After a few days “off” getting up to speed on my new semester here, back to a serious third reading, adding ideas for leading the upcoming course. No more bedtime perusing, but morning attacks. Adding layers and points to the plan, allowing for accordion-like flexibility.
Let’s be honest, a lot of research is a little dry. A straightforward grad-school seminar class format is not what I am looking for. To knit the research together, we can look for layers, build in layers, and then add points.
This will change, but the layers I am considering right now include, but are not limited to:
1) Dimensions Matrix. See the previous post about ASQ: Agreed/Surprising/Questionable, in 3 levels, Task/Language/Science.
2) Connected to what? How does each chapter of TBLT connect with vocabulary acquisition, the Dogme approach, textbooks, teacher training?
3) Task of the Week (research): We pick out a representative task that we drill down on. Maybe even start a star-graph evaluation system.
4) Task of the Week (teaching): We pick out a task, probably from the Activities for TBLT by Anderson and McCutcheon. (Listen to Neil’s interview on oxfordlp.org) to take a close look at.
5) Developing experts: My high school lit teacher appointed me the Vonnegut expert. Another got to be the humor expert, and so on. Here, we cast about for expertise in experimental design, statistics, application, and teacher training.
6) If this study were a movie (or an animal): Taking a look at one particular study and trying to draw as many metaphors out from it.
7) Author of the week: See who shines in each chapter. Look at their other work, how they got there, and where have have gone since. (Scroll back to a previous post about The Rewatchables podcast, where they look a the star and see what part of their career they were in the movie: aka Apex Mountain).
8) I used to do that: Tales about encountering different forms of TBLT in our careers.
I am going to hold off with a few more until these settle down. See you soon.
Background: I’m preparing an 8-week course about TBLT for iTDi as part of their Great Minds series (not mine, the ones in the book). I am blogging about the process of preparation mostly for the fun of it. I was inspired by Cory Doctorow, an SF writer that does this with all his books. But it also helps me focus. This is even more exciting than teaching a grad school course. I’m looking forward to it and hope this might spark an interest.
Preparing for the iTDi panel, I answer the 4 questions posed.
Panel discussion on April 10 at 3PM Japan time, both on Zoom and Facebook, with Steven Herder, Dorothy Zemach, and Scott Thornbury.
Why did you choose your Great Minds in Language Education book? I had taken courses on iTDi, one from Dorothy about publishing eBooks, and the Dogme course from Scott. My career has been what I’ll call TBLT adjacent. I teach grad school courses in Vocabulary Acquisition, Psycholinguistics, Methods and Materials, and Teaching with Technology. I’ve tended to focus on different areas like CALL, SLA, and Intercultural Communication.
Last December, when Steve proposed this idea of facilitating a group of keen people on a subject, I thought of TBLT, because it has been nagging me for years. I don’t really have a good handle on it. I feel like one of the blind men encountering an elephant. Is it a wall, a rope, or a tree trunk? The best way to learn something is to teach it. TBLT was on my “to-read” list.
The best part of this book is that it looks at TBLT from 5 perspectives: Cognitive-interactionist, Psycholinguistic, Sociocultural, Psychological and Educational. It’s the perfect answer to the blind man problem.
It’s also a great balance of Theory and Practice, the subtitle. It really looks at the science and how it is applied. Mind, it is not a “how to teach” book, but it does give you a solid background. It gives you an almost complete grasp of the field. It’s kind of like Ellis’s earlier book on language acquisition, what grad students would call “the purple monster” because of the color of its cover.
You shared your favourite quote from the book … can you tell us a little more about it? “Nevertheless, problems still exist with the definition of a task. Van den Branden (2006) distinguished seventeen definitions of a task, which he divided into those that define a task in terms of language learning goals and those that define it as an educational activity.”
Ellis, R., Skehan, P., Li, S., Shintani, N., Lambert, G. Task-Based Langauge Teaching: Theory and Practice. Cambridge University Press. 2020. Page 342.
This quote shows how the state of the field has changed in the last 15 years. It comes from a book with almost the same title. Now, there are even more definitions, but the great thing is that they are aligning, congregating around a few principles.
I’ve just finished my second reading of the TBLT book. The first reading is like a participant, to get the feeling of the book and how it feels to discover so much new stuff. The second is a deep dive, reading some of the related literature in the 45-page bibliography. There were 11 meta-analyses, for example. The third reading is to build the content of the course, the paths of action. It’s what I do for my graduate courses. This quote encapsulates progress and lack of it in TBLT. It gets at the central question of the quest. What is a task?
What do you think Ts can get from your GMILE course? I’m just beginning my 3rd reading, for teaching. It depends. There is a nice balance of theory and practice in the book and, depending on participants, we can shift in one direction or the other. Another organizing principle has a burning question for each week, for example, “What is a Task? How do we handle Corrective Feedback? What about Motivation?” Yet another organizing principle could be to look at the main people in the field, the five authors, plus Robinson, Dornyei, and ask why some like Nunan and don’t appear so often. We may even try a mix of those. Keep updated on my prep at kevinryan.com. If you sign up, I may contact you before the course starts for tailoring.
How do you plan to approach your course? It will be a mix of 2 formats. Start with a grad seminar, sitting at a round table, no head. I’m a facilitator and the less I talk the better. I just lay the groundwork. This works for me, smoewhat. But I have tiny classes. With only 2-3 it is more like a conversation, not a lot of discussion.
The second ingredient comes from a podcast about old movies. The Rewatchables. It’s not like your traditional critic, being analytical and holding things at arm’s length. It’s a small group of guys that know a lot about movies. They get excited. They love and hate things. The other thing is a set format. You can always find the Apex Mountain. Was that movie the best of the actor’s career? Then you have the Test of Time. Has the movie held up over time? There are a dozen others in each podcast. Listen to the one. Pick out a classic movie you’ve seen and listen.
Like that, I ask participants to bring 3 things each week from their reading and experience. ASQ. Agree, Surprise, Question. Something Agreed, Surprised, Questionable.
Agreed (correct, you agree with, is both important and valid, a “right on”)
Surprising (new, unknown, raises your curiosity)
Questionable (doubtful, wrong, demonstrably false, or something you disagree with)
Note that none of these necessarily indicate the theme of the reading. They could just as easily be about a small divergence in the reading. These are what each participant finds important. Ideally, we get the Agreed part done online, before the session. Surprise usually takes up most of the session, then we deal with the Questionable with the time left over or online.
After the first week or two, we can add a new dimension, three tiers Tasks and teaching, Linguistics and SLA, and Science. So that makes a matrix of 3×3: ASQ in 3 columns, with 3 rows of Tasks, Linguistics and Science. Like this:
Agreed
Surprising
Questionable
Tasks
In TBLT, the learner is thus the agent in the learning process, and teachers or course designers serve to facilitate this process through planning and implementation of learning opportunities.(p. 155)
Such devices are what Sabet and Zhang (2015) refer to as vague language, which functions to create pragmatic meaning such as tentativeness, self-protection, collaboration and cooperation. (p. 167)
Language is seen as a by-product or artefact of successful task performance. Task performance in Long’s sense is thus trainable and measurable in terms of objective criteria that apply to all learners. (p.185)
Language & SLA
Engagement has been a mercurial construct in L2 research and has tended to piggyback on trends in research on information processing and cognitive – interactionist theories of SLA . (p. 171)
Ellis makes a clear distinction between task – as – workplan and task – as – process. (p.196)
Unlike Long and Robinson , Ellis ( 2009a ) defines ‘ task ’ not in real – world terms , but as a language learning tool. (p.196)
Science
Little work has been done to systematically address the issue of learners’ interests in the sense the term is used in Dewey’s theory of experience. (p. 156)
Dewey defines feelings as mental states that do not lead to further action on the part of the learner , and he argues that it is a mistake to orient instruction towards learners ’ feelings. (p. 158)
Example participation matrix for Chapter 6: Educational Perspective
That about wraps it up for now. I am looking forward to putting this course together. If you have any input or ideas, I am all ears.
Background: I’m preparing an 8-week course about TBLT for iTDi as part of their Great Minds series (not mine, the ones in the book). I am blogging about the process of preparation mostly for the fun of it. I was inspired by Cory Doctorow, an SF writer that does this with all his books. But it also helps me focus. This is even more exciting than teaching a grad school course. I’m looking forward to it and hope this might spark an interest.
I get the first inkling that I have a handle on this book. The mountain of meta-analyses is not so high. It is all starting to come together.
That feeling that you finally understand the book, the topic, what the authors are trying to get across. If you are older, you might use the term “grok” (from Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land). Things just start fitting together and everything becomes a little easier.
There are 46 references in TBLT (the book) about “meta.” 44 are about meta-analyses. They lead to only 11 studies, 3 of which are by Li, one of the authors of the TBLT book. I am going to skip the meta-analysis of neuro-imaging (Jobard 2003). This is a manageable read before my deadline for the second reading, April 10. I hope I can find them all.
On April 10, I switch to the 3rd reading, my favorite, preparing materials for the participants.
April 10 (Friday, 6AM GMT, 3PM Japan, Thursday evening in the Americas) is a panel discussion for the Great Minds series of courses. Course leaders (and I would argue the others are great minds themselves), Scott Thornbury, Dorothy Zemach, Steven Herder and I will talk about why and how we chose our topics and books. Not to miss (it will be recorded).
Background: I’m preparing an 8-week course about TBLT for iTDi as part of their Great Minds series (not mine, the ones in the book). I am blogging about the process of preparation mostly for the fun of it. I was inspired by Cory Doctorow, an SF writer that does this with all his books. But it also helps me focus. This is even more exciting than teaching a grad school course. I’m looking forward to it and hope this might spark an interest.
The close look at the bibliography has lead me to two authors. TBLT looks at 5 different perspectives, and I have found the sociocultural perspective the most different from the others. So this last week I have been reading Lantolf and authors related. This week the same with Dornyei, and authors related.
So not much more to report on preparation style, except that it includes lots of reading. The exciting part is making the connections, as I fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle. Pretty typical research.
Background: I’m preparing an 8-week course about TBLT for iTDi as part of their Great Minds series (not mine, the ones in the book). I am blogging about the process of preparation mostly for the fun of it. I was inspired by Cory Doctorow, an SF writer that does this with all his books. But it also helps me focus. This is even more exciting than teaching a grad school course. I’m looking forward to it and hope this might spark an interest.
Someone somewhere, in my grad school era, opined that the most important part of any research book is the bibliography, and if one was short for time, that should come first.
Situating any book in the field is vital to a researcher. A kind of due diligence and critical look at the contents.
Getting the bibliography for this book into a text-readable form took days. Kindle reader (and the publisher) would only let me download a bit at a time. I have used up most of my 10% limit to get the 41 pages of references. I can continue to highlight, the subject of the next post.
Copy and pasting meant the line feeds were not included, meaning huge blocks of text. I spent many a meeting mindlessly finding author names, and adding two line feeds (return key) to format everything (as I listened, of course).
Once in digital forms, we can look at it through a word-cloud, above, which is pretty useless. Below is a list of names and publishers; Ellis, Skehan, Robinson. Swain was surprising, such a strong showing. Dornyei missed a few because of his umlaut. Long established researchers had the advantage here.
The Concepts list is not surprising, except perhaps the low ranking of the word Motivation. You’d think that would be mentioned more often as it is central to language learning. More to explore.
These will help me continue to puzzle out which 2-3 articles to read for each chapter as I progress a second time through the book.
Background: I’m preparing an 8-week course about TBLT for iTDi as part of their Great Minds series (not mine, the ones in the book). I am blogging about the process of preparation mostly for the fun of it. I was inspired by Cory Doctorow, an SF writer that does this with all his books. But it also helps me focus. This is even more exciting than teaching a grad school course. I’m looking forward to it and hope this might spark an interest.
