Autonomy in Language Learning

Those are scary words to the high school language teacher. The first thing that comes to mind is when I have the students working in pairs to come up with a dialogue on topic X. As I circulate the room I discover that X is not what they are talking about at all. What they are talking about is what they did last Saturday night or what they’re going to do this Friday night. That would be somewhat okay if they were speaking in the target language. Even scarier than the word “autonomy” is hearing what they actually did Saturday night.

Healey states that in U.S. academic settings few “teachers expect to be the sole source of language learning for their students (392).” I am reminded of one of my colleagues, a German teacher, who was “warned” by a student that if he didn’t get a 4 or 5 on the German AP exam, it would be her fault. My advice to her was to inform the (young man) that outside the rarest of cases does anyone get a 4 or 5 without at least one of the following:

-Native speaker
-Native-speaking parents
-Study/Travel abroad
-Near daily contact with a native speaker
-Hours of outside the classroom study.

There must be autonomy for the student to take ownership of his/her studies. Without autonomy the student will merely regurgitate the spoonfuls of language we force feed them. If a student has the desire to learn vocabulary outside the scope of the lesson, why would we as educators want to squelch that enthusiasm?

I once had a student who did absolutely nothing in class. No matter what I said or did he was happy with his F. Then one day, he asked me “how do you tell a girl ‘you’re so hot’ in Spanish?” After a bit of a pause, I told him and he repeated it. Then I corrected his pronunciation. Then he said it again. But then came my zinger. I asked him “what are you going to say if she responds?” He said he didn’t know. So I said “how about ‘how are you’?” His reply, “yeah, yeah. How do you say that?” So I told him “¿cómo estás?” "Oh yeah, I remember that", he said. He started to carry a Spanish/English dictionary in his backpack. And nearly every day he would tell me some new word he learned (not necessarily from the current vocab). To make a long story short, he earned a solid C for the second semester.

Just to set the record straight, I would not have answered that question under many other circumstances. But that time I saw an opportunity to motivate him with what already motivated him. Did that make him an autonomous learner? I think so.

Search Engines and Site Evaluattion

Search Engines

I used the following websites for this assignment:

http://www.excite.com/
http://www.lycos.com/
http://www.wisenut.com/ .

Lycos.com gave me the best results. It didn’t have any of the same sites in its top five as excite.com and wisenut.com. However, the lycos.com results were actually “provided by ask.com.” Just for fun I searched ask.com as well. It came back with the same results as lycos.com.

The reason I didn’t like the other two as much was because they came back with too many threaded discussions that just happened to have “wikis education” in them. The lycos/ask results solidly pertained to wikis in education.

Website Evaluation

For this assignment I am evaluating http://www.ibritt.com/resources/wp_blogs.htm#blogs .
It is a compilation of links gathered by “Pink Flamingo”. The author does not give her (sexist assumption on my part;)) name or credentials. She does however give a clue on another page. But I agree with a statement she makes that she could just make up a name and most people would be happy.
So as far I’m concerned I don’t really need to know her name or credentials for what the site is. It’s a place to find links to external material. It’s a great site for other educational resources as well. She claims up to 500 hits per day.

It is organized very well. If you arrive at the site from the above link, you will want to click on the “back to home page” link. This was my favorite of all search results because it gave me several options for the subject I searched plus dozens of other topics as well.

My sincere apologies to Pink Flamingo if she is not a she. I just didn’t want to type s/he her/him throughout the assignment.:)

Individualization

This topic can cause even a veteran teacher to cringe. How do I teach the same subject/topic to 25 individuals per class times six classes for a total of 150 individuals? That’s what could be considered the absolute worst-case scenario. If you really think about, it won’t really be necessary to come up with 150 different lesson plans or even 25 different lesson plans.

Most individuals can be put into just a few groups. I know, I know. That sounds contradictory. But if we look at table 19-1 (Ngeow, 308), there are only seven learning styles – linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. Now, seven is a whole lot fewer than 150. This is something I can get my brain around.

Most of these styles can be intertwined in countless combinations in almost any language lesson. It is true that some of the styles lend themselves to “blending” more than others. For instance, musical and bodily-kinesthetic could easily be paired in a lesson where one partner sings the “head, shoulders, knees, and toes” song while their partner goes through the motions. Using a combination of two of the styles reduces the number of lesson plans the teacher must create down to three or four.

Trying to reduce it further would probably defeat the purpose of individualized instruction. I believe that individuals can learn in this group and blend method. In the real world, this may be as good as it gets. Ngeow says that:

"…it is necessary to have students work in groups in order to increase the time spent at the computer during a task. A good reason for encouraging group work at the computer is that it leads learners to use their individual learning styles to the group’s advantage."

The reality is that in a real classroom with 25+ students it would be next to impossible to come up with 25 individualized plans. A few groups is the next best thing.

Authentic Tasks in the Classroom

I struggle with this everyday. Whether I like it or not, today's students (at least in U.S. public schools) must not only be challenged, but equally entertained. Many simply refuse to do anything that looks like work. I know, I know -- just give 'em an "F." Not so simple anymore. The public school teacher gets hauled in the principal's office if more than 25% of his/her students have Ds or Fs. That's the bad news.

The good news is that authentic tasks (even though simulated in my opinion) are entertaining and they work. Guariento and Morley quote Willis (1996:18) for students to achieve a particular communicative goal, employing authentic tasks is "far more likely to lead increased fluency and natural acquisition."

For my Praxis III Exam, where a trained observer is in the room, I had my students perform a fashion show in Spanish. We had just finished the unit on clothing and they already knew colors and some adjectives. Students were paired off and each was to be the presenter and then the model. As the presenter described each article of clothing their partner was wearing, the model had to point to and touch it as they walked up and down the runway. Although not required to wear special clothing, some of the students dressed up for the event. One student even wore a suit! He told me he wanted to stand out from everyone else. This was a kid who had been suspended multiple times and had even started that school year out on a two-week suspension held over from the previous year. I like to think that maybe, just maybe, that authentic task kept him for looking for attention in another way. But did the students learn the vocabulary? Yes, they did. Each of the 26 students in that class scored no less than 91% on the exam for that unit. Did they study for it? Maybe, maybe not. But I think the high scores have more do with the fact that each and every student had the opportunity to hear, see, and touch the vocabulary used in an "authentic" situation no less than 25 times. Hmmm, is that "natural acquistion?" It's natural enough for me.

I have noticed in the lower level classroom that normally apathetic students will participate in task-oriented exercises, even if they do grumble along the way. And authentic tasks are hard to design for lower level students. But Guariento and Morely point out that simple tasks can be used such as, "ordering coffee, booking a hotel room, or asking (directions)."

It's worked every time I've tried it. I just need to do more!

Website Evaluation #4

The BBC’s Learn Spanish (http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish/index.shtml) website is fantastic whether you are just starting out or are an advanced learner. I wish this had been available to me when I was first learning Spanish. The content presented on the above page through links is quite extensive.

For the beginner, there is a self-contained online course, a “Quick Fix” for printable holiday phrases with audio and mp3 download, two video courses (one short and one long), a historical look at Spanish across Europe, two links for primary/elementary schools, and a message board.

For the more advanced student there are interactive crosswords, El Mensual audio magazine (with quizzes), Reportajes audio-based activities by topic or structure focus, Cool Spanish (slang), Spanish for Work, Spanish Journey (transcripts of a TV show), and links to purchase books, DVDs, and CDs.

There is something for almost everyone, even tutors http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/tutors/internet/. While this evaluation is in regard to Spanish, there are links to similar BBC sites for French, Spanish, German, Italian, Mandarin, Chinese, Portuguese, Greek, and more languages.

The website is so extensive, very easy to use, and so much of it is free that it is hard to find any are for improvement. It would be nice to not have to purchase a book for some of the video program(mes), but, hey, they have to make money too.

Professional Development Websites

I liked all of the websites in the Dan's Office Passageway. I agree that the Blogstreams Salon looks like the best for what I'm interested in. The WiA looks interesting as well. I like the idea of language educators coming together to discuss and resolve technology. It's not quite the same when we talk to the school's tech person, who has no idea about language teaching. This is a great service, but in the few times I've been logged in on tappedin.com it seems like there are not very many people logged in. In any case it's there and we can certainly use to help and get help.

Website evaluation #3

This is a neat website (www.verbix.com) if you like to explore languages and find similarities between language families. The website says “This site contains verb conjugations for hundreds of languages, ranging from national and international languages to regional and even extinct languages.” You can put almost any verb from many languages and it will conjugate it for you. There’s even a language guesser. Just type or paste in any text and the program will guess the language. That’s not something I need every day but it has come in handy a few times.

This site could definitely have some excercises added to it. However, I think it is doing what they intend -- conjugating verbs. I don't think a lesson could be built around this site, but it could be used by the student to check parts of their work.