CRAAP: An acronym to guide web research

The CRAAP Test for assessing appropriacy of web resources popped up on my radar in a Pinterest suggestion of a graphic:

The CRAAP Test

gleaned from the Daytona State College Library:

• https://library.daytonastate.edu/reliable/CRAAP,

which in turn apparently adapted content from a library guidance page at California State University, Chico:

• http://libguides.csuchico.edu/LiteratureReviews?p=2822716.

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Dr. Morrow's presentations from December 2019

This post showcases two presentations that Dr. Jeffrey S. Morrow made at the PIGATE gathering on December 14, 2019, on:

1. Keys to Successful Student Motivation; &
2. Successful Pronunciation Teaching.

These are for attendees to review as well as for the perusal of PIGATE members who had other commitments last month.

If you have questions or suggestions regarding either of those presentations, please feel free to:

• Post them in comments on this blog post; 
• Send them in messages to the PIGATE Google Group;
• Voice them at an upcoming PIGATE gathering (Calendar of Events); or 
• Address them directly to Dr. Morrow (contact info. at ends of slide shows).

Except as otherwise noted, each of those presentations is licensed under a 

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License:
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Please attribute them to Dr. Jeffrey S. Morrow.

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Motivation matters!

Image source: YouTube, Education Week (2019.12.19)

Education Week recently showcased a series of four videos of Larry Ferlazzo and Katie Hull Sypnieski explaining ways for teachers to foster learner motivation:

•  What Teachers Can Do to Boost Student Motivation (2019.12.09).

The short videos covered "four specific ways to nurture a sense of intrinsic motivation in students" (¶1), namely:

1. Granting students autonomy,
2. Applauding effort rather than ability;
3. Cultivating interpersonal relationships, and
4. Helping students discover the relevance of learning activities.

A list of further readings followed the videos on the Education Week article, and Larry Ferlazzo linked to additional resources in a follow-up in an Education Week Teacher blog post.

• Everything You Wanted to Know About Student Motivation, But Were Afraid to Ask (2019.12.11).

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Online activities and opportunities: Work in progress

The short (16 slide) presentation embedded in this blog post represents on-going endeavours mainly to recover from a massive setback in online resource curation. In a nutshell:

This presentation provides snapshots of an individual teacher's recent and ongoing professional development endeavours. It reflects problems of ICT use, mainly discontinuation of a free service for educators, and outlines strategies for addressing them with collaborative partners, tools, and venues of choice. It supplements a working paper submitted to PIGATE.

(Abstract, slide 2)

If you have comments or questions with regard either to the content of slides in that short presentation or the gist of the working paper (Beaufait, 2019) submitted to PIGATE prior to its Annual General Meeting last month (2019.09.14), please feel free to spell them out in threadable comments on this post.

Reference

Beaufait, P. (2019a). Reflection in action: An unavoidable IT transition. PIGATE eigo jugyou gaku kenkyuu-kai kiyou, 26 [English language teaching action research group working papers, issue 26], 32-42.

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Sneak preview of PIGATE's Special Summer Session

PIGATE's Special Summer Session (SSS)

Tentative schedule (as of 2019.07.05)

09:30 Preparation and sign-in (30 min.)
10:00 Opening remarks (10 min.): Paul Beaufait
10:10 IPS, Part 1 (45 min.): English pronunciation challenges for English teachers
10:55 Break (10 min.)
11:05 IPS, Part 2 (45 min): Tactics for teaching oral expression
11:50 Lunchtime (60 min.)
12:50 CPS, Part 1 (45 min.): Favorite picture books and stories to share
13:35 _Kitemiran_¹ and _shitemiran_² sharing time (15 min.)
13:50 CPS, Part 2 (45 min.): Experience and tips for learning and teaching with stories
14:35 Break (15 min.)
14:50 Working Papers (_kiyou_) workshop (45 min.):
Reflections, projections, & progress reports;
Preparation and collaboration time; &
Submission guidelines & deadlines.
15:35 Session summary: Mr. Nobuyuki Takaki (15 min.)
15:50 Closing remarks (10 min.)
Membership matters
Newsletter contributions
Other announcements:
Annual General Meeting (AGM), 2019.09.14
Other
16:00 Clean-up (10 min.)
16:10  Steering committee meeting (20 min.)
Presenters and PIGATE members are welcome to attend the committee meeting!

____________________

¹ Why don't you come and see this?

² Why don't you try this and see?

If you would like to take part in this month's session, or to join PIGATE, please fill out one of our short online info. collection forms (https://goo.gl/Hpe9pd). 

The Beaufait Collaboratoire: A Google Site

A Google Site that I'm using to reconstitute bits and pieces of new and previous online endeavours, the Beaufait Collaboratoire, grew new pages and subpages today.

Home page snapshot, 2019.07.12

Most notable was a new Educators' Corner, now a ProDev subpage. Other additions included a couple of Google Forms for surveys of EnglishCentral (EC) users that I have embedded in EC subpages. I'd linked to the forms previously from the Tech. Tools page to replace old wiki resources.

Please feel free to browse the Collaboratoire, and let me know in comments on this post if you have any questions or discover any incipient web rot (faulty links).

As I continue to build and update that site, I'm seeking a communication interface to include there. Something like the threaded comment functionality of Blogger blogs might be ideal. In the meantime, I welcome your suggestions in comments here.

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A Visual Summary: 32 Learning Theories Every Teacher Should Know

In his post, A Visual Summary: 32 Learning Theories Every Teacher Should Know, Terry Heck displayed a detailed graphic by Richard Millwood.

In that post, Heck asserted that "there are dozens of theories that underpin what and how you teach already, and that the better you understand them, the better chance you’ll have to master your current approach and begin to bring new possibilities into your classroom..." (¶4).


Heck then posted brief additional explanations of the concepts in Millwood's graphic. 

The graphic itself is available ... [as a PDF]: 

• http://blog.richardmillwood.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Learning-Theory.pdf (PDF)

and in a hypertextual concept map with loads of links to additional resources here:

• https://cmapspublic3.ihmc.us/rid=1LNV3H2J9-HWSVMQ-13LH/ (Cmap).

A follow-up comment by Millwood (2019.06.18) on his one of his own posts that introduced the map (2013.05.10) suggested that he was preparing a new version.

References

• Heck, T. (2019, January 12). A Visual Summary: 32 Learning Theories Every Teacher Should Know [weblog post]. Retrieved from https://www.teachthought.com/learning/a-visual-summary-the-most-important-learning-theories/
• Millwood, R. (2019, June 18). Learning Theory [comment on 2013, May 10 weblog post]. Retrieved from https://blog.richardmillwood.net/2013/05/10/learning-theory/#comment-54999 

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Revisiting communicative competencies (YouTube recording)

This hour-long recording by Dr. Kate Reynolds of Central Washington University's College of Education and Professional Studies[, Chairperson of the Department of Education, Development, Teaching and Learning,] came out about a year ago. It was from a TESOL Teacher Education Interest Section (TEIS) webinar on evolving theories and potential applications of a communicative competence framework for language teaching.

Frames and Reframing:

Recent Discussions on Communicative Competencies 

In that webinar, Dr. Reynolds surveyed "recent developments on the model of communicative competencies and [began to] facilitate an interactive conversation on how teacher educators can use this information" (Abstract, 2018.06.26). Though the webinar chat is invisible in the recording, live discussion opened about 33 minutes in. Dr. Reynolds read and summarized chat entries aloud. She then reflected on contributions and issues that arose, and asked clarification and follow-up questions.

At the end of the webinar, Dr. Reynolds highlighted one of over a dozen selected references for further reading. She also offered to share her PowerPoint slides, and expressed desire to continue discussion in audience-initiated TEIS discussion list posts. That's a TESOL members-only venue, so I (Paul) would be happy to see comments from PIGATE reviewers here [on this post].

Reference

• Reynolds, K. M. (2018, June 26). Frames and reframing: Recent discussions on communicative competencies [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qs1aRTjnwAY

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Linguistic paranoia – why is Australia so afraid of languages?

For most other countries speaking more than one language is the norm.

Misty Adoniou, University of Canberra

Image from www.shutterstock.com.au

About 20% of the Australian population speaks a language other than English. In fact, around 250 languages are spoken in homes around the country. This would seem to be cause for celebration. After all, successive governments have spent millions trying to increase the numbers of students studying languages in schools. However there is little connection between the languages taught in schools, and the languages spoken in homes.

Foreign language learning in schools

In 2001 the Howard Liberal government set a target of 25% of Year 12 students studying a foreign language. The same target was set by the incoming Rudd Labor government in 2007. In 2014, the new Abbott Liberal government upped the ante to 40% of Year 12 students studying a foreign or classical language within the decade. This was ambitious given that the previous targets of 25% had never been reached.

Barely 10% of Year 12 students study a language. Yet 20% of the population speaks a language other than English in the home. How does that add up? The answer is governments pay little heed to the languages spoken in Australian homes; they prefer “foreign and classical” languages to “local and community” ones.

Not all languages are equal

There is a clear hierarchy of languages in Australia. English is at the top. Next are the “classical” languages like French and German, particularly when learned at school. These are followed by languages deemed useful for Australia’s economic prosperity - e.g. Chinese, Indonesian and Japanese - but only if they are being learned as “foreign” languages. Because that is quite clever, learning a foreign language.

But if they are languages already spoken in the home, they slip down the hierarchy of languages, into the community languages pile along with about 245 other languages. Somewhere towards the bottom of that community languages pile are the Indigenous languages of Australia, about which most Australians know nothing.

The chances of those 245 community languages surviving in Australia are remote. Australia is remarkably adept at wiping out languages. Of the 250 Indigenous languages in existence at the time of British colonisation, only around 20 remain viable today. The languages immigrants bring with them are usually dead within two generations.

It seems remarkably odd policy to pour millions of dollars into setting consistently unachievable targets for learning foreign languages at school, while simultaneously watching community languages slide into oblivion.

Is it just linguistic snobbery?

We always seem more impressed by a native English speaker who has managed to learn another language at school than we are by those who learn their languages at home.

Everyone was quite impressed by ex Prime Minister Rudd’s proficiency in Mandarin, but I expect Senator Dio Wang’s Mandarin runs rings around Mr Rudd’s. I’m guessing Belgian born Finance Minister Mathias Cormann speaks German, Flemish, and perhaps also French. I suppose Senator Nick Xenophon speaks Greek, but perhaps he doesn’t. Maybe his Greek language heritage has been lost, which would be ironic as his surname means “foreign voice”. Does Deputy Opposition leader Tanya Plibersek speak Slovenian? Does the Malaysian born Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, Penny Wong speak Malay and Mandarin or Cantonese or Hakka?

I don’t know. I’ve never heard any of them speak another language, or be reported admirably in the press for their linguistic prowess. They don’t note their bilingualism in their biographies on their websites. Perhaps they’ve lost their heritage languages - or perhaps it’s just not “Australian” to say you speak another language in your home or to your mum and dad. Either scenario is a sad indictment.

It seems, in Australia, if you learned your second language at school or at university - that’s clever and admirable. If your bilingualism comes from your heritage, we’d prefer to ignore it.

Multicultural but monolingual

Australia is generally happy to be multicultural, as long as that just involves some tasty food, and a bit of dance and music at an annual festival. We are definitely not comfortable with being multilingual. We are a country where you are free to speak another language, but preferably in the privacy of your own home or on an overseas holiday. It seems we like our foreign languages to stay that way - foreign.

Australia is currently in a social and political space where “unity” has overtaken “diversity” as the preferred political discourse. A country that speaks multiple languages in its everyday life seems somehow harder to manage. After all, who knows what they’re saying? A community that speaks foreign languages to foreign people in foreign lands is much more secure.

It is odd we should be so determined to keep our multilingualism in the closet. For most other countries speaking more than one language is the norm. With so many economic, cognitive, social and political advantages to multilingualism it seems simultaneously extraordinarily wasteful and absurdly paranoid to not celebrate and nurture the languages spoken in homes all around the country.

Misty Adoniou, Senior Lecturer in Language, Literacy and TESL, University of Canberra
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

PIGATE gathering, 2019.06.08

PIGATE's June 2019 session

This month's highlights: Guest Speaker Series (GSS)

Active Learning from Theory to Practice

Dr. Fumi Takegami

Faculty of Letters

The Prefectural University of Kumamoto

Prof. Terry Laskowski

Faculty of Letters, Kumamoto University

Date & time

Saturday, June 8, 2019; 13:30–16:30

• Doors open at 13:00!

Venue

Seminar room 10, 5th floor, Faculty of Administrative Studies office wing; 
Prefectural University of Kumamoto (PUK)

• Please see PIGATE Meeting Locations (https://goo.gl/h5DgbP) for site details.

About the presenters and the program

Fumi Takegami has extensive teaching experience in schools ranging from elementary to secondary levels, mostly at high school. She is now teaching in the Faculty of Letters at the PUK. Terry Laskowski also has extensive teaching experience, in his case at university. He now teaches in the Faculty of Letters at Kumamoto University.

Together Terry and Fumi will talk about the relationship between theory and practice in teaching.  Linking theory to practice helps teachers to better understand why they do what they do in their classrooms. Having this knowledge will better inform teachers regarding their instructional practices. 

During their workshop session, Fumi and Terry will talk about learning theories going from behaviorism to social constructivism and complementary teaching methods. They will focus in particular on social constructivism and related teaching methods and techniques. 

Participants will take part in classroom activities. Through active involvement, i.e., active learning, participants will understand the purpose of the activities by experiencing them themselves. They can expect to take part in a jigsaw activity and a task-based problem solving activity.

Let us know you're coming!

If you would like to take part in this month's session, or to join PIGATE, please fill out one of our short online info. collection forms (https://goo.gl/Hpe9pd). 

• Thank you!