21st Century Learning - Part 1: Skills

After having watched the video from Pearson ELT on the importance of developing 21st Century skills, here are our reflections.

 

Even though we do not belong to the same generation as our students, we do not consider ourselves digital immigrants, we are not outsiders. We feel comfortable with using technology in the classroom and we consider ourselves flexible enough to adapt to what the situation requires. We accept the challenge to help our students develop the digital skills they need to process the huge amount of information available to them. We are conscious that there is a need to add into our plans instances in which they filter and summarise the data the Internet has to offer.

 

Summarising skills can be implemented from the very beginning. We can train our students to summarise key points from texts read, songs, any given topic, and we can even have a "Summary of the lesson" activity at the end of the day.

 

In relation to our first project, Helping Hands, we could include logical thinking strategies when gathering data about the situation of children in Argentina, and about the process of collecting items for donation. This is an aspect we need to go on exploring. Also, regarding creative thinking, students could be asked to present results using different tools and media.

 

Even though fifth form projects deal with working with teams to try to promote social change, it may be necessary to go more deeply into what it means to work as a team, the roles involved, the expected attitude and behaviour, learning to act both as a good leader and as a good follower.

 

Developing communicative skills is a central issue. In fifth form students have several opportunities to exercise these skills throughout the year, however they mainly give informal talks or presentations. We could try to implement the teaching of formal presentation skills so that students gain more confidence and develop accuracy in a formal register.

 

We consider we should include reflecting moments within our plans, making them explicit and providing them with a specific timing in the assembly. This year we aim to raise students' awareness in relation to their learning styles and provide them with tools to enhance their strong points while at the same time improving their weaknesses.

About questions & tasks

Questioning

Even though the usefulness of teaching strategies to aid understanding of texts has been proved, comprehension is still a silent, private process which is difficult to be observed and measured. Brown admits that reading comprehension is “totally unobservable (we have to infer comprehension from other behaviour)” (2001:315). Nuttall (2005) agrees that it is problematic since the comprehension process is invisible. In an attempt to solve this conflict, Nuttall suggests that questions are a way to get access to what is going on in the reader’s minds, but she suggests an improved version of the traditional approach. Questions need to be used as “aids to successful exploration of the text” (2005:182) as she believes that reading tasks are “opportunities for learning, not tests to be escaped if possible” (2005:181).

 Kinds of questions in a reading assignment

Nuttall (2005) claims that the purpose of questioning in a “teaching approach” to reading is not to test but to make students notice the way language is used to carry meaning, and the strategies readers can use to understand texts (p. 181). There is a variety of questions that foster an inquisitive role from readers and they can be classified in four different aspects:

- Presentation of questions: open-ended questions, multiple choice questions (MCQs), and true/false (T/F) questions.

- Forms of questions: according to their grammatical pattern (yes/no question, alternative questions, wh- questions and how/why questions)

- Types of questions: questions of literal comprehension, questions involving reorganization or reinterpretation, questions of inference, questions of evaluation, questions of personal response, and questions concerned with how writers say what they mean.

- Questioner: teacher or student.

 Nuttall (2005) claims that questions can be presented in three ways: open-ended questions, multiple choice questions (MCQs) and true or false (T/F). Open-ended questions can be answered in any way the student considers appropriate, and their typical examples are how and why questions since they offer the greatest scope for the responder; MCQs offer a number of possible answers to choose from; and finally, T/F present a statement about the text and the reader has to decide whether it is true or false, based on his or her understanding of it (pp. 186)

Questions can also be sorted out according to their grammatical form: yes/no question, alternative questions, wh- questions and how/why questions. Answers to yes/no questions are short and do not require readers to compose a larger sentence. Alternative questions demand respondents to choose between two options. Wh- questions, including why and how questions require full sentences as answers which are more challenging since they vary in content and structure (Nuttall, 2005, pp. 184-185).

Nuttall adds that questions can also be classified “according to the skills they require from the reader, [which] is much more important than their grammatical
form” (2005:187). She classifies them into six types “questions of literal comprehension, questions involving reorganization or reinterpretation, questions of inference, questions of evaluation, questions of personal response and questions concerned with how writers say what they mean” (2005:188,189).

First, Questions of literal comprehension are aimed at checking the basic understanding of the text, and answers can be directly and explicitly found in it. Cubo de Severino et al. (2008) explain that words from the text are used in the questions so that readers make use of their short term memory to store data from the text and answer literal questions (p. 49).

Second, questions involving reorganization or reinterpretation are slightly more difficult than the previous type as they require the reader to reinterpret literal information or to put together pieces of information from different parts of the text, considering it as a whole rather than sentences in isolation.

Third, questions of inference demand readers to discover what is implied in the text, not just its explicit meanings. In order to answer these questions, the reader needs a deep understanding of the text, to be able to decipher its implications. They aim at comprehension, making students rebuild the text with their previous knowledge.

Fourth, questions of evaluation require readers to judge the writer´s intentions
and how far these intentions have been achieved in the text. The typical examples are questions of literary appreciation in which readers need to analyse techniques by which the writer tries to influence him/her.

Fifth, questions of personal response do not depend purely on the how the writer influences reader but on how the reader reacts to the text according to textual evidence. That is to say, the reader can explain his/her own feelings towards the text based on his/her understanding of it.

Finally, questions concerned with how writers say what they mean seek to offer strategies for tackling texts in general, making students aware of what they do to interpret texts.

Nuttall (2005) explains that questioning as a reading task follows an analytical bottom-up approach, which differs from other types of tasks which are more global and ask for a top-down approach. In those tasks intelligence and experience become more important than language proficiency (p. 192). She sorts out tasks as follows: tasks with outcomes requiring little or no language, tasks with outcomes involving spoken language and tasks with outcomes involving writing.

The first group of tasks with outcomes requiring little or no language consists of activities using figures: grids, flow charts, graphs, maps, etc., in which the reader has to interpret the text as a whole to be able to transfer information to the figures.

The second group of tasks with outcomes involving spoken language deals with a more creative and integrative way of checking students’ reading comprehension. It consists of a number of varied activities which include drama, simulation, role play, debates, discussions, and reading out loud. In order to carry out these activities students need to work deeply on the texts to combine the information in them with their own creativity and schemata.

The third group of tasks with outcomes involving written language requires students to use what they have read to solve other activities. Typical examples include planning tourist brochures or documentary films based on a text describing a certain place, writing rules or instructions for a procedure or game described in a text, or retelling an incident from a different point of view among others.

 

Strategy 10: Students’ Opinion and emotional response to the text

Considering that reading is the result of the interaction between readers an text this section was added in order to check whether teachers highlighted the importance of students’ opinions and feelings towards the material dealt with.

Strategy 9: Identification of words (Lexical strategy)

Lexical Strategy

Cubo de Severino et al. (2008) start their analysis of these strategies by claiming that expert readers build up the meaning of the text offering their knowledge of the world, not only the one referred to content but also the grammatical and textual ones, regulating their cognitive processes. The acquisition of the written code allows readers to decode words and symbols as well as textual and paratextual elements in order to obtain coherence in the text. Van Dijk and Kintsch model distinguishes different levels within a text: morphological, syntactical, semantic, pragmatic and lexical (pp. 212-213).

 

The latter consists of a linguistic system in the readers’ mind which contains the lexicon, a phonological component dealing with the sounds and a semantic component dealing with the meanings. Emmorey and Fromkin (as cited in Cubo de Severino et al. 2008) support this idea by stating that the mental lexicon is the grammatical component which carries all the information about the words or morphemes: phonological, morphological, semantic and syntactic information about words (p. 224).

 

Cubo de Severino et al. (2008) distinguish two types of words: the lexemes, and the grammatical words. The former are units of lexical meaning such as nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. They can also have attached morphemes which are the minimum units which carry lexical or grammatical meaning through suffixes and prefixes. The latter are considered independent and empty words which lack a lexical meaning. They are also called functional words (p. 216).

 

Following these ideas, Cubo de Severino et al. (2008) assure that the previous knowledge of the topic and the understanding of key words in texts optimize the comprehension of the reading process. That is the reason why understanding how the mental lexicon operates is crucial in comprehension. The authors highlight a number of lexical strategies which aid in the development of metacognitive capacities. They are classified into five groups:

• Use of semantic characteristics: design of semantic maps, charts in order to integrate the new word with the stored information in the readers’ mind.
• Use of context: search of semantic elements in the text which are equivalent, complementary or descriptive in relation to the given unknown word.
• Analysis of word components: associations of lexical items using family of words, suffixes and prefixes among others.
• Recognition of words: use of a phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic or pragmatic processing to decode the word.
• Use of reference material: search of conceptual information which cannot be given by the text or mental lexicon in dictionaries, encyclopedias and text books.

Lewis (1997) claims that language consists of lexical chunks which can produce continuous coherent texts when combined together (p. 7). The author explains that an elemental lexicon consisting of individual words is not adequate to make readers functionally effective to tackle texts. He supports the idea that accurate

noticing of lexical chunks, grammatical and phonological patters “all help convert input into intake, and provide the central strategy of the Lexical Approach” (p. 53). Consequently, a sixth classification needs to be added: recognition of lexical chunks. McCarthy (as cited in Lewis, 1997) expresses that “Over-concentration on learning single words may hinder the development of the L2 phrasal lexicon and deny the opportunities this gives for rapid retrieval and fluent connections” (p. 56). Likewise, the development of foreign language vocabulary might be affected negatively by overconcentration on learning lexical items in isolation.

 

Oxford (Oxford, 1990) acknowledges that research has shifted from what students learn to how the process of learning occurs. That is the reason why it may be crucial to focus teachers’ attention on the training of the aforementioned reading strategies to acquire reading skills in ELT.

 

Strategy 8: Identification of propositions: structure analysis (Propositional strategies)

Propositional Strategies

Readers employ propositional strategies to reconstruct the text base by means of the propositions established in the sentences of the text. Cubo de Severino et al. (2008) define a proposition as the meaning of a sentence which represents events that happen in any possible world. A sentence can have more than one preposition, i.e. it may refer to more than one event (p. 186).

 

Propositions are units which can be analyzed in terms of a predicate, which is syntactically represented by a verb; and one or more arguments, syntactically represented by nouns or noun phrases (Cubo de Severino et al., 2008, p. 187). Besides, propositions can be compound and complex in the same way sentences are compound when they contain one or more clauses; or complex when they have at least one subordinate clause (Cubo de Severino et al., 2008, pp. 191-192). These clauses may express different degrees of proximities among the events they relate to:

 

• O – No relation: it is characterized by lists of words or incoherent discourse.
• Indirect coherence: the events belong to the same episode in the possible world sharing a setting, plot and meaning. They are expressed by sentences which are not included one after the other.
• Direct coherence: the events are described in linear clauses or sentences and the relation is expressed by connectors such as then, as a result, thus, so, therefore, etc.
• Coordinated connection: the events are related as cause and consequence, forming a single event as unity. Frequently, they form a compound sentence joined by explicit coordinating connectors.
• Subordinated connection: events are not organized as a sequence but in a hierarchical order, since one event is presented as the specification of the other.
• Integration: one event determines on aspect of the other event. They are typically expressed by relative clauses.
• Reduction: the event is reduced to one of its properties, expressing it through adjectivization.

 

These different propositional relationships are expressed in the surface structure of the sentence by using specific connectors, as well as other factors such as context and reader´s knowledge of the world. (Cubo de Severino et al., 2008)

 

When readers make use of these propositional strategies, they represent a possible world, its settings and other circumstances in which those events described in the text may take place. Then, they build the representation of the objects or persons which are included and participate as well as other events

within the situation. After that, the individuals obtain their roles in relation to those events such as agent, object, and instrument. This strategic interpretation aids the reader to build the propositional scheme in order to comprehend the sentences and text. Word order, morphological structure, and syntactic categories at the surface structure of the text help readers build the propositional scheme (Cubo de Severino et al., 2008).

Strategy 6: Identification of local coherence: meaning relation of sentences & Strategy 7: Identification of local coherence: referential relation of sentences – Cohesion

Microstructural Strategies

 

Readers employ microstructural strategies to relate pieces of a new sentence with the previously processed ones in their intention to obtain local coherence. This term is defined as the semantic relations that exist among the sentences included in a text. Readers make use of mental processes in order to comprehend the semantic associations between two sentences which appear one after the other in a text. (Cubo de Severino et al., 2008, p. 152)

The relations between sentences can be of two types: based on meaning or based on reference. The first group is also called intentional relations since the associations are based on the concepts that are expressed. These relations are functional and they are established when a sentence specifies, explains or exemplifies the other. Hence, they give coherence to the text. The second group is also referred to as extensional relations since the associations are based on the objects that are denoted. These objects are called cohesive devices and they can be of three types: grammatical, lexical and rhetorical devices. The first group includes reference, ellipsis, substitution, conjunctions, comparatives and tenses. The second group includes reiteration, collocation, substitution and ellipsis. The third group contains questions and parallelism. The typical linguistic elements that establish referential relations are pronouns. Words can also maintain semantic relations such as synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, and others (Cubo de Severino et al., 2008, pp.153-154).

Readers make use of their knowledge of the word to establish local coherence. Yet, this is not an isolated phenomenon which occurs on its own, but it is related and also included in the global coherence of the text. Thus, local coherence strategies are unconscious mixed cognitive processes which can be combined with global coherence strategies, use of previous knowledge strategies, pragmatic and communicative strategies (Cubo de Severino et al., 2008, p.157).

Strategy 4: Detection of global coherence (Semantic Level) & Strategy 5: Identification of author´s intention (Pragmatic Level)

Macrostructural strategies

Readers employ macrostructural strategies to summarize the global information contained in the text. Cubo de Severino et al. (2008) distinguish two types of macrostructure: the semantic and the pragmatic. The former deals with the main idea of the text or topic whereas the latter deals with the global speech act or general intention (pp. 130-131).

The semantic macrostructure is the abstract representation of the global structure of the meaning of the text and it is formed by the main ideas which are explicitly or implicitly included in it. Readers cannot possibly remember all the details so they combine the textual information with the context and their schemata in order to construct the semantic macrostructure or main idea. The pragmatic macrostructure is the author’s intention to write the text as well as the purpose he/she has in mind: to inform, to entertain, to ask, to give advice, to argue among others. Readers use both macrostructures to reconstruct the global meaning of the text (Cubo de Severino et al., 2008, 130-131).

Van Dijk and Kintsch (as cited in Cubo de Severino) recognize two types of macrostructures: contextual and textual. Contextual macrostructural strategies are based on the reader’s knowledge of the world, which proves useful to predict situations; as well as the reader’s knowledge of the contents in the different types of texts, which aid the readers in the predictions of possible topics included. Textual macrostructures are based on the syntactic and semantic structures of the text and its markers which aid the readers in making discursive inferences (p. 132).