Tools and Settings
Content
Questions and Tasks
The purpose of this chapter is to introduce the notion of communicative competence in foreign language teaching and provide available resources for enhancing language learners’ language skills through integrating technology into your instruction. We focus on two aspects - authenticity and collaboration, and how to create learning environments incorporating these ideas through technology integration. After our discussion on the two aspects, we compile a list of online resources that you can refer to when teaching different language skills, followed by two scenario-based examples.
Among the five World-Readiness Standards for Learning Languages proposed by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (Cutshell, 2012), communication is one of the five focal areas that decide how effective language learners can use language competence to participate in communities through achieving different communication goals, such as interacting with other members, understanding communication topics, or presenting information to various audience. The emergence of technology has made it easier for language instructors to improve their students’ communicative competence as more forms of group work, teacher-student interactions, and authentic learning situations become available.
Communicative competence goes without saying to be one of the most important goals for foreign language teaching. Learning a foreign language allows students to be connected with the world and be able to understand and communicate with people of other cultures, which has become inevitable in today’s diverse classrooms and workplaces. However, being able to communicate in a foreign language, in written or oral form, is not easy. It is made up by competences beyond linguistic knowledge. The following figure offers an overview on the four areas contributing to communicative competence:
As shown in figure 1, communicative competence requires more than knowing the vocabulary, grammar or language patterns. The foreign language learners also need to be fully aware of the social rules of the target language, the cultural references, the communication modes and then strategically utilize various communicative strategies to build up a successful communication. Therefore, as we help our language learners develop their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills, we need to consider how our instruction addresses all four areas of competence constituent of the communicative competence.
A communicative language learning approach heavily emphasizes language learning through interactions and real-life learning situations. To create lessons that enhance students’ communicative competence, two concepts you would not want to miss are authenticity and collaboration.
To enhance students’ communicative competence, one essential element of our teaching is the authenticity of the learning tasks. However, simply having students use the target language does not mean the learning task is authentic. Johnston (2007) pointed out that when learning tasks are presented in the form of drills or lockstep question-answer exercises, “the substance of the message is either completely immaterial or secondary to the grammatical form” (p. 64). To ensure the authenticity of language learning tasks, consider the following two questions:
Now, if it were twenty or thirty years ago, incorporating authentic materials or communication tasks probably wouldn’t be the easiest task for foreign language instructors, but thanks to modern technologies, finding authentic materials and reaching out to authentic audience has made relatively easy. Through various information technologies, engaging in authentic communications with authentic audience who speaks the language without travelling abroad becomes possible.
It requires more than basic language skills to make effective communication happen, and building students’ communication competence in collaborative learning environments gives them chance to focus their attention on linguistic development during social interactions. Collaboration allows students to work together toward a shared goal, through which they verbalize their ideas and engage in decision-making processes that stimulate awareness of their own strengths and weaknesses and leads to better comprehension of the content.
When we design a collaborative task, here are two key questions to ask ourselves:
Of course, there are more to keep in mind as we design collaborative tasks, like how to group the students strategically to ensure enough diversity in the group or to ensure contribution from each group member, and whether or not we provide enough scaffolding to enable the students to complete the task, just like in other types of learning tasks. But here we especially want to emphasize that putting students in groups would not make it a collaborative task; rather, how to set up a task where each group member can serve as resources to one another and where languages mediate the process of meaning negotiation is what makes this language learning experience collaborative and meaningful. Many of the new technologies have been born with the idea of collaboration in mind. These technology tools not only diversify forms of collaboration but also create handy platforms that extend learning outside the classroom.
Being able to communicate in a foreign language involves the speaker’s integrated competence of the 6 language skills: grammar, listening, speaking, reading, writing and culture. In actual communications, these 6 skills are all necessary in order for a successful communication to happen. For example, imagine that a student wanted to talk to a professor about the assignment requirements. In this scenario, a series of literacy events happened and connected to one another, leading to the final communication event. First, the student needs to have the reading competence to understand the assignment description. He or she probably also needs to write an email to the professor in order to schedule the meeting. With this email correspondence as well as the face-to-face meeting, whether the student is familiar with the social rules of the culture dictates how successful this communication would be. In the face-to-face meeting, listening and speaking skills are undoubtedly critical for both parties to understand each other. Finally, the grammar knowledge governs the student’s comprehension of all language output in all the literacy events.
So, as you can see from the example, all 6 language skills are equally important and need to be taught in an integrative way. But for the sake of categorization, we listed out the 6 language skills as separate categories and introduce technology tools that are particularly useful, but not limited to, for fostering certain types of language skills.
Miss Lee teaches Chinese as foreign language at the Sunshine Elementary School in the midwest. She usually has about 15 to 20 students in 3rd to 6th grade in her class. They are all beginning learners with very limited Chinese proficiency. In this lesson unit, she designed activities and projects that prompt students to introduce their family members and compare the family values in Chinese and American culture. The lesson goes as following:
Miss Lee first taught the keywords for addressing family members in Chinese (e.g., mother, father, older sister and younger brother). Chinese has different titles for different relatives in the family depending on the seniority and whether the relative is from the father’s side or the mother’s side. Miss Lee explained the basic system for deciding how you address a relative. To help students visualize the relationship, she searched and found a diagram that depicts the basic structure of the extended Chinese family with titles for all relatives at https://edtechbooks.org/-Id.
Miss Lee then taught students two useful sentence patterns they can use to introduce family members later in communicative contexts:
(
_______
_______.)
Miss Lee asked the students to introduce family members who live with them on Flipgrid [https://info.flipgrid.com/]. She asked the students to either draw pictures of their family members or find photos of their family members for the introduction. Miss Lee encouraged students to practice doing the introduction a few times before they record their responses on Flipgrid.
Miss Lee taught additional new sentence pattern, vocabulary and grammar that students need to know in order to engage in a later discussion about their family members in Chinese.
Miss Lee divided students into groups. Each group has 4-5 students. Students work with group members to listen to all the video responses and complete a worksheet created with google doc on their digital devices. On the worksheet, Miss Lee listed questions in Chinese such as:
If students couldn’t understand what the person said in the video, they are encouraged to ask the person to explain himself or herself in Chinese with the facilitation of body language, gestures and other techniques for overcoming language gaps.
Miss Lee designed a Socrative [https://www.socrative.com/] game to help students review all the sentence patterns, vocabulary and grammars in an integrative and engaging way. Students are divided into groups to compete with one another. Using the video responses students posted on Flipgrid, Miss Lee developed quiz questions such as:
Miss Lee guided the students to discuss the common familial relationship and family structure in the US based on their observation of their own and their classmates’ family structures. To guide the discussion, Miss Lee asked the following questions:
After the discussion, Miss Lee showed the BBC lesson “Family introductions” (https://edtechbooks.org/-KY) to review some basic sentence patterns and vocabulary words, and offer some initial cultural insights about Chinese families.
To engage students in authentic communications with audience outside of the classroom, Miss Lee arranged Skype [https://www.skype.com/en/] sessions for the students to chat with Chinese native speakers to learn facts about their families. Students worked in a group of four on this telecommunication project. Each group interviewed 4 Chinese people to learn about their family members and their familial values. Students took turn to be the interviewer, note taker, cameraman and technology leader for the interviews.
To prepare students for the activity, Miss Lee and her students also spent one class period to come up with interview questions and did a mock interview in class. Miss Lee used the following questions to guide students’ thought process:
As the final culminating activity, Miss Lee had students create a digital essay to share their understanding about families in China and in the US. With this assignment, students worked with the same group members and used Shadow Puppet [http://get-puppet.co/] to make the digital essay by incorporating photos, videos, drawings and voice-overs. Miss Lee created a worksheet to facilitate students’ script writing process and encouraged students to think about how they want to discuss the differences and similarities between Chinese and American families in the form of a video.
Miss Dubois teaches French as a foreign language to students at the Henderson Middle School, which locates in a city in the east coast of the U.S. Typically, she has around 15 to 18 students in her class. Her students have learned some basic knowledge of grammatical gender, basic forms of pronouns, first-, second-, and third-group regular verbs in present tense, and a few other basic grammatical rules. The topics covered before mainly focused on greetings, family members, responding to questions, clothing, and some daily activities. The topic of this lesson is food. In this lesson unit, students learned to discuss food and drinks in social occasions in French. Miss Dubois took the following steps when teaching this lesson:
In learning a foreign language, gaining vocabulary knowledge is an important way for students to understand others and to get themselves understood. Miss Dubois introduced key vocabulary to her students, and selected a group of more common words to make a study list for her students on Quizlet [https://quizlet.com/].
The study set she created was added as one of the study sets for her class. She created different kinds of exercises as homework for the students, and monitored the study progress her students had made for each study set. To make vocabulary practices more fun, she decided to also use the gravity game feature. Using this features requires no additional effort form teachers. You will just need to select a study set you have created earlier, and the site will help you turn it into a gravity game.
Miss Dubois introduced several grammatical patterns, and emphasized those her students would need to use in communication with their classmates and pen pals in later tasks, such as the following:
Since one of the goals of this lesson is to enable students to talk about food with friends, Miss Dubois selected a short clip of a similar scenario where an English speaking student who wants to improve his French has connected with friends who are far away in Marseille, France. Though the context available to Miss Dubois’ students would not be the same as that in this video, students would get to visualize how that communication looks like. The video selected is from BBC Bitesize Modern Languages (https://edtechbooks.org/-UH), but just keep in mind that the point of using a video at this stage is to build up cultural knowledge students may need in later tasks while giving them chance to review vocabulary in an authentic context.
It is always good to reuse a video students watch for practicing other language skills. For example, the video Miss Dubois selected to give her students more cultural input and review vocabulary can also be used to expand a discussion on topics related to cross-cultural communication or comparison. Did Ben and his French friends encounter any communication problems? What kind of problems do you think would happen if you were Ben? How would you solve them? These are just some questions you can ask to help your students better develop cross-cultural awareness, and you will sure find more to ask. Once you and your students spend enough time on a topic extended from the discussion, it is the right time to have them put thoughts into words. You can implement individual or collaborative writing tasks, depending on how well-prepared your students are in writing about the given topic. Alternatively, you can have your students start a blog that can be used to enhance collaboration between classmates as well as between them and their future pen pal (whom they will get connected later through PenPal Schools). Since having students exchange with a pen pal about a topic is our next step, it is important too that your students are equipped with the writing skills needed in exchanging with their pen pal.
For language learners, nothing is more exciting than communicating with a real person in the target language. Miss Dubois connected her students with students who were doing the same project around the world through PenPal Schools [https://www.penpalschools.com/]. The site offers a variety of online classes/projects for teachers to choose from. You can narrow your search based on the date to start, the project length, the subject, etc. as the screenshot shows below.
Once you decide on the project, you will get a class code, with which you can invite your students to join you on the site. Then students will be matched based on the subject they are studying, age, etc. Convenience isn’t the best part of using this site. As a teacher, we will need to keep our students safe in the learning space. PenPal Schools makes it easy not only to monitor the interaction between your students and their pen pal but also to rate their performance on the project, since you will be able to see all the exchanges between them.
One thing to pay attention to is that there usually will be deadlines for finding a match; be sure to consider this when you plan to use this site in your classroom. If you are not sure how to start, this blog article from a teacher in the PenPal Schools Global Ambassador Program (https://edtechbooks.org/-GUF) will give you some useful tips when you get ready for it.
The Alberta Government. (n.d.). Supporting English language learners: Tools, strategies and resources. Retrieved from http://www.learnalberta.ca/content/eslapb/about_communicative_competence.html [https://edtechbooks.org/-BCb])
Cutshall, S. (2012). More than a decade of standards: Integrating "communication" in your language instruction. The Language Educator. Retrieved from https://www.actfl.org/publications/all/world-readiness-standards-learning-languages/standards-summary [https://edtechbooks.org/-HWh]
Gilmore, A. (2007). Authentic materials and authenticity in foreign language learning. Language Teaching, 40(2), 97-118.
Johnston, B. (2007). Theory and research: Audience, language use, and language learning. In J. Egbert & E. Hanson-Smith (Eds), Call environments: Research, practice, and critical Issues (2nd edn) (pp. 61-70). Alexandria, VA: TESOL.
Lynch, A. (2017, April 24). Getting started with PenPal Schools [Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://blog.penpalschools.com/home/getting-started-with-penpal-schools
World-readiness standards for learning languages. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.actfl.org/publications/all/world-readiness-standards-learning-languages/standards-summary