Providing EAL students - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

Providing EAL students

with

grammatical focus

in

a mainstream secondary

school

Irena

Gwiazda

, PhD

Teach Meet

R

esearch Oxford 2016

Form-focused instruction research

Research designA quasi-experimental studyExplanatory sequential mixed methods design – quantitative data followed by qualitative91 EAL students

aged 12-16

3 groups – Isolated FFI

(n=27)

, Integrated FFI

(n=28), and control (n=36)10 x Isolated or Integrated FFI lessons with use of short films as the communicative background

Experimental groups versus the control groupThe effect of intervention was statistically significant (F1.89= 16.285, p<0.001).

Long term language production gains

The notion of noticing in Second Language AcquisitionThe role of noticing:

Noticing of forms in the communicative context as prerequisite to learning them (Schmidt 1990, 1995

)

Learning as a consequence of a learner having noticed a target form for enough number of times (threshold effect), or rather the noticing of a target form occurs because it has already developed in the learner’s explicit knowledge (

Fotos

, 2004) e.g. by means of instruction (the form is not learnt unless it is noticed or it is not noticed unless it is learnt)

When the latter phenomenon takes place, it facilitates the process of transferring that knowledge of the form into the long term memory (Ellis, 2005).

Noticing – research findingsIn the majority of the interviews with both ISO and INT participants, regardless of how they scored in the tests, the noticing of forms, also in the mainstream lessons, was a skill that they attributed to the intervention triggering that process.

Noticing of forms while reading in the mainstream was commonly reported by the respondents.

Noticing: possible processesAwareness raising inputTime taken to digest the FFI Noticing of the target structures in their ‘natural environment’ = mainstream classroom inputMaking necessary connections between the awareness raising stimulus received in the intervention, and the language of the mainstream classroom

input

Random

encounters:

Johnny’s

‘Eureka’ moment

Addressing the issuesInterventionsCollaborative teaching

Aims:To ensure that the EAL students’ learning needs are better met in the mainstream, and their language learning is facilitated by all the teachers in a more targeted way

To encourage the EAL students, particularly those with good functional levels of English, to improve their grammatical and lexical accuracy

To raise the mainstream subject teachers’ awareness of the EAL students’ needs and

t

o promote the EAL focus in the mainstream subjects

so that the students

’ linguistic needs are supported inside and outside of the EAL interventions and English lessons

.

EAL target stickers

Language target sticker cycle

Advantages:

Students

have a clear linguistic focus when they write in any subject, not just English.

With time, they become more confident to correct

their

mistakes in a proofreading phase, since corrective feedback acts as language instruction.

The increased awareness of a selected linguistic element promotes noticing of this targeted form in the input, facilitating further learning.

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