Month: January 2018

Focusing on Form in a Dialogic Context … – Part 2

Last week we took an initial look at Glisan and Donato’s fourth High-Leverage Teaching Practice. If you missed it, click here for the post.

For those who choose not to read the entire post, here is what we discussed.

The chapter starts with the idea that knowing grammar means having the ability to use language for real communication.

A question that is never answered is, “What does it mean to ‘know grammar’?” Do the authors mean to know it consciously or unconsciously? Is that knowledge Continue reading “Focusing on Form in a Dialogic Context … – Part 2”

Focusing on Form in a Dialogic Context … – Part 1

Over the past several weeks, we’ve taken a look at three of six High-Leverage Teaching Practices: Facilitating Target Language Comprehensibility, Building a Classroom Discourse Community, and Guiding Learners to Interpret and Discuss Authentic Texts. Two of those practices were further broken down into two smaller grain size practices.

All six High-Leverage Teaching Practices are contained in Enacting the Work of Language Instruction by Eileen W. Glisan and Richard Donato.

The three remaining HLTPs are Focusing on Form in a Dialogic Context Through PACE, Focusing on Cultural Products, Practices, Perspectives in a Dialogic Context, and Providing Oral Corrective Feedback to Improve Learner Performance. I will take a look at each of these practices in a separate post over the next couple of weeks.

Today we start with “Focus on Form …”

This is an area of discussion and great disagreement. The first sentence of the chapter tells us that it deals with Continue reading “Focusing on Form in a Dialogic Context … – Part 1”

Guiding Learners to Interpret and Discuss Authentic Texts – Part 7

In the past six posts, we have taken a look at the meaning of “authentic” and discussed what it means to use “authentic resources”.

We have looked at the interpretation phase of the High-Leverage Teaching Practice and seen that the relationship between interpretation and discussion seems a bit muddled in the description of the practice.

Now we come to the second part of the practice: Leading a Text-Based Discussion.

Before looking at this smaller “grain-size practice” (P. 66) in detail, two comments about the overall practice are in order:

Sometimes what one does not say is as important as what one says, and this case is no different. Missing from the title of this portion of the HTLP is the word “authentic”. This is because the “authenticity” of a text is Continue reading “Guiding Learners to Interpret and Discuss Authentic Texts – Part 7”

Guiding Learners to Interpret and Discuss Authentic Texts – Part 6

Well, let’s see how much further we get with this High Leverage Teaching Practice.

Last week we looked at the first step in the Interpretation phase:

Choose the (authentic) text

That led to an excursus on writing. If you didn’t see that, go here.

The second step in the Interpretation phase of this practice is

Plan the sequence of interpretive tasks

Glisan and Donato note that there are several recognized models for guiding students through texts, and the model they use draws on two different approaches.

Obviously, they had to choose a model for their book. It is not the only model, and teachers need to find and use a model that works for them.

In “Models of the Reading Process“, an article written for PMC, US National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Keith Rayner and Erik D. Reichle note: “Reading is a complex skill involving Continue reading “Guiding Learners to Interpret and Discuss Authentic Texts – Part 6”