L1-Educational Studies in Language and Literature
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Communicating local knowledge in a foreign language: A comparative study of ideational and interpersonal aspects of primary school pupils\u27 L1 and L2 texts in the Seychelles
Get PDFDrawing on evidence from second language medium of instruction (L2 MoI) context (the Seychelles), the objective of the study was to investigate to what extent the choice of language is a factor that influences pupils\u27 writing and their opportunities to incorporate their own knowledge, person, experiences and world views in their school knowledge production. The evidence is based on findings from a corpus of 308 written texts, produced by 154 primary six pupils in the Seychelles in the subject of Social Studies, where each pupil answered the same task under controlled conditions in their native tongue (Kreol Seselwa) and in English (L2 MoI) in a counterbalanced design. Apart from text length, aspects of two metafunctions from Halliday\u27s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) were investigated in the analyses, namely 1) the cognitive ideational dimension and 2) the social and interpersonal dimension. With relevance to the ideational dimension, we also looked at how students resorted to code switching to express their ideas. The results of the study show that pupils produced longer texts when writing in Kreol Seselwa and that they code switched more in the English texts. Further, the Kreol Seselwa texts contained far richer vocabulary to describe the semantic domain of the locally contextualised topic of the exercise. It was also evident that pupils used far more first-person pronouns when writing in their mother tongue, indicating a closer engagement with the text than when they wrote in English. The study has implications for policymakers, teachers and most importantly learners in other multilingual settings, particularly in post-colonial countries like the Seychelles, where the mother tongue is undervalued in the classroom
Pupil preconception as a source of solutions to lingering problems of grammar teaching?
Get PDFThe main aim of the paper is to show pupil language preconception as a fundamental part of L1 teaching. This theorisation is compliant with the model of educational reconstruction and constructivist principles in education which are the sources of the modern productive culture in education. Based on concrete examples of grammar matter in Czech, the study demonstrates how research into pupil preconceptions can guide teaching grammar so that it is functional, communication-oriented and cognitively challenging. The results of the presented studies show that even pupils of primary school possess developed preconceptions of language phenomena, which, however, school education often ignores. This fact is later a potential source of various lingering problems and failure of L1 teaching. The study illustrates (a) how it is possible to use language preconceptions as a source for modelling the curriculum of L1 teaching, and (b) how lingering problems of L1 teaching can be linked to the fact that pupils\u27 understanding and thinking about language is mostly neglected
Teaching fiction in the age of measurability: Teachers\u27 perspectives on the hows and whats in Swedish L1 classrooms
Get PDFStudies have shown a slow but steady change in reading habits among students in Swedish upper secondary schools. The frequency with which they read fiction on a daily basis has decreased and reading comprehension has declined. Consequently, Swedish politicians and school authorities have taken measures to reverse these trends. Fiction reading has traditionally been a part of the Swedish subject, but whereas the course syllabi in the upper secondary school stipulate that fiction be taught, they pay little attention to how. This study examines how teachers describe the process of literary education. In doing so, it suggests that monitoring students is central to teachers\u27 didactic decisions, and that both teachers and students regard printed books more highly than both audiobooks and e-books. The data was collected using two focus groups interviews with upper secondary school teachers of Swedish, seven female and five male, age 28 to 61. The analysis was grounded in a phenomenographic examination of experience, allowing themes to emerge through iterative coding. The findings show that the teachers\u27 view on literary education is associated with instrumentality and teacher-centered activities—the discussions circled around practical aspects, with no mention of teaching objectives, approaches, or literary experience
Facilitating second-language learners\u27 access to expository texts: Teachers\u27 understanding of the challenges involved
No full textMany second-language learners (SLLs) struggle with comprehending texts in their second language. However, teachers have reported feeling incompetent when it comes to teaching SLLs. The purpose of this study was to investigate teachers\u27 understanding of the challenges involved in facilitating SLLs\u27 access to expository texts. Data were collected through interviews with nine teachers of 10–12-year-olds. The findings show that the teachers understood text challenges to be found at the word and text levels. Further, the teachers recognized SLLs\u27 need for text-comprehension support, which they seemed to understand mainly as providing explanations for words and texts. However, they questioned the effectiveness of their adapted teaching. The findings suggest that the teachers\u27 understanding of the issue may unintentionally restrict SLLs\u27 academic-language development and their opportunities to learn from texts. Hence there may be a need for a change in the teachers\u27 understanding of what it means to give access to texts in order to empower SLLs for future participation in society
Enhancing children\u27s literacy learning: From invented spelling to effective reading and writing
Get PDFThis longitudinal study aimed at testing the long-term impact of invented spelling activities conducted in kindergarten on children\u27s literacy skills throughout primary school until the end of Grade 3. The participants were 100 Portuguese 5-year-olds that were randomly assigned into two equivalent groups and took part in 10 training sessions: invented spelling (experimental condition) or storybook reading (control condition). Writing and reading skills were tested in kindergarten, Grade 1 and Grade 3. The results showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in kindergarten and benefited more from formal school teaching instruction. Lasting effects were found as the invented spelling condition presented statistically significant higher scores in reading and writing in primary education. These findings support empirical evidence for enhancing young children\u27s learning in favour of their later literacy performance
Assessing oracy: Chasing the teachers\u27 unspoken oracy construct across disciplines in the landscape between policy and freedom
Get PDFThe aim is to capture teachers\u27 implicit oracy construct across disciplines through surveying 495 teachers on a high-stakes oral national exam in the 10th grade. The survey and the results were interpreted with concepts and ideas from rhetorical theory and tradition. The results of the study show that teachers value a complex oracy construct. The teachers\u27 genre expectancy for oracy seem to be a balance be-tween the three modes of persuasion: logos (i.e., subject specific content), ethos (the ability to display character), and pathos (the ability to have an emotional influence on the audience). The constructs have specific discipline characteristics as well as features that are consistent within disciplines. For teachers, a pattern of a unified oracy construct is developed from, and embedded in, their collective everyday prac-tices, culture, and traditions. The discussion raises issues related to future curriculum development and educational sustainability
Stịm·mig: Assessing prosodic comprehension in primary school
Get PDFThe German speaking countries have tested L1 listening proficiency in large national assessment studies during the past decade. However, testing prosodic comprehension—that is, students\u27 ability to understand prosodically encoded content—has remained a blind spot, primarily because test items focusing on this specific aspect of listening have been lacking. The project stịm·mig aims to fill this gap by developing and evaluating test items that measure students\u27 ability to understand prosodically encoded content in auditory texts. In this article, we explain the basic process of item construction, and we present sample items to illustrate the item design. Thanks to the collaboration of the Institute for Educational Quality Improvement (IQB) in Berlin, we were able to administer and evaluate the items in a large pilot study in 252 third-grade classrooms (N = 4,893 students). The main goal of this large-scale assessment was to evaluate the suitability of the reading and listening items so that they might be used for national, large-scale assessment studies. We tested the effects of the presentation modes (written vs. auditory) of the stimulus texts and test items in a multiple matrix sampling design. Our findings show that prosodic com-prehension is a construct that is empirically distinguishable from both verbal comprehension and reading comprehension. However, more detailed analysis is needed to fully understand the structure of the prosodic comprehension construct
Improving public speaking in secondary education: Exploring the potential of an improvisation training
Get PDFPublic speaking occupies a central position in secondary education, and often teachers introduce improvisation training to improve this competence, but it is yet unclear if this teaching approach has a beneficial impact. In this respect, this paper addresses the following research question: Does an improvisation training that focuses on eye-contact, voice, and body language have an impact on the public speaking competence of students in secondary education? In this study with a quasi-experimental design, we assessed the impact of the intervention with a control group with a pre- and posttest of a speaker\u27s public speaking competence scored via compared judgement of videos of speaking exercises. The intervention had a significant but modest effect, but a number of important caveats need to be formulated. Age of participants, group size, and professionalism of the instructor might all partly determine the effect of such an improvisation training, but these variables were not integrated into the research design of this study