Project Description - Your Story, My Story

7/30/2019 Project Description - Your Story, My Story

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Project: My Story, Your Story

Capturing Stories in a Community ESL Setting

Lita Brusick JohnsonLING 583 - Materials and Curriculum Development

May 6, 2013


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My Story, Your Storyis 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 theAll-Star 3 textbook.

Project Structure and Goals. The Your Story, My Storyproject, 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 accuracyon one end and fluencyon the other, this project

tips toward fluency. The bulk of the class time is devoted to speaking and listening

activities using student-known language formsand the learners focus is on receiving

or conveying meaning (Nation 2007, p. 6). However, ample opportunities for peer


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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 ofAll-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 student-

directed 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


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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 learner-

centered 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 bothrecept ion(listeningto the interviews done by others in the real world)

and product ion(a combination ofspeaking and listening, interviewing and being

interviewed). The project reflects a commitment to both meaningful and authentic input

and meaningful, authentic outputin ways that enable student engagement at the higher,

analytical, evaluative, and creative levels of Blooms taxonomy

The sources ofmeaningful, authentic inputinclude 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


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L1 or L2; and interviews in English obtained from StoryCorps, an oral historyprogram

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 projectsmeaningful, authentic output student-produced oral and written

stories/interviewsis 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 rubricfor 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


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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 learningand 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 Bookthat

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


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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 loadwhen they speak, for example by extensive use of pre-planning

activities. The project design reflects an intentional commitment to address the

issues ofcognitive complexityand 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 morecomplex(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 forlearner choice as the project progresses.

Summary. It is my hope that the project design ofMy Story, Your Storygives

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 theirdepth of processingprinciple: Learners should process the items to be

learned as deeply and as thoughtfully as possible (p. 60). My Story, Your Storywas

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.


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References

Graves, K. (2000). Designing Language Courses: A Guide for Teachers. Boston, MA:Heinle Press.

McGrath, I. (2002). Chapter 4 Coursebook-based Teaching: Adaptation. MaterialsEvaluation 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 adultsparticipation 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. LanguageLearning, 61, 136.


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Project Description - Your Story, My Story

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