is ambiguous again and leaves room for speculation.

After discussing this, one then moves to introduce the grammatical aspect of it, explaining what morphosyntactic processes are embedded in the forming of the sentence, and how these choices affect the way the message is received by the audience. In my experience, this approach helps students understand the distinction more easily by increasing the saliency of the difference between the two forms.