Grammar in context

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Scott Thornbury’s 6 Rules of Grammar Teaching

— The Rule of Context

• Teach grammar in context. If you must take an item out of context to focus on it, recontextualize it as soon as possible.

• Always associate grammar form with the meaning of the speaker or author.

— The Rule of Use

• Teach grammar with the objective of improving the learners’ understanding and production of real language – never as an end in itself.

• Always provide opportunities for students to put the grammar to some communicative use: practice, practice, practice!

— The Rule of Economy

• In order to obey Rule 2 (The Rule of Use), be economical.

• Minimize presentation and direct explanation time in order to provide maximum practice time.

• By practicing, students think, communicate, experience learning and remember language.

— The Rule of Relevance

• Do not waste time on grammar items or rules that students already know or will soon forget (e.g., every kind of question tag in one lesson or more than one or two contrastive examples).

• Allow Chinese to facilitate learning objectives, not to simplify or replace English.

— The Rule of Nurture

• The most difficult rule: teaching does not cause learning. The right environment, conditions and opportunity for learning do.

• Language learning is not an “ah ha! Eureka!” kind of learning. It is orienteering: finding one’s way through a jungle step by step, accumulating knowledge and skills through a long, slow, deliberate process.

— The Rule of Appropriacy

• Consider all these rules according to the level, needs, interests, expectations and learning styles of the students.

• These same rules may lead one teacher to focus on explicit grammar teaching more and another to explicitly focus on grammar…not at all.

Grammar lessons should be:

1. Text-based (Content Focus)

• Grammar teaching should always be contextualized (literally meaning ‘with a text’)

• Language never happens out of context; you’ll never find a fish out of water, unless it’s dead.

• There are layers of context that the teacher should make accessible through activities: the situation, the culture and the co-text.

• Grammar and language skills can be introduced independently in preparation activities.

• The language arts/text-based approach allows integration of other, skills-based approaches

• Highly compatible with genre-based and text-type teaching

• More opportunity for authentic and adapted-authentic texts

2. Awareness-Raising (Inductive Process Focus)

• Grammar lessons should require students to think about and understand the relationship between grammar form and language meaning.

3. Task-based (Goal Focus)

• Grammar lessons should require students to do something authentic, practical or interesting with the learned grammar, using it in a context and experiencing language with a purpose beyond classroom exercises or homework.

4. Production-based (Meaningful Practice and Recycling)

Technology and ESP

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How can technologies support teaching English for specific purpose (ESP)?

1. ESP and its characteristics

ESP is a learner-centred pedagogy which emphasised the importance of needs analysis. ESP learners need to understand authentic texts and how to communicate effectively in the situations they encounter in their discipline rather than mastering field-specific terminology. ESP attempts to meet learners’ specific needs.

• ESP makes use of underlying methodology and activities of the discipline it serves.

• ESP centres on the language (grammar, lexis, register), study skills, discourse, and genre appropriate for these activities.

•ESP concerns what learners need to know in their own work contexts.

•The teaching in ESP must be authentic.

•Closely related to authenticity and learners’ needs is the appropriateness of teaching methodology.

•ESP deals with mainly adult learners who are at intermediate or advanced levels.

3 models of ESP instruction

2. Benefits of technology in ESP contexts

•Technology provides ESP teachers with a new tool to engage students in real-life communication, to bridge the intercultural gap, to collaborate in their professional community, and to access up-to-date information relevant o their discipline.

Technology assists in creating authentic contextualised materials

•In ESP instruction, there is urgent need for learning materials that are appropriate and authentic.

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•The Internet is an authentic resource for natural, context-rich, cultural-specific, up-to-date, and multimodal materials and context to see how language is used.

Technology can mediate thinking

•In ESP context, learners not only engage in the ways of thinking underpinning the discipline but also develop their own cognitive and metacognitive strategies because of the authentic tasks they conduct and the authentic audience with which they communicate.

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•The multimodality of technology materials can mediate ideas, thoughts, and thinking process, especially in network-based learning and computer-supported collaborative learning.

Technology provides a learning environment for interaction

•Interaction lies at the heart of language learning.

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•Technology can provide learners with an environment where they can engage in authentic interaction.

Technology facilitates self-directed learning

•ESP is concerned with turning learners into users. In order for self-direction to occur, the learners must have a certain degree of control over when, what, and how they study.

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•Technology can support self-paced instruction and to support self-paced review of concepts.

Technology motivates and engages learners

•Technology serves the authenticity of the task, materials, and international opportunities.

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•Learners are more motivated in engaging with learning tasks and content.

3. Principles for integrating technology in ESP

Principle 1:

Understanding the benefits and roles of technology：Teachers need to be aware that technology in general has a positive impact on language learning, but it does not do everything, and different tools have different functions.

Principle 2:

Linking technology to learners’ needs: ESP adopts a learner-centred approach, and learners’ needs are the top priority in designing and teaching a course.

Principle 3:

Integrating technology into, rather than adding it to, teaching: Technology needs to be integrated as part of pedagogy rather than an “add-on” to the existing situation.

Principle 4:

Considering the role of a teacher: Teachers need to be aware of the different roles that they perform when different kinds of technology supported activities are implemented.

Principle 5:

Enhancing authenticity of both language and task: Teachers can use technology as a tool to access authentic materials so that students are experiencing and learning the authentic discourse they are expected to encounter in their profession.

4. Technological tools for teaching ESP

Corpora

•To develop writing.

…To search how a vocabulary item is used

…To serve as a reference tool

•To study key lexis

•To develop teaching materials

Web-based materials

•To address both teachers’ professional needs and learners’ needs …To provide useful links of different categories of ESP

•Teachers can guide students to explore resources

•Students can have independent study

•Students can access the discourse of the community and participant in activities

Wikis

•To serve as powerful mediating artefacts for collaboration

…to let participants collaboratively generate, mix, edit, and synthesise subject-specific knowledge within a shared and openly accessible digital space

•Students can work collaboratively to create a discipline page

•Students can perform academic writing

•Student can collaboratively solve writing problems

CMC: email

•To address collaborative work need to exchange information and ideas

•To address the issue of lack of intertextuality in traditional textbooks and to raise students’ awareness of writing as an ongoing and dialogic process

•To raise students’ pragmatic and cultural awareness in the communication

3D and virtual worlds

•To simulating the real world to train people in various professions

•Second Life

Flipped classroom: Theories and practices

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>>>Language learning in digital age (Zou, Xie, & Wang,2018)

Rapid advancement of information technologies

• AR & VR (Wu, Lee, Chang, & Liang, 2013),

• wearable computing (Ngai, Chan, Cheung, & Lau, 2010),

• mobile applications (Hwang & Wu, 2014),

• cloud-computing applications (Bora & Ahmed, 2013),

• social media (Dizon, 2016; Sun, Lin, You, Shen, Qi, & Luo, 2017) and

• big data processing (Picciano, 2012)

Great innovation and transformation of technology-enhanced learning have occurred in recent years.

Fast development of various technology-enhanced pedagogies

• flipped classroom (Chen Hsieh, Wu, & Marek, 2017),

• game-based learning; gamification (Calvo-Ferrer, 2017) and

• socio-cultural contexts in language learning (Wang, Liu, & Hwang, 2017)

• mobile assisted language learning

• collaborative learning

Extant variety in both technologies and pedagogies also provides flexible options for the implementation of TELL in classroom teaching and learning, as well as out-of-class learning activities.

>>>Distinct trends of TELL (Zou, Xie, & Wang,2018)

• Contextualization. Contextual learning of language in certain socialcultural contexts constitutes an essential stream of TELL (Wang et al., 2017).

• Socialization. Collaborative learning. Interactive learning environments (Zou & Xie 2018).

• Personalization. Instant feedback (Golonka, Bowles, Frank, Richardson, & Freynik, 2014; Zou & Xie, 2018)

>>>Future TELL model

1. Learning theories.

2. Learning objectives

3. Learning strategies

>>>TELL Model

Flipped classroom

What is it?

• A flipped classroom is a type of blended learning where students are introduced to content at home and practice working through it at school. This is the reverse of the more common practice of introducing new content at school, then assigning homework and projects to completed by the students independently at home.

• In this blended learning approach, face-to-face interaction is mixed with independent study–usually via technology.

• In a common Flipped Classroom scenario, students might watch pre-recorded videos at home, then come to school to do the homework armed with questions and at least some background knowledge.

What Students Might Do At Home In A Flipped Classroom

1. Watch an online lecture

2. Rreview online course material

3. Read physical or digital texts

4. Participate in an online discussion

5. Perform research

What Students Might Do At School In A Flipped Classroom

1. Skill practice (guided or unguided by teacher)

2. In-person, face-to-face discussion with peers

3. Debate

4. Presentations

5. Station learning

6. Lab experiments

7. Peer assessment and review

Benefits brought by flipped classrooms include

1. better student preparation (McLaughlin et al., 2013),

2. higher motivation (Butt, 2014; Davies et al., 2013; Mason, Shuman, & Cook, 2013; McLaughlin et al., 2013; Wagner, Laforge, & Cripps, 2013),

3. greater openness to cooperative learning (Strayer, 2012),

4. better academic performance (Mason et al., 2013; Tune, Sturek, & Basile, 2013),

5. Better problem-solving techniques (Mason et al., 2013),

6. better critical thinking skills (Kong, 2014),

7. better creative thinking skills (Al-Zahrani, 2015), and

8. higher self-regulation (Lai & Hwang, 2016).

Peer Instruction (PI)

• PI is an interactive approach to learning and teaching popularized by Mazur and Hilborn (1997). It is defined as a student-centred approach which provides students with rich opportunities to teach each other through collaborative classroom activities like group discussions and projects (Zhang, Ding, & Mazur, 2017).

• Rather than directly starting a class with pedagogical content input, as is normally the case, PI requires students to understand the key knowledge before coming to the classroom, and the foci of PI classroom activities are information assimilation and application of the learned knowledge; this is aligned with flipped classrooms (Nielsen,Hansen,&Stav,2016).

• Typical PI practices are based around problem-solving, in-class discussions and group projects, including providing peer feedback on each other’s learning at different times in the process and learning from peer interactions (Zhang et al., 2017).

• For example, Mazur and Watkins (2010) and Mazur (2014) used questions that asked students to apply concepts in different contexts, and questions that illustrate how different ideas are related to check students’ understanding of key concepts.

• After students’ completion of the ConcepTests, teachers ask them to discuss their answers in groups and give peer feedback to help each other better understand the key knowledge. When all students achieve good understanding of the knowledge, the class move to the next stage.

• This type of PI, also known as “ConcepTests”, is mainly used in science subjects such as physics, chemistry and mathematics, but seldom in language classrooms.

Just-in-time-teaching (JITT)

• Just-in-time-teaching (hereafter, JiTT) is the pre-class part of PI where students complete online assignments such as reading, watching videos, doing exercises, recording learning progress and reporting difficulties they have had with the assignments;

• it helps teachers receive feedback from students, evaluate students’ learning progresses by checking their online learning performance, and tailor lesson plans accordingly (Clark, 2016; Sayer, Marshman, & Singh, 2016).

• JiTT is an ideal complement to PI as it creates a feedback loop between students’ online learning at home and interactions in class (Novak, Patterson, Gavrin, & Christian, 1999).

• In Mazur’s studies (1997, 2014), teachers of science subjects checked students’ learning performance while doing JiTT and then designed their lesson plans.

• Such practices are not very common among language teachers.

The flipped Learning Model

1. In our flipped learning model, teachers post reading, video-watching and question-answering tasks online first;

2. students then teach themselves through reading notes, watching videos and answering questions that intend to promote critical thinking on the notes at least twenty-four hours before class.

3. Thus, when students come to the class, they have already obtained some of the essential ideas about the key knowledge points.

4. During this process, teachers check students’ progresses and send reminders when necessary.

5. After that, teachers review all answers to check what common weaknesses or challenges students have in understanding the notes and design lesson input and follow up accordingly.

6. The in-class discussions and writing tasks are designed based on students’ learning progresses as demonstrated through their online learning performance.

Tools:

1. Edpuzzle: What it is and how to use it

• The implementation of JiTT was enhanced by EDpuzzle, an assessment-centred tool that enables educators to edit and crop a video, add questions to it, and track students’ progress of watching the video and answering the questions. A special feature of EDpuzzle is that it prevents skipping and assigns a due date, so students are required to watch the entire video and answer all questions within the given period of time.

• Edpuzzle was selected as a tool to create interactive online videos for the JiTT in this research because it is easy to use and able to grade questions and track the asynchronous learning progresses of the entire classroom and individual students.

2. Padlet: What it is and how to use it

Participants

• Two groups of Year three students, 39 boys and 27 girls, from the faculty of science at a Hong Kong university participated in this study.

• Upper intermediate English learners, aged nineteen to twenty-two, and had learned English for around sixteen years.

• The 34 students in the experimental group did flipped learning through JiTT and PI, and the control group with 32 students learned through the conventional flipped learning approach.

Main activities

Learning performance, motivation, and tendency of critical thinking

ANCOVA results

Scaffolded learning experience

• EDpuzzle divided the videos into several parts, each of which focusing on one knowledge point; and it is consequently easier for them to understand the key information of the videos piece by piece.

• This also assists the learners in evaluating their understanding of the key messages from time to time, leading to better self-management of the learning processes.

• The awareness of the fact that they needed to answer some questions about the videos from time to time while watching the videos drove them to concentrate on the videos, as they felt that there were purposes of watching, and thus they were more motivated in the learning processes.

• As EDpuzzle enabled teachers to present all students’ answers on the screen, students were also induced to demonstrate good performance by peer pressure when completing the online exercises.

Sharing culture

• Within this sharing culture, the participants had better sense of audience and more multiple interactions, which further led to greater motivation and tendency of critical thinking.

• The cloud-based tools for real time collaboration (Padlet and Google Docs) presented students’ discussion notes and writing samples online and allowed students to freely read others’ notes and writing, and to learn from each other; a sharing culture was thus promoted among the class.

• Accompanied with the sharing culture, authentic communications and multiple interactions were brought to the participants in the experimental group; they commented on others’ posts critically, responded to the comments, and further developed ideas based on the comments and responses.

• In such ways, critical thinking skills were practiced. From the perspective of the learning pyramid, the Padlet- and Google Docs-enhanced peer instruction activities helped students achieve the next four levels of learning (apply, analyze, evaluate, and create).

Peer instruction

• The in-class activities of the flipped learning through JiTT and PI began with comparing and negotiating answers in groups. During these processes, students practiced applying what they have learned through reading notes, watching videos and completing associated exercises to teach each other. If they disagreed on some issues, they discussed and negotiated to explain their viewpoints, attempted to persuade others, and learned from each other.

• This is very different from what students in the conventional flipped classroom did: directly receiving feedback and input from teachers without attempting to figure out the answers through discussions and negotiations.

• Such differences led to the opposite attitudes towards the pre-class learning part among the participants: those in the experimental group considered the JiTT exercises very important as they wanted to be prepared for the in-class PI;

• those in the control group regarded the pre-class exercises not so important because they felt that the answers would be given by teachers to them anyway.

• The benefits of peer instruction are aligned with the learning pyramid of the National Training Laboratories, which argues that teaching others promotes better learning than lecturing and reading.

Conclusion

1. The flipped learning through JiTT and PI outperformed the conventional flipped learning in terms of the learning performance, motivation, and tendency of critical thinking.

2. The use of assessment-centred tools like EDpuzzle and cloud-based applications such as Padlet and Google Docs assisted in creating scaffolded learning experience, sharing culture, and opportunities of peer instruction for students in the flipped classroom with JiTT and PI.

3. The proposed flipped learning model is therefore advised to be employed in more English classes.

Related contents:

• Rethink time and space

• Overcoming problems in the flipped classroom

• Is flipped classroom for you?

• Formative Assessment with Flipped Classrooms

• Tools for Flipping Classrooms

• Including stakeholders in the flipped classroom

• An Example: Introduction to a Language Arts Flipped Classroom

• Daisy's example of flipped classroom