Yesterday evening I experienced a wonderful lesson in Lakota language taught by a grad student in the Linguistics department at the University of Hawai'i (I will add her name here if she wants me to). This was her second attempt at CI teaching, and she excelled at going slow, parsing, speaking clearly, presenting a clear word list with pictures, pausing and pointing, asking questions in the target language, integrating culture in popups, focusing on form in popups, engaging the audience with questions, fishing for audience contributions, and more fine-grained practices that I'm not noticing here. At one point, an audience member asked, "Can I get a popup? You keep saying 'The dog, the cat, likes. Does that mean the dog likes the cat or the cat likes the dog?'" Clearly, pointing to the pictures of the dog and the cat in the order spoken was not clear enough to many people in the room, to clarify "who likes whom". This was important information for our unfolding, co-created scene, and audience participation could not continue if people weren't clear on what we had all decided to be true. I jumped in and mentioned a relevant finding in Bill VanPatten's research on Input Processing (IP; VanPatten & Cadierno, 1993), showing that learners tend to assume that the first noun is the agent or subject of the sentence. But the audience still wanted a clear mention of the intended sentence meaning. Upon reflection after this lesson, I realized that the key word in research is "tend to."
Experimental researchers are rarely concerned with unanimous outcomes, that is, every member in one group coming out equal. Instead, researchers seek out tendencies in averages. So if a teacher is aiming for equity among learners, then it's important to understand that averages found in research only imply averages in our classrooms. Exceptions to the average should also be implied from the research. So, if a teacher's goal is success for everyone, then findings from research should only serve as a helpful starting point (the teacher can think, "Ok, many students will likely assume the first noun is the agent or subject in the sentence"), but then the teacher should differentiate by checking for which participants are similar to the non-average members in the research. In this example, a teacher can still help many people in the room to more clearly understand the unfamiliar language structure by asking, "What do you think this sentence means?". The teacher can then briefly clarify using a shared language, and then return to the discussion in the target language (this is standard practice in the TPRS literature). In addition to facilitating language acquisition (connecting form with meaning frequently), these extra clarifications should help audience members (the learners) contribute to the ongoing discussion as they are more clear on what is being discussed (the content of the discussion).
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At first I wanted to title this post "Differentiating for Heritage & Non-heritage Learners", but my idea is really the opposite, as I will explain.
In my CI/TPRS teaching, I design my instruction to promote language proficiency by providing input in the context of communication ("The interpretation, expression, and (sometimes) negotiation of meaning in a given context", to borrow Bill VanPatten's most recent definition of communication). One central way I do this is by ensuring that the language learners hear and read contain words and structures (the input) which are repeated a lot (a "high frequency in the input" to use the SLA/Usage-based research term I like). The standard TPRS practice is to get this repetition by Circling, where the teacher asks lots of similar questions slowly, so our beginning learners have opportunities to process the same words in a variety of target-like sentence contexts. When I hear Vietnamese and more advanced French, Spanish, and German in teaching demos, I am usually eager to hear even the same sentence a few more times. It's at my current ability to process and my current level of challenge. When teaching Mandarin to undergrads at the University of Hawai‘i, and to 2nd, 3rd, & 4th graders at Punahou School's after-school immersion program, I'm always teaching heritage learners (often half to 3/4 of my class) who already understood me the first time I ask a question. Circling questions are confusing to them. They understood me the first time, so move on. But the non-heritage learners want to hear it again. My solution for balancing everyone out, and keeping us all in the class discussion during the listening part of the lesson is what I'm calling "Bottomless PictureTalk" (basic PictureTalk is described here, and please message me if this idea has already been described elsewhere). If I can ask two questions about each picture and three about how the students' own lives relate to each picture, and I do this for 20 separate pictures, then that's already (5 x 20) 100 times learners hear and process a target construction (or an otherwise emergent construction generated by the students when I'm doing non-targeted CI teaching). "But wouldn't many students feel annoyed by 100 similar questions?" To answer to this question we can simply do a web page search. I recommend trying this now: 1) open a long web page, maybe the Wikipedia page for "China", 2) search the page for the word "the", 3) search for "of". My search found over 1000 matches for "the" and another 1000 matches for "of". But shouldn't I have felt annoyed at so many uses of "the" and "of"? Probably not, because language naturally repeats when we keep talking about different things. If you go shopping with someone, you might ask each other "What about this one?" as many times as you need until you find what you needed. Neither person is likely to say, "Okay already!! Please use a different phrase. I'm so tired of this one." We use language to focus on meaning, and if the referent keeps changing, we don't notice the repeated use of language. My thinking now is that when we are all talking about new things, new people, new places, and new events, we don't have to differentiate for heritage and non-heritage learners. Everyone can continue being engaged in, and contributing to, our discussion in the target language. The non-heritage learners get the repeating language as we talk briefly about each picture, and no one suffers from repeated content. See how I make my long PictureTalk files as speedily as possible at this post here. |
Reed Riggs (Author)
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