Portfolios and VLEs

Slowish day today, but at least I've pretty much resolved all that needs doing until September, and the rest can wait till then. I even managed a bit of precious research time.
One thing that will wait till the start of the new academic year is the portfolios, or rather the virtual part of the project. I mentioned in the earlier post that a designated list of tasks would be given, from which the students would select the best work for their portfolios at the end of the year. Well, what will also happen is that these will form the core of 'key tasks' on the university's VLE, Blackboard. Not only will the task be outlined alongside the companion tasks that a student will need to be able to understand and do in order to complete the task, each component will be a learning module. The idea is that where students can't come to class for whatever reason, they will be able to complete the designated self-study tasks and still have their attendance counted. That's what we're moving towards, anyway. In addition, links pages will direct students to additional reading, exercises and study linked to each key topic, the idea being that we can create differentiation within the cohort - faster students will be able to do more challenging work involving less guided, more real-world learning material, while lesser able students still complete the tasks they need to. It will also be a boon for the IT sessions we ru for our FT students, as these are currently a bit on the flabby side.

Lazy(Tembel, Barid)) Sunday (Pazar, Al-Ahad) Afternoon (Ogleden sonra,بعد الظّهر)

It's too hot to do any serious work today, and besides it's Sunday. I'm just sat in the garden, listening to langourous mid-afternoon birdsong, drinking a beer and contemplating sparking up the barbie. And, while son #2 is having his nap, reflecting on how he's acquiring language. Currently he's not two years old yet (he's 21 months), yet you would expect he would be producing certain phrases by now. He is, but what's interesting is the variety. Nur and I are both making the best effort we can to speak English and Turkish with him, but he's also getting input from his childminder, who's Syrian. So, we have 3 very different language systems that he's being exposed to, from the uninflected Turkish through to the highly inflected Arabic. Although Turkish and Arabic share quite a few lexical items (though not as many as you might expect: The Turkish language reform of 1928 effectively created an linguistic tabula rasa) they are significantly different. You would think it would be hard for any child to make sense of anything through the prism of these different tongues. So how does Sean cope?
Surpisingly well, is the answer. While it's difficult to understand what he's saying at times, apart from some lexical items and bits of syntax, what is also apparent is that he understands himself - in other words, he has his own interlanguage with its own rules and conventions and which to him is perfectly comprehensible. What I find a little surprising, considering the L1 environment is English, is that he seems to prefer Turkish and Arabic vocabulary. He tends to call me, for example, 'Baba' or 'Aba'. However, his intonation and rhythm are distinctly English - for example, he uses very distinct rising and falling intonation when asking a 'wh-' type question (even if I don't understand what he's asking!), and a rising intonation when asking a 'yes-no' type question. What will be interesting to watch is how this interlanguage develops, and how, or if, he will begin to change preferences as to which lexical items he uses, and thence how it changes morphologically.
(btw, please forgive any dodgy Arabic in the heading)

busy?

rather a slow week, or at least it's felt that way - maybe it's the weather. And again, frustratingly, not much going on on the Dip. front. I want to complete my current workbook in the next few days (the distance Dip. Tesol is split up into workbooks), then try and do as much as possible over the summer before I'm inundated by the shitwave of work that inevitably breaks over me come september. So far this week, I've been working on publicity for the PT & FT EFL courses, marketing strategies (too little, too late, in my opinion: The university's sole overseas agancy is about to be closed, meaning that we probably won't be getting much in the way of FT students for the new academic year), and, of course, portfolios. It finally looks like they've crystallised. Basically, the FT programme will use the portfolio in very much the way they were originally designed to be used, vis. a showcase of each student's best work. However, the Programme Leader will set out prior to the start of the programme what work needs to be covered, and from that the minimum number of items that need to be included. On top of that, and to encourage students to work, having a complete portfolio will be in some way a requirement of course completion, and prizes will be given for the best portfolios.
For the PT programme, because of time constraints and its more specialised nature, the portfolio will be used more in the way I originally envisaged it, i.e. a way of delivering specific tasks that conform to ECF freamework descriptors and show students the type of tasks they may face in PET, FCE, CAE and CPE. It means we can spread the exam skills workload over the whole of the course, rather than trying to cram it from halfway through the course (don't ask why this is: suffice to say it's a long story involving fundaing regulations for FE).
Anyway, I'm fairly pleased with what I've hammered out - now all I have to do is sit back and see if it bloody works.

Another rather slow and plodding monday. Currently working on the whole portfolios idea - it's evolved a bit. just a bit. Currently, the idea is to use the European Language Portfolio as the core for students to reflect on their own language skills and what they want to do with language, followed by a reflective diary-type thing, possibly on the net, then sections covering functional and notional skills. The headache lies in the latter. I don't want to be too proscriptive as to what can and cannot be done, yet it would be desirable to have concictency across several levels in the same learning cohort - it means we can match students to the ALTE framework and give us a really accurate snapshot of a whole academic year, covering accuracy of initial placement tests to end of year results. It'll also give us standardised pieces that would make Internal Validation, and external for that matter, much easier. However, saying 'this and this must be in the portfolio, but not this' isn't desirable, as it ignores the students' needs. In addition, each class may have subtly different needs that require addressing. It's all rather thorny.

step forward, step backward.

Well, it's been a frustrating week. I don't feel as if I've done that much - something I put down to sitting in front of a monitor until my eyeballs bleed, rather than being up and on my feet in a class. Most frustratingly, I've done hardly anything on the Dip, something which really bugs me. I'd like to have done more, but work stuff and a house full of ill people has put paid to that. Made some progress on the portfolio design, only to find it seems to be getting more and more complex and involved than I first thought.

Red Face....always remember..

...to do your research before you write! How many times do I tell my students that? Further to the previous post about SATs, I find in fact that the majority of the marking is actually done in the UK, and not, as implied on the BBC this morning, abroad. The problems allegedly come from the lack of training and support ETS Europe provide, alongside an apparently appalling system for transporting and delivering papers. This doesn't surprise me. ETS are probably better known for running the TOEFL, quite possibly the worst Academic English exam in existence. And why is an American company dealing with British exams in the first place? Just an example of shoddy government - go for the cheapest contractor, and to hell with the futures of the children being tested.

SATs, contractors and doing it on the cheap

Off the topic of ELT, but still educationally related - The SATs(Standard Attainment Tests), sat by 11 and 14-year-olds in the UK. There's been a bit of a kerfuffle, to put it mildly, at the delay in releasing the results this year. There's been more disgruntlement at schools, where teachers have been resending marked papers because of inaccuracies in the scoring. So, what's going on?

the papers have been sent off to be marked to a company contracted to do it, presumably the cheapest one available.

Its name?
ETS Europe.

The marking of the SATs has been subcontracted to a company not based in the UK. In other words, British students' work is being checked and marked for accuracy in somewhere other than the UK.

I can't begin to describe how shocking I find this. It's wrong on so many levels. Now, if it was just a case of a multiple choice paper being fed into a computer, I could accept that. If it was just checking the result of a maths paper, where you can only have a correct or wrong answer, I could just about accept that too. But it seems (and honestly, I couldn't be more glad if I were wrong on this point) that the entire lot is being sent off. OK, you can make a point abour objectivity in marking: The examiner will have a set number of descriptors against which he/she will check the submitted work, and based on that assign a mark. However, I can see so many ways that marking will be inaccurate.
Just a few examples:
Orthography. The way that UK kids are taught to write is significantly different from the way it is done in other EU countries. This is a fairly neat example:
, and it's written by an adult! Imagine an 11-year-old's being deciphered by an examiner.

Cultural and Social mileau. Taken out of context, how can anything relating to a culture or society be accurately interpreted, let alone assigned a score in an exam?

Examiner's L1/L2 competency. No matter how good the examiner's English may be, nevertheless they will be marking and interpreting at one remove - that is, they will have to decode the information, recode into L1, interpret according to two sets of cultural and possibly sociolinguistic filters, then assign a mark and re-encode into English. There is no way it can be done entirely fairly, as any examiner in this situation will use affective filters in the process.

All I can say is that it's WRONG. Totally bloody WRONG.

Acquisition within learning

Insight: In acquisition, learning does not occur. In learning, acquisition may occur. By this, I mean that when we acquire information, in this case languages, we do not consciously analyse, criticise or judge what has been acquired: It just is. However, when we learn, we apply a critical process - we may ask ourselves what we are learning for - in other words, there is some form of conscious motivation involved. Even though this happens, some information is (uncritically, non-judgementally) acquired. We see evidence of this where students, even in the midset of ropey writing, produce a perfectly executed phrase or sentence or turn of speech. It indicates that that phrase has been acquired syntactically. If we were to ask the student why they used that, they would probably not be able to give a good reason.
Just thought I'd share that with you.

Portfolios

This is a work-related post, and a warning. Never volunteer ideas too loudly - you might get saddled with redesigning an entire syllabus, as I have done. And I've only got a few weeks to do it in!
Actually, it fits in fairly neatly with the curriculum and syllabus design section of my Dip studies, and it bodes to be a hell of a lot more interesting than doing plod work on the Summer School. It also chimes in with a few ideas I've had about running the part time programme and how we keep students from drifting away, as often happens when their work/life/study balance changes.
Basically, it centres on using student portfolios. It's not a new idea, and in fact there is, somewhere out on the Interweb, a British Council document about using a learning portfolio, which for the life of me I can't find. The idea and structure is simple. Each student creates a portfolio of work which is proof of work done over a course, and contains marked and internally validated work covering the main skills. It will also contain a 'biography' section, a 'personal vocabulary' section (for vocab students come across in everyday life rather than in the classroom), a reflective diary and individual learning plan for them to identify what their targets are. So far, so good.
The difference comes in two places: How it is delivered and how it is differentiated. I'm weighing up how much of the portfolio needs to actually be on paper and whether it can't be done using our online learning platform, Blackboard. Anyone who's used this bit of software will know how clunky it is - it's very old as a piece of software and relies on plug-in modules to keep it up-to-date - and how it tends to render users rather passive (and here I mean teachers and students). However, with some nifty wrangling I think I may be able to do something usable. Actually, it does have its own version of a portfolio as a plug in, but it's really not much more than a glammed up CV. There is also the issue of technophobe students, and even more technophobe teachers. Currently, I think that the portfolio can be in parts delivered online, but with backup documentary evidence to place in a file. For example, the reflective diary can be in the form of blogs, which would give them much greater flexibility - students can use alternative ways of recording what they're doing, including pictures and sound recordings. The various marked tasks might be done both electronically and on paper.
Which last point leads very nicely onto differentiation. By this, I mean not only differentiation across levels, but also across the courses. For example, we have an evening Effective Writing course: It would be rather ridiculous having the students complete a portfolio that has elements not related to their study needs. In addition, one feature of this course is that students bring in real life writing situations into the class, and so a portfolio should cover this - perhaps by some kind of case study, analysis and solutions - some kind of report, perhaps. For the classes that cover Exams - for example, FCE, CAE etc. - the portfolio requires tasks that directly relate to the type of tasks they will need to do in exam conditions, but without being tainted by Backwash.

The most important differentiation task will be across the levels. Here, I intend to use the Common European Framework to identify what students are expected to be able to do and how they express it. For example, in the 'biography' section, I envisage the lowest level students just completing a simple form asking for basic details, while a higher level student might be expected to write a CV and sample cover letter, or write a more complex biography.
Well, that's the idea, anyway. Wish me luck.

drawing articulators

I never was much good at drawing these things..

Honestly, look at them - looks like coils of bacon. The first one is meant to show the position of the articulators during nasal plosion and the second during lateral plosion.

ambiguous language spotting

..from 'Mary, Queen of Shops' last night, while describing discerning shoppers in York:
'...she needs to understand what the thirty-something fashionable women of York want...'
Is she talking about women in their thirties, or is she implying that there are only thirty or so fashionable women in York?

bloody plosions. Especially nasal and lateral ones. It's not that it's difficult, it's just tedious.

Roles of speaker and listener

Just a short post, based on a conversation last night. Do different language groups place different responsibilities on the speaker and listener in a conversation to ensure that any given communication has been understood? In English, if I want to make sure that the other person is following me, I might say 'Understand?', '..if you get me..', '...did you get that?', and so forth. In Turkish, however, you say, 'Anlatabildim mi?', which means 'Have I made myself clear?'
Another feature of Turkish is the tendency to repeat information, especially important information, three times, often in subtly different ways. So what's going on? It seems to me that in English, the responsibility on understanding the message is on the listener, hence the reason why I say the things above. In other words, it's down to the decoder to ensure the successful transmission of a message. In Turkish, however, the responsibility for the successful transmission of the message lies with the speaker, or encoder. This means that, in English, listening is a far more active role: There is an expectation that the message will be understood. In contrast, in Turkish the listener is far more passive. Speaking from experience, I would say that this explains why Turkish language students tend not to hear instructions in class, as well as explaining why they can get so frustrated in conversation - it's because the role they are expected to play is at variance with what they do in L1. When they speak, this tendency to repeat and emphasise comes out, which to the English listener is frustrating: When it happens to me, I want to say ,'Yes, yes, I understand!', which is rather rude in Turkish culture. When the Turkish student listens, the expectation is that all the work of making the message clear lies with the speaker.
This phenomenon possibly also has something to do with the turn-taking periods in the two languages. In English, generally the first person will speak, then the next person will speak afterwards. In Turkish, there is a tendency to overlap, hence possibly the reason why it is necessary to convey information several times.
Now, there may be some research out there into this, but I don't have the time at the moment to look; However, I think I'm on to something. Ideas, anyone?

My eyes are feeling a bit fried up from reading for the past three hours, and I'm about to call it a day - well, at least for the time being: I'll probably do some more work this evening at some stage. A question about methodologies: why are they all aimed at beginners? OK, so lots of research has been done about acquisition and learning, but what about the fine-tuning, improving and expanding phase, once students get past intermediate level? I don't know if much research has been done, but my impressions based on my teaching experiences are that there's a big drop-off in the numbers of students who want to learn English once they get to an intermediate level, or thereabouts - in other words, once they reach a basic level of linguistic competency. Now, the fact that tens of thousands of people take the FCE and CAE, and that the number of students taking IELTS has exploded over the past year, may belie that fact, but there it is. What turns basic competency into fluency and eventually mastery? What are the motivators?

Suggestopedia

In my ongoing travails, I have to read about the various theories and methodologies that pervade the world of language teaching, and have spent most of today making notes and reading about the damn things. One of the more looney ones has to be Suggestopedia, which quite frankly appears to be madder than a betting shop full of scousers who've just found that a) their giro's been stopped and b) they've had their last 50p nicked.
I can't begin to describe how ridiculous this theory is, nor the demented self-aggrandisement and egotism of its proponent. Suffice it to say that part of it involves letting the students sit in recliners, listening to baroque music while listen to the teacher, who projects an aura of believing in what he's doing while being simulataneously enthusiastic and grave of deportment, intone a relevant text, before the whole lot get up and bugger off without discussing a thing. Utter nuts.

Dipping away.

working away on the dip. Currently, I'm having a deeply exciting time looking at theories and methodologies - right at the moment, Krashen's Natural Approach, TPR and the Silent Way. Why do none of these seem to have much to say about higher level English Learners? They're all focused at getting beginners competent to a certain degree. Since I generally teach the other end of the spectrum, I'd be interested in the work done regarding theories and methodologies for those who already have higher levels of L2.