TESOL Scotland 21st Annual Conference Proceedings
15th November 2003, University of Abertay Dundee
"Englishes - Whose English?"
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Concurrent Sessions 2
High Stakes Testing : The impact of IELTS
Lee Knapp (Development Manager UK, University of Cambridge ESOL Examinations)
This session reported on a world-wide impact study of the International English Language Testing System which an external consultant, Dr Roger Hawkey, is currently undertaking.
The IELTS impact study (IIS) is an action in Cambridge ESOL's continuous and iterative examination research, development and validation system, and has a twofold aim:
- to investigate the impact of IELTS on language learning materials, activities, test candidates and test users;
- to help ensure that the test is as valid, reliable, effective and ethical as possible.
Now in its third and final phase, the study has focused on participants and target data as follows:
- Language learners: background, attitudes, strategies; test-preparation programmes; attitudes to/experience of IELTS
- Language teachers: background, methods, materials, tests, IELTS experience and attitudes
- Receiving institutions: IELTS use, experience and attitudes
The study employs quantitative and qualitative research methods. The instrumentation includes questionnaires for different target participant groups as well as materials evaluation and classroom observation analysis forms. Face-to-face data in support of questionnaire data was gathered from focus groups, individual interviews, and classroom observations and videos. The IIS has aimed at replicating in its sample population the total IELTS candidature in such features as gender balance, study levels and study areas, and test-taker nationalities.
In the presentation, a flavour was given of IIS questionnaire responses.
Teachers responded as follows to these questionnaire items:
"If an IELTS score had not been a requirement, would you have prepared your students for their future studies in the same way?"
Yes - 32% No - 68%
"Would the IELTS preparation course be useful for someone who is not going to university?"
Yes - 54% No - 46%
"Would your IELTS preparation course be a good way to learn English for someone going to university but who is not going to take IELTS?"
Yes - 63% No - 37%
Responses from IELTS candidates - gathered before and after they took the test - include these:
"How worried are you by IELTS?"
A bit - 33% Quite a lot - 30% A lot - 37%
"Which paper did you think was the most difficult?"
Reading - 44% Writing - 26% Listening - 19% Speaking - 11%
Some of the broader views of the IELTS, supported by evidence from the IIS are that it:
- is a high-stakes, direct, communicative, task-based test
- is mainly fair, though hard
- is in content and micro-skills reasonably appropriate
- leads to relevant teaching/learning, with the use of authentic texts and topics, and to some good test-preparation course books and materials
- is sometimes used as more than a language test, with users taking a flexible approach to the meanings of IELTS bands
- might consider longer, multi-sourced writing tasks.
The IIS will be featured in a forthcoming volume of Studies in Language Testing (Cambridge University Press). An article on the study by Dr Roger Hawkey is also scheduled to appear early in 2004 in Issue 15 of Research Notes, the URL for which is www.CambridgeESOL.org/rs_notes.
If you would like to subscribe to Research Notes - the quarterly publication reporting on matters relating to research, test development and validation within Cambridge ESOL - the URL is www.CambridgeESOL.org/rs_notes/inform.cfm.
For any further information contact Lee Knapp at:
E-mail: knapp.l@ucles.org.uk
Tel: 01223-553978
Using corpora in the classroom
Alison Macaulay (Collins COBUILD)
The use of corpora has revolutionised dictionary publishing, and the impact of corpus linguistics is also widely felt in EFL publishing more generally, with the insights of the lexical approach being applied to coursebooks and other teaching materials. Many teachers also create their own materials for classroom use, but are unsure of how the huge amounts of information in a corpus such as the Bank of English" can be used to supplement and enhance these materials.
This workshop aimed to look at some of the ways in which the Bank of English" corpus can be used by teachers to supplement their own teaching materials. The workshop looked first at the nature of the corpus and at the kinds of information it can provide (frequency, collocational information, information on varieties of English, new senses and new words entering the language, etc.). It argued that the corpus can also be used by teachers to increase learner autonomy, by encouraging learners to discover the 'rules' of lexis for themselves.
We then took one example, a worksheet designed to explore the differences between a set of near synonyms (in this case the words 'thin', 'skinny', 'slender', 'slim' and 'scrawny') and used this to examine some of the features of the corpus that can be used to analyse the items chosen. First we looked at basic concordances, which can be used to encourage learners to examine the immediate environment of the word for collocational and contextual information. Then we looked at ways in which more specific collocational information can be drawn from the corpus, using picture trees to show which words are most common in various positions around the search items.
This kind of activity is perhaps best suited to higher level learners, but corpus-based materials can also be usefully developed for lower levels. An example was provided in the form of a worksheet looking at various nouns that can be used with uncount nouns to indicate 'one of ' the uncount noun (e.g. 'a piece of…', 'an item of…', 'a shred of…' etc.). The worksheet aims to demonstrate to learners that some of these items are far more productive than others, in that they can be used with a far wider range of uncount nouns. In this way it is hoped that lower level learners can be helped to prioritise their vocabulary learning more effectively.
E-mail: alison.macaulay@harpercollins.co.uk
Grammar and Movement
Mario Rinvolucri (Pilgrims-OISE)
(Report by Alec Edwards, Dundee College)
This was the perfect after-lunch workshop - lots of activity by participants, and clear and easily understandable and transferable teaching ideas.
After a brief introduction when Mario stressed that learning through movement greatly benefited those students whose learning strategies were less reliant on visual memory or analysis, the participants did left brain/right brain exercises along the lines of 'left elbow to right knee' and vice versa. Thus warmed up, the circle practised irregular verbs, touching toes, hips and stretching arms if a verb was of the form go/went/gone, or touching toes and hips[twice] if the form was buy/bought/bought. Very participative. [I think the term is 'Brainfit' but I can't verify it].
We then wrote on each other's backs: one example was where one person wrote a word with an irregular plural [e.g tooth] and then the other had to write 'teeth' on their partner's back. This exercise of course went with the caveat of cultural or gender issues in the classroom.
Three further exercises followed:
1. In small circles with a ball the 'learning names' routine was developed into preposition practice along the lines of chucking the ball and moving through the following [with the thrower saying the following]:
from Jenny to …[other person]
from Jenny to Pat
from Jenny to Pat for Joe
from Jenny to the person between Joe and Danny
from Jenny to the person on Danny's right/left
from Jenny to the person beside/behind/near Joe
I hope you get the idea!
2. A phrase in Greek [come and sit here] was drilled [an interesting variation to drilling was the fact that we said, whispered, shouted, sang, chanted the target phrase]. Then, a kind of open pairs drill, with a smattering of musical chairs, ensued, whereby participants took it in turns to ask 'come and sit here'; wherever a space was vacated, the person next to the space had to do the asking.
3. Each person in a group of 5 or 6 had to represent a word in a sentence, e.g She/live/s/in/Dundee/fullstop; the 'wordpersons' had to put themselves in the correct order. Sounds corny and difficult to explain clearly but it worked well, and full marks to the questionmark girl who performed her role to perfection!
Using a dictionary CD-ROM and finding a goldmine of materials and resources for teachers
Daniel Wilson (Macmillan)
The aim of the workshop was to show the participants how the Macmillan English Dictionary CD-ROM could be used to create resources for teachers. This might be in the form of putting grammar exercises together or printing out wordlists and illustrations.
I produced a handout with three exercises for the participants to try in order to show them how the exercises might work with students. These were tasks involving frequency (using the red and black word feature of the dictionary); choosing the correct sense of a word (using the menu system where any word has five or more senses in the dictionary) and collocation (this being another key feature of the dictionary and one which is viewed as extremely useful by teachers and students alike).
Along with the handouts the participants were given a sample section of the dictionary to work from.
After the exercises had been completed I focused people's attention on copies of dictionary lesson material available on the macmillandictionary.com web site - these included lessons and teacher's notes which are available to download for free.
The final part of the session involved a guided tour of the CD-ROM with the image beamed up onto a large screen. We looked at various facilities of the CD-ROM and how they could be used by teachers in order to create resources and materials. We looked at copying and pasting straight from the CD-ROM and how this saved teachers having to think up their own examples when perhaps creating sentences for grammar or vocabulary exercises.
I highlighted the fact that everything on the CD-ROM could be printed out - wordlists or, for example, phrasal verbs or common collocations and phrases.
The search facilities of the CD-ROM enable teachers to find related grammar or vocabulary quickly and save them having to rack their own brains or thumb through books. All of the illustrations in the paper dictionary are contained on the CD-ROM and can be printed out - perfect for low level learners who find visual aids particularly useful.
The session was wrapped up with a brief question and answer session in case anyone needed something clarified or had a query resulting from their own experience of using the CD-ROM.
Although the turnout of the session was disappointing, those who attended said that they believed it had been very useful and had given them something that they could take away and use or adapt to suit their own purposes.
Email: D.Wilson@macmillan.com
Task - whose task? Learner adaptations of classroom activities
Lesley Gourlay (Napier University, Edinburgh)
This interactive session began by looking at the relationship between teacher instruction and tasks. Participants were first asked to reflect on and discuss a classroom occasion when they had given instructions and the learners had enacted the task differently from how they were instructed. This lead to a whole-group discussion of incidents from a variety of teaching contexts, ranging from one-to-one classes to large groups. We reflected on the possible reasons for these mismatches between instructions and tasks.
The session went on to focus on the notion of "co-construction" of classroom process, and how learners may be seen to make an active contribution to an unfolding "classroom culture". It also examined the notion of negotiation of classroom process, and proposed that this can take place implicitly, through learners taking action.
This idea was illustrated using an example from a Business English classroom research project, in which students were asked to participate in a "mingle" type activity, talking to each student in turn. The research showed that students adapted the task procedure, forming small groups to exchange information. The students commented in the lesson that they preferred to approach the task this way. We also looked at a student interview extract focused on the same task and interpretations of it. The student gave a rationale for the change in approach - that it was more natural and less "boring". In the study students gave rationales for other task adaptations such as opting out of interactive work, citing shyness, cultural unfamiliarity with other students, and individual motivation to work individually.
The conclusion proposed that this example and others of student-initiated task adaptation may be interpreted as implicit classroom negotiation of process, taking place in a classroom culture which was sufficiently flexible to accommodate these adaptations. It was argued that teachers may at times perceive student task adaptation as a failure of instruction-giving, resulting form lack of clarity, when in fact they might be interpreted as success stories, pointing to a co-operative and jointly-constructed process, implicitly sensitive to the needs of diverse cultures, personalities and motivations.
The session concluded with some group discussion of these points, covering themes such as the need for close adherence to instructions in exam practice, possible reasons for student adaptations, and ways of creating flexibility within classroom process.
E-mail: L.Gourlay@napier.ac.uk
Code Switching in Emergent Bilingual Children: A comparison between adults, peers & siblings
Alice Lawrence (University of Sheffield)
There is an increasing number of emergent bilingual children (EBC)1 [1] in British schools yet little is known about their code switching (CS) [2] behaviour. Speakers in bilingual communities, and bilingual families, are exposed to patterns of CS, thus it could be argued that CS is a learned behaviour. This paper highlighted the fact that despite not being exposed to such patterns, and their apparent lack of language competence, EBC code switch, and their CS is complex.
This paper summarized a longitudinal study and presented several findings about the CS of EBC, illustrated with discourse data from the study. The study drew on Pragmatics, the notion of footing, Accommodation Theory and the relationship of the individual self to the social environment.
It was found that, like adult bilinguals, EBC used CS as contextualisation cues to organize discourse, e.g. as a conjunction, to make evaluative comments, to initiate & direct conversation and to change topic. It was also found that in both EBC peers and EBC siblings, early CS functions were similar, i.e. both groups used CS to direct the behaviour of others, explain and make both positive and negative comments. However, despite similar early CS, over time the range of sibling functions was different to that of peers: siblings tended to use CS in a more manipulative way, whereas peers tended to use CS in a constructive way. Thus for the siblings in this study, CS was associated with non-cooperation, while for the peers, CS was associated with cooperation & collaboration.
The study suggests that CS as a contextualisation cue in the talk of EBC occurs fairly early on in bilingual development. Also, despite a lack of L2 competence, there is evidence in the data that points to EBC using CS to change the footing in conversation in terms of discourse organisation and negotiating identity, both aspects of pragmatics. The data then suggest that these children use CS as a pragmatic resource and may not have learned this use through exposure to CS in their environment.
E-mail: A.Lawrence@sheffield.ac.uk
Parallel Literacy Classes and Multilingual Flexibility
Leena Helavaara Robertson (Middlesex University)
The focus here was on young bilingual children's parallel early literacy experiences in three different languages, English, Urdu and classical Arabic, and in three strikingly different types of classes in England (English 'literacy hour' lessons in a mainstream school, Urdu lessons in a community school hosted by the same mainstream school and madrassahs or Qur'anic lessons in a local Mosque). The data presented here drew on a longitudinal, ethnographic study that sets out to discover what kinds of advantages or additional strengths bilingual children might bring from their community literacy practices and especially from their experiences of learning to read in two or more languages simultaneously into their English literacy lessons.
The study followed five children of Pakistani background, three boys and two girls, from their Reception class (4-5 years) to Year Two class (6-7 years) in a Watford Garden school. These children, like 15% of this school's pupils, are of second generation Pakistani background and were born in Watford. Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, is rarely the first language for these children. Their main home language is Pahari, which is different from Urdu. Classical Arabic is a language the children do not speak or understand, but use daily for learning to read the Qur'an.
A number of studies, that have explored the benefits of bilingualism per se, have often used literacy learning as a way of establishing 'advantages' of bilingualism (most influentially Cummins, 1979; 1984; 2000). In effect bilingual children's ability in learning to read and write in a new language is often allowed to stand for general 'cognitive' advantages (Edelsky, 1996). There are far fewer studies that have focused specifically on the literacy-learning-advantages. But the evidence presented here revealed that for these children learning to read simultaneously in three different languages results in social, emotional and cognitive advantages, and in multilingual flexibility. They were very aware of their own learning process, what they had to do as a learner in each school, which potentially provided them innovative new ways of entering the world of English literacy. They were also able to discuss their literacy learning in highly analytical and complex terms. At the age of 5 they examined, translated and reflected on words in different languages, how they are written in different scripts and contrasted sound systems in different languages.
Email: l.robertson@mdx.ac.uk
Footnotes:
[1] Emergent bilingual children are children who have been brought up in a monolingual home and are in the process of learning an additional language in order to participate fully in the wider environment. (Lawrence, 2002: 101) (back to text)
[2] For the purposes of this research, a slightly
modified version of Gumperz' (1982:59) definition of CS was used;
the underlined words /phrases were added by the author:
The juxtaposition within the same speech exchange between two or more people
of single words or passages of speech belonging to different grammatical
systems of sub-systems. (back to text)
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