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Indigenous
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7 thoughts on “Indigenous”
I just registered for the conference this week! I’m very excited about meeting everyone, and learning more about where things are going. Great stuff!
I also look forward to meeting you as well, Bryan. You add much to this community!
Hi, I’m new to this PLC, just signed up about a month ago. I have a question but I’m not sure where to post it as it seems like the forums are not so active. On Saturday, at our Chicago TPRS meeting the issue came up about thematic units and their place in language classrooms.
Last year I started teaching with CI but I was required by my school to use a textbook. To work around that I created stories based on the textbook chapter. For many new people starting with CI who are not in charge at their school I think this is probably the most necessary first step for them.
Are there actual research studies that would show that thematic units are detrimental to acquisition (or at least not ideal)? I’ve heard that it is harder to acquire vocabulary that is thematically grouped, and it makes sense to me, yet I’d like some actual studies that I could use to support that claim.
I know that the natural order hypothesis would argue against the grammar syllabus, but is there actually any research that would preclude using thematic units?
Great question on the thematic units. I can’t wait to find out. Tina can ask Beniko because she is there in Portland for a few more days. Or they can call Krashen if Beniko doesn’t know. We’ll have an answer soon. It’s an excellent question. I can only say for myself that it was about the loss of time mainly, trying to get a story going when the kids knew the real agenda. That sucked. It kept me from getting lift off in m classroom.
I already responded to Greg but I’ll copy what I wrote here, in case anyone is interested!
After you read the thread on ACTFL’s blog that someone recommended to you (it’s a good thread with lots of heavy hitters weighing in) I also want you to look at Nation’s work (http://www.ijern.com/journal/2015/June-2015/20.pdf)
Also several of the researchers are mentioned in this overview: http://www.eslminiconf.net/summer06/thematicsets.html.
That should provide (some of/) the bibliography you need!
I blogged (below an excerpt) briefly against thematic units, which are extremely common at the elementary level. My point is about interest and engagement. When the teacher chooses and scripts everything, some kids may be interested; others, not so much. When it’s collaborative, though, teachers often see a lot wider buy-in and engagement and results – I call it the democratization of the WL classroom. Themes try to cram a lot of related vocab and language in – so I’d say it’s high on the contextualized scale, but CAN BE low on the comprehensible and compelling scales.
The words ‘thematic unit’ have been hijacked many times. We can certainly teach themes in the TL – provided we meet all the criteria for Comprehensible, contextualized and compelling input! We have to stay narrow and in-bounds for beginners, too…
It boils down to (IMO) what practices optimize attention to the input? Something that I alone decide on, or something that we all agree upon together?
Here’s what I said on my Hebrew blog:
Many schools assume that teacher-made thematic units are the way to go, and map their curriculum accordingly.
But we know that young students (and most people, no?) like to talk about one thing more than any other – themselves! Therefore, setting a curriculum focused on exploiting the highest frequency words (& verb-containing chunks), while incorporating students’ interests and ideas through story-asking, is a fun, lively, engaging and creative way to customize classes for the group in front of you! Using hi-frequency verb-chunks to talk about “my house” or “my morning routine” is flat and boring, while collaborative, creative and personalized stories bring light and laughter into a discipline in which the brain is already working hard! We can decide upon a corps of foundational verbs we want to use, and recycle & add more each year to articulate a curriculum up through the grades, realizing full well that we may deviate while following student interest. The key to good language instruction is sustaining engagement and attention to the comprehensible message, while using Hebrew all the while.
Here’s a better working link to Paul Nation’s critique of using semantic sets:
http://whaaales.com/Nation2000.pdf
I find Nation’s critique on learning semantic sets very interesting. To me it seems he is talking about this problem of interference mainly in a cognitive way.
In my experience of using TPR in classes 1-4 (I’ve used TPR for about 20 years) even semantic sets seem to work very well.
Eg I have a rug with pictures of buildings, roads etc and we use animals and vehicles to play on it, which incorporates unrelated words as well of course, when I tell a student to put the truck on the roof of the school. Most students enjoy this kind of “vocabulary learning” that feels more like playing to me.