We are pleased to announce that the REaD REPORTS, our official interviews with our plenary speakers from our Sabanci University School of Languages 2nd International Conference on Language Education, are now available on our School of Languages TV. In these interviews our speakers refer to their 2011 Eclipsing Expectations presentations.  If you wish to do some background reading before watching please click on the summary link for each speaker:

Plenary speakers and their titles included in the REaD Reports’ interviews are:

Christine Coombe’s Plenary Title:

Foreign/Second Language Teacher Assessment Literacy:  Issues, Challenges and Recommendations

Summary Here

Joe Pereira’s Plenary Title:

A narrative at war with a crossword: an introduction to Interactive Fiction

Summary here

Kathleen Bailey’s Plenary Title:

Eclipsing Expectations: Bridging Student Learning and Teacher Development with Dialogue Journals

Summary here

Nur Kurtoğlu Hooton’s Plenary:

“Noticing critical incidents and learning to reflect critically”

Summary here

Patsy Lightbown’s Plenary Title:

Transfer-appropriate processing: How can we ensure that classroom learning is transferable?

Summary here

Tony Humphreys’ Plenary Title:

The Inner Course of Teaching and Learning

Summary here

Click here to watch the REaD REPORTS

Adam John Simpson, rediscovers Interactive Fiction through Joe Pereira’s Eclipsing Expectations June 2011 Plenary, and hard copy interactive fiction books.  In this post Are you likely to be eaten by a Grue? Interactive Fiction in the Language Classroom he begins to share some ideas of where to start exploring this interesting tool for learning.

Concurrent comment collective: Some of the teachers at Sabanci University School of Languages got together to share their thoughts and reflections on some of the concurrent sessions from June 2nd-4th that they attended.  Please feel free to add to the comment wall by emailing EclipsingX@gmail.com or by posting below in our blog comment box.

Click for the comment wall

Nesrin Eren, is a teacher trainer and lecturer at Bilgi University in Istanbul, Turkey. In this post on Nesrin’s blog she gives a comprehensive overview of intelligence as well as a detailed write up of her June 4th Eclipsing Expectations conference workshop:

“Feeding” the intelligences

Click here to feed your intelligence and journey into ‘Intelligo me Intelligere’

Andrew Bosson has prepared an amazing Prezi presentation which summarizes the sessions he attended at our conference: Eclipsing Expectations.  Please click below on the Prezi presentation and enjoy this journey as much as we did.  There are also great links here.

Written by Jonathan Smith

Joe Pereira, British Council Portugal: A narrative at war with a crossword: an introduction to Interactive Fiction

(Joe’s Plenary and concurrent slides are here)

Joe introduced a type of computer game called Interactive Fiction, which as it dates originally from the early days of home computing when graphics were either not available or very primitive, is primarily text-based. There are many of these types of games available in English, Spanish, French and German. The Reader and the Writer tell the story together and it is therefore a mixture of literature and game (hence the title of the plenary).

In this type of game, the reader is able to influence the pace and to determine how the story unfolds through input in natural language. The game takes the readers input, analyses it and responds to it. The reader can also back-track and discover different paths through the narrative. It is a little similar to the idea of a “Reading Maze”, but at a more sophisticated level. The reader is engaged in the story as an outcome is sought through the second person narrative and logical puzzles.

Joe demonstrated on simple game of this type called 9:05 by Adam Cadre (2000), which takes about 20 minutes to play and has two different endings depending on the input the reader puts into the story.

He then outlines some of its usefulness for language learning:
• Language is context-based
• “Stealth” learning (i.e. learners pick up much without consciously focusing on learning)
• Cognitive skills such as problem solving and critical thinking are employed
• Situated learning
• Meaning is focused on more than fluency of reading
• Less teacher-centred
• Vocabulary is encountered in a meaningful context
• Learners need to fully understand each part of text to decide what input to give
• If played alone dictionary skills will need to be necessary
• If played in pairs this will lead to much negotiation of meaning

Joe also pointed out the necessity of considering the genre and theme of the game and its length and recommend that the teacher needs to play the game and explore the different narrative paths to be able to support. He also gave some useful links:
http://digitalplay.info/blog has information about creating classroom activities for computer games
www.IFDB.tads.org and www.wurb.com/if and www.brasslantern.org have IF downloads
http://parchment.toolness.com and www.iplayif.com have online IF games

Finally, you can find more from Joe about Interactive Fiction from his website www.theswanstation.com

REFLECTIVE QUESTIONS

How appropriate would this kind of computer game be in your teaching situation?
In what other ways could this kind of game be exploited in the language class (and outside the classroom too)?

Click here to watch Joe Pereira’s REaD REPORT

Written by Zeynep Urkun

Christine Coombe

F/SL Teacher Assessment Literacy: Issues, Challenges and Recommendations

Christine Coombe’s session, titled: “F/SL Teacher Assessment Literacy: Issues, Challenges and Recommendations” started with her philosophy of testing, stating that to her testing and assessment meant the same in a broader sense. Both need to be guided by cornerstones of good testing practice and teachers’ involvement is absolutely essential.

She then moved on to explain how teachers and students view assessment which, in both cases, is generally from a negative perspective. She then went on to explain the main characteristics of an assessment-literate teacher, saying that there have been only a handful of studies looking into the important area of assessment knowledge among teachers. Most of these concluded that many teachers lack sufficient training in assessment because most teacher education programs offer limited or no courses on this although student assessment is one of teachers’ most demanding, complex and important jobs. However, in order to promote transparency for teachers and students, in order to make feedback accessible and meaningful and in order for teachers to feel ownership, they have to be involved in assessment.

Coombe then went on to explain four models of in-house test development, namely “Teachers Write the Tests”, “Testing Specialists Write the Tests”, “Administration Buys the Test” and “Teachers/Testers Write the Tests”, explaining the advantages and disadvantages of each, concluding that the last option is the most preferable. However, she said, in order to apply this model, teachers had to acquire certain assessment skills, such as learning how to design tests, to analyze test results, to provide diagnostic feedback to students, evaluate the quality of tests/tasks, evaluate learner performance according to rating scales and write evaluative reports. Still, she stated, there were challenges such as no time to pursue much needed testing training, insufficient resources, trust issues, getting institutional and administrative support, overcoming increased workload, mismatch between teaching and testing and the fact that alternative assessment still had a few slippery slopes.

Coombe concluded by saying that the way to go about is for teachers and testing professionals to stay in close touch to communicate on needs/resources and to use the available technology/internet resources.

Click here to watch Christine Coombe’s REaD REPORT

Are you a blogger or have always wanted to try blogging?  Well here is your chance.

We looking for conference delegates and our virtual online community to share their reflections on our Eclipsing Expectation June 2011 conference.  These reflections will be published on this blog.  We are looking for blog posts of 250-500 words or short videos.

What can you write about?

We do not want to restrict your imagination so anything that comes to mind is possible.  Here are a few ideas to help you on your way:

1) summary of a concurrent session or plenary

2) reflections on any question that struck you during the conference

3) Educational application of an idea

4) Someone interesting you spoke to

5) A meaningful experience for you

6) Something you put into practice

There are many more possibilities, so please do not feel limited by these.

Deadline: From now until July 31st, 2011

How to submit- Please either post in the comments box of this post or send to our blog email: EclipsingX@gmail.com

Happy Writing or videoing.)

Written by Zeynep İskenderoğlu Önel

Eclipsing Expectations: Bridging student learning and teacher development with dialog journals

Kathleen Bailey

Kathleen Bailey discussed the invaluable use of dialog journals in EFL classes as learning tools for both educators and learners. She explained how journals provide students the opportunity to use the language as well as to express themselves.

Key concepts that she explained in her talk is summarized below:

She says in dialogue journals, communication becomes systematically dialogic through the way language teaching and learning are organized. Dialogue journals “facilitate the development of new knowledge and awarenesses on the part of both students and teachers” and they “provide a new perspective in promoting language and culture learning through scaffolded interaction.”

She referred to Walqui & van Lier (2010) to define pedagogical scaffolding.  Pedagogical scaffolding is “progressive help provided by the more knowledgeable to the less knowledgeable.” She explained the significance of these journals in terms of how teacher responses can help students reflect critically. What is important about scaffolding is that actually once the individuals are capable of performing themselves, the “scaffold” is removed.

Below is the chart to show the features of pedagogical scaffolding from Walqui & van Lier (2010) showing that actually it is not a static process.

She also mentioned input, interaction and affordances . By affordances she means the relationship individuals build with another individual in their environment. She exemplified this notion referring to Tony Humphreys’ suggestion that each learner has a different teacher. In other words, the relation between the teacher and each individual student is unique and not necessarily similar to others.

She then shared the results of a study she is conducting with David Chisea and Ryan Damerow. Each of the researchers examined the learning that occurred between themselves as EFL educators, and their university students. The teachers learned about their students’ background, impressions from in-class activities and discussions, and specific cultural information. The study does not only focus on student learning and development, but on ongoing professional development of educators, as well.

They analyzed journals in terms of 4 caregories namely awareness (our attention to attitude, skills and knowledge); attitude (stance toward self, activity, and others); skills (the “how of teaching” — methods, techniques, activities, materials and other tools (for Ss, the 4 skills, analysis, studying)); knowledge (the what of teaching” — our subject matter and our knowledge of the students, as well as the sociocultural and institutional context)

The analysis revealed that in student learning happened in terms of Knowledge, Attitude, Skills, Awareness. However, educators learning happened in only 3 categories: Knowledge, Attitude, Awareness.

• She finished her talk by posing some questions for the audience to think about:
• Are dialogue journals culturally appropriate in all contexts?
• Should teachers grade and/or correct students’ dialogue journal entries? If so, how?
• What is the optimal length and frequency of dialogue journal entries to achieve their potential benefits?
• Do teachers who share the students’ home culture have opportunities to learn from the dialogue journals, or is this opportunity only relevant to teachers from another culture?

Click here to watch Kathleen Bailey’s REaD REPORT