Project: My Story, Your Story Capturing Stories in a Community ESL Setting

Lita Brusick Johnson LING 583 - Materials and Curriculum Development May 6, 2013

My Story, Your Story is a complex, multi-month project that is designed as an integral part of the course described in my textbook adaptation paper. The students are parents of elementary students who have limited English language proficiency who attend an intermediate-level ESL class during regular school hours, which has limited technological resources available. The programs goal is to increase parents communicative competence in English so that they can engage more confidently in community life and provide a positive learning environment for their children. The class features an integrated four-language-skills communicative teaching approach and utilizes the All-Star 3 textbook. Project Structure and Goals. The Your Story, My Story project, which spans the entire second half of the school year, comes after a half year of language instruction. By this time, learners and their teacher will have achieved a relatively high comfort level by this time, and the teacher will have had opportunity to both formally and informally assess the needs and interests of the students. Dedicated class time a minimum of 30 minutes is provided every Thursday, in the Tuesday/Thursday cycle of 2.5. hour classes; the project accounts for 10% of teacher-student face time. The projects language learning goals (in the areas of listening, oral fluency, vocabulary building, and communicative competence/narrative) are detailed in Appendix A (Project Design), p. 1. On a scale that has accuracy on one end and fluency on the other, this project tips toward fluency. The bulk of the class time is devoted to speaking and listening activities using student-known language forms and the learners focus is on receiving or conveying meaning (Nation 2007, p. 6) . However, ample opportunities for peer

feedback on form (oral and written) are provided, as well for acquiring the vocabulary needed to convey meaning. The project design assumes that key language forms and elements needed for this project have been taught, as other class learning the scope and sequence of All-Star 3. However, observation of problems areas arising in project discussions enables the teacher to embed a focus on form on these areas in the more controlled classroom sessions thus avoiding interruptions the flow of studentdirected project work. Constraints and Affordances. Given the specific context of learners mothers of K-8 children who have limited English language proficiency who are often marginalized and economically disadvantaged the affective goals are at least as important as language learning goal. These affective goals are detailed on p. 1 of Appendix A (Program Design). The project design anticipates some of the considerations (some might call them constraints) related to the community ESL program context. However, on the flip side of constraints are often affordances that can enhance the possibility of learning (Perry 2007). This program is completely voluntary. Students sit in the classroom because they choose to; their goal not getting a good grade or passing the TOEFL. Attendance and homework production could be sporadic, given the economic and social pressures faced by parents and if learners have had limited schooling in their L1. The nature of the learners has significant implications for the use of rubrics and assessment measures, especially since a major goal of the program as a whole is building the confidence of learners in English. Summative assessment, expressed as grades, is not a major focus. Indeed, a teacher would need to take care to minimize the

possibility of rubrics and assessment tools/grading becoming a dis-incentive to learning English generally or continuing in this program in particular. However, the voluntary nature of participation can also mean that learners bring into the classroom powerful motivations to improve as well as varying personal English-language goals. Formal and informal needs assessments can enable the teacher to shape opportunities for learning that are in alignment with student interests and needs, and provide as much learner choice as possible, in the context of specific language learning objectives. This speaks for this project being profoundly learnercentered and recognized by learners as a useful (and fun) way to acquire the skills and experience they need to achieve their goals from better assisting their children in their learning, to negotiating their English-speaking context, to enabling movement toward personal employment or higher education goals. Project Elements and Design Issues. The building blocks of this project are a series of tasks that focus on a basic interactive communicative structure: the interview format both reception (listening to the interviews done by others in the real world) and production (a combination of speaking and listening, interviewing and being interviewed). The project reflects a commitment to both meaningful and authentic input and meaningful, authentic output in ways that enable student engagement at the higher, analytical, evaluative, and creative levels of Blooms taxonomy The sources of meaningful, authentic input include are both directly relevant to students interests and can be used unchanged, two key elements highlighted by McGrath (2002, p. 61): media interviews of students own choosing in their L1; input from learners children, family members, and friends who are interviewed, in either the

L1 or L2; and interviews in English obtained from StoryCorps, an oral history program of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio (www.storycorps.org). StoryCorps has collected 45,000 stories, a significant number done in the interview style. These are stories told by everyday people who chose what they want to talk about and tell their stories in their own words, which are recorded and archived in the Library of Congress. StoryCorps provides short, authentic and meaningful speech samples about daily life issues of interest to students including one that models a peer/student interview. StoryCorps also provides (1) several interviews accompanied by simple animation and written texts (book of interviews) useful in scaffolding listening skills development; and (2) classroom resources, which have been liberally adapted for use in this project. The projects meaningful, authentic output student-produced oral and written stories/interviews is detailed in Appendix A (Project Design) , p. 1. What follows describes why certain design decisions were made. This project reflects a fundamental commitment to inductive learning processes and use of critical thinking skills, which reflects, as Graves (2000) suggests, one of my core beliefs about learning and learners (p. 31). This is illustrated in the positioning of a key rubric for this project (describing excellent, OK, and poor interview practices). Distribution of these rubrics follows completion of the first major task: production of group posters and a class compilation of Interview Dos and Donts. These are a kind of student-created rubric that is developed from observation of L-1 interviews and interviews in English (from Story Corps), and from learners first interview experience. The rubric in Handout #6 (Appendix C), which in real life

would include student-developed elements from this process, is provided not as a basis for grading but to facilitate learner self-assessment and peer and teacher feedback. At the point of introduction, students have the opportunity to suggest changes and additions to these rubrics and to make them their own. This reflects the kind of negotiation of assessment described by Nation and Macalister (2010, p. 154) that is appropriate to this community ESL context. While there is some teacher-fronted work (especially in the first part of the project and in the listening segments), the context in which inductive learning takes place is primarily within groups, where students manage their own learning and have opportunity use a wide range of creative talents to produce the final project outcome. Groups are formed and operate to facilitate specific tasks; their makeup is often determined by the requirements of the task itself (e.g., common interests, age of children); the membership of group changes during the course of the project to provide students with different experiences of peer input. Learning is intentionally scaffolded as are the activities and tasks that lay the foundation for production of the final project outcome, a class Stories Book that contains the following contribution from each learner: three short written stories garnered from interviews with family, friends, and a fellow student, plus the individuals recorded reflections in an interview conducted by a peer. An example of scaffolding: the project moves from listening to interviews in the learners L1, to interviews in English with visual and script support, to interviews in English (oral only); student interviews progress from L1 interviews with family/friends, to students speaking in English as both interviewer and interviewee. The production of written

stories from the interviews provides cross-skill reinforcement, especially useful when the learner reverses roles and becomes the interviewee. Closely related to scaffolding is the staging of activities to reduce in students cognitive load when they speak, for example by extensive use of pre-planning activities. The project design reflects an intentional commitment to address the issues of cognitive complexity and communicative stress described by Robinson (2011, p. 13) in order to assist students to balance fluency and accuracy. Activities and tasks move from more simple to more complex (from observing interviews to doing them) and from more controlled to less controlled. For example, the first interview is more controlled (questions decided upon by the group); the second is less controlled (individuals develop their own questions). This also affords increasing scope for learner choice as the project progresses. Summary. It is my hope that the project design of My Story, Your Story gives expression to my commitment to live out many of the principles of communicative language teaching articulated by Nation and Mcalister (2010). Of these, I would highlight their depth of processing principle: Learners should process the items to be learned as deeply and as thoughtfully as possible (p. 60). My Story, Your Story was designed to provide a scaffolded, learner-centered space for learners to create a significant and meaningful product using authentic speech and, along the four-month way, to process deeply newly/previously learned language elements in ways that enable them to communicate more effectively and confidently in their day-to-day lives in their communities.

References

Graves, K. (2000). Designing Language Courses: A Guide for Teachers . Boston, MA: Heinle Press. McGrath, I. (2002). Chapter 4 Coursebook-based Teaching: Adaptation. Materials Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching. Edinburgh , Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nation, P. (2007) The Four Strands. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching. 1(1):1-12. Nation, I. S. P., & Macalister, J. (2010). Language Curriculum Design. New York: Taylor & Francis. Perry, K. (2007). More of the people want to know English: Sudanese refugee adults participation in ESL programs. University of Kentucky. (Accessed online, Feburary 2013, part of the Purcell-Gates Cultural Practices of Literacy Study.) Robinson, P. (2011). Task-Based Language Learning: A Review of Issues. Language Learning, 61, 136.