Image from Google Images "labeled for reuse" I often see proficiency-oriented language teachers bring up "time" as part of the motivation for choosing certain teaching practices. Comprehension-based teachers regularly discuss the vast differences in hours of input that a child is exposed to before reaching kindergarten versus limited hours that students in most language classrooms receive. Some teachers argue that there isn't time in a classroom to provide input the way children at home naturally receive, so their solution is to explicitly teach grammar and then push students to practice producing teacher-determined linguistic patterns (typically sounds, words, grammatical structures, and pragmatic actions like asking-answering, greeting, and so on). I think these discussions can benefit from the concept of leverage, which I'm defining here as: Hours spent providing one type of learning experience that are observed to correlate with specific and measurable learning outcomes.
High-leverage Teaching Practices (HLTPs) are explored in the book by Glisan & Donato (2017) through ACTFL. Kearney (2015) looked at one HLTP, leading an open-ended group discussion, in advanced Spanish and Latin classrooms, and Hlas & Hlas (2012) first advocated bringing the HLTP concept over to language education from its original place in math education. Most recently Yue (2019) looked at HLTPs in an introductory-level Chinese language classroom (thanks are owed to Diane Neubauer for bringing this last paper to my attention). To illustrate the usefulness of talking in terms of leverage, I'll offer a made-up example: One teacher spends the first 20 hours of class time with beginning novice learners of some new language delivering content-based instruction in a full-immersion manner. The teacher only talks at fast native-like speed, and pictures and ongoing context help learners infer the meaning of the teacher's talk. A second teacher delivers similar content-based lessons but speaks very slowly and with pauses in between chunks of words to give learners time to process each sentence that the teacher says. At the end of the 20 hours, all of the learners are given three assessments: one in free-speaking, where learners each draw pictures about whatever they want to talk about in the target language and then they talk about those drawings. The next assessment checks the learners' understanding of fast native-like speech. The third assessment checks their understanding of slow speech. In this imagined scenario, the learners who only heard fast speech (1) score worse than the other group in speaking, (2) are able to pick out more words accurately in the fast listening assessment than the other group, and (3) score equally high in the slow-listening assessment. The learners who only experienced hearing slow and segmented speech perform (1) far better in the free-speaking assessment, (2) pick out far fewer words from the fast listening assessment compared to the other group, and (3) score equally high in the slow listening assessment. So we see the 20 hours spent using the micro-practice of slow versus fast listening resulted in different outcomes for each of the three assessments. Leverage being higher or lower depends on the outcomes measured, but which outcomes are more important depends on the teacher and connected stakeholders (learners, families, colleagues, and so on). I think it would be productive for teachers to talk about relative measures of leverage ("higher than teacher practice A for X outcome," "Lower than teacher practice B for Y outcome"). A simple measure can be hours, or fractions on an hour, that the teachers spend enacting a particular teaching practice and, consequently, learners spend experiencing that practice. In the imagined examples above, 20 hours spent providing slow speech for beginning novice learners proved to be higher leverage than providing fast speech for the desired outcome of learners of the same proficiency level being able to perform in a free-talking assessment. However, those same 20 hours spent experiencing fast-speech proved to be higher leverage than slow-speech for the outcome of picking words out when listening in the fast speech assessment. Leverage allows us to talk about short-term developmental goals on the way to reaching advanced proficiency. One example is novice learners in TPRS classrooms writing and telling stories using a minimal set of vocabulary (see Lichtman, 2019, for a review of TPRS classroom research). A teaching practice might be high leverage for certain learning outcomes for novice learners, but that same teaching practice might be lower leverage if done for intermediate and advanced proficiency learners. The same can be said of a teaching practice that is high leverage for a learning outcome for advanced proficiency learners but lower leverage for novice and beginning learners for that same outcome (obviously, we expect different learning outcomes at different proficiency levels). My hope in drawing out these examples is that teachers can talk past each other less, and get more specific about what we want to see in our learners and what we can do to get there.
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Reed Riggs (Author)I hold a Ph.D. from the University of Hawai‘i. My research looks at entrenchment, frequency effects, and salience along with interactional behaviors from Usage-based Linguistics (UBL) and Conversation Analytic (CA) perspectives. Archives
June 2023
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