The Intuitive Language Teacher

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”

It was beginning to look like we would never get to the practice itself, but we have finally arrived.

Glisan and Donato remind us in their discussion of this practice (see Enacting the Work of Language Instruction, 2017) that “interpretive work should never occur in isolation but should be viewed as part of a larger instructional practice, that is, participation in a text-based discussion.” (P. 70) On this point, the authors are slightly at odds with themselves, because the very next sentence states, “Text-based discussion … complement interpretive work by students and teachers.” (P. 70)

How can text-based discussion both the larger instructional practice that contains interpretation and a complement to interpretation?

I believe that the authors wished to link the two practices but could not find Continue reading “Guiding Learners to Interpret and Discuss Authentic Texts – Part 5”

Is Green Eggs and Ham by Dr Seuss an authentic text?

It certainly is by a native speaker for native speakers. It has become part of the American cultural landscape. It became the fourth-best selling children’s book of all time in 2001 (“All-Time Best Selling Children’s Books”. Publishers Weekly. 17 December 2001). It consistently scores in the top 10 on lists of popular children’s books by both children and adults (cf. two National Education Association Polls, Scholastic Parent and Child magazine, School Library Journal).

In Wolff v NH Department of Corrections et al., Judge James R. Muirhead rendered his judgment in the style of Green Eggs and Ham, which judgment ordered the destruction Continue reading “Guiding Learners to Interpret and Discuss Authentic Texts – Part 3”

Last week as we began looking at the High-Leverage Teaching Practice “Guiding Learners to Interpret and Discuss Authentic Texts”, we took a look at what the terms “authentic” and “text” mean.

Glisan and Donato in their book Enacting the Work of Language Instruction also try to give a definition of the term “authentic texts”. They write that students develop language and cultural proficiency through interesting talk and text in the target language. (p. 65) This is another way of saying that language learners acquire language through comprehensible input that engages them. In the classroom setting, the teacher is the primary provider of comprehensible input, especially in the early stages of instruction. If the teacher is not a native speaker – and the learner decidedly isn’t – how can they have “authentic” conversations according to the definition provided by Galloway and generally used throughout the language teaching community, i.e. “by members of a language and culture group for members of the same language and culture group”?

Glisan and Donato attempt to surmount this difficulty through a more complex and nuanced definition. They stress the need for students to attend to language “in the form of authentic texts – i.e., texts, be they printed, audio, or video, Continue reading “Guiding Learners to Interpret and Discuss Authentic Texts – Part 2”