Open Source ESL/EFL Curriculum for Young Learners

Update

Due to personal issues, I haven’t been able to focus a lot of time on the Immersion Quest Project. I hope to get back into the swing of it soon.

-Matt

The End of the Rainbow

On a slight tangent to young learner ESL/EFL curriculum, my children’s/family screenplay THE END OF THE RAINBOW made the quarterfinals of the BlueCat Screenplay Competition. The synopsis/logline is: “Because she believes it’s her fault the family’s Bed & Breakfast is going to be foreclosed upon, a twelve-year-old girl with the mind of a much younger child and her eight-year-old “older” brother set off into the woods to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

The semi-finalists will be announced on July 15th, and the finalists on August 1st. I just found out that if you make the finals, you are able to submit an updated version of the script for consideration. I suppose I should- and I will- work on a revision just in case.

“Freedom”

Last night, my 4th grade equivalent level EFL class, one 5th and two 6th graders in actual age, were reading “Amelia and Eleanor Go For a Ride” from Reading Street Grade 4.  We were discussing how Amelia and Eleanor felt the same about, respectively,  flying an airplane and driving a car: Doing so gave them a feeling of independence.

I asked my students what “feeling of independence” meant. They agreed it was the feeling of “freedom.” I went around the room asking each student about when he or she felt “free.” The oldest boy said, “When I play video games.” The girl said, “When I write or make something.” The younger boy said, “Never.”

Emergency Rooms

I haven’t blogged in a couple days because my three year-old daughter has been suffering from a bout of gastroenteritis. Despite our efforts to keep her hydrated, yesterday she got to the point where a trip to the emergency room was necessitated for re-hydration therapy. We spent about eight hours at the hospital while she went through tests and then had water, saline and glucose given to her through an IV drip. Today, my daughter is doing somewhat better, but still distinctly under the weather.

While we were in the emergency room, a relatively young man in what looked like military-style exercise clothing in a bay a couple down from the pediatric session went into what to my untrained eye looked like cardiac arrest, and although the medical staff clearly did their best, he died.

It’s not my point to blog about what happened to reflect on the fleeting nature of life, although what happened did give me pause, but rather to reflect on how the emergency room seemed to function as a system.

In a TV show there might have been a great deal of attention and focus on his passing, and while I don’t think there was anything disrespectful about what I could see in how his body was subsequently handled, it was a busy emergency room and there were a lot of other patients to deal with.  I guess I don’t know what I was expecting, but I suppose it’s not surprising that death is relatively normal part of the process of a hospital emergency room.

I intended to have a point relating to frame of reference and education, but I think I’ll leave off here for the moment.

Thoughts on ENGLISH NEXT 2006

I finished reading David Graddol’s book “English Next 2006.” I have yet to start “English Next India 2010,” but before I do I want to document some thoughts, observations and predictions.

I read a comment on Jason Renshaw’s blog claiming David Graddol asserted that ELT was endangered. That’s not exactly accurate. The argument Graddol does make is that ELT as currently constituted will need to change to reflect emerging global patterns in English usage, and that UK and USA native speaker standards may not remain the benchmark by which everyone else measures their proficiency. He makes a case- I think correctly- that ELT will shift towards a focus on young learners. The teaching of older learners will increasingly become more and more specialized and integrated with content areas.

One of things he forecast I think he got wrong was about that the enrollment of international students at native English country universities are in an inexorable decline. A quick web search on the subject reveals that by 2008, international student enrollments at universities in the United States rebounded to either being at, or were approaching record highs. I suspected this was the case.

In terms of things I’m not sure I agree with about his predictions but want to think about more starts with the question of who will “own” English in the future. It will certainly be a very interesting area of research for generations to come, but I think Graddol underestimates the role of culture in the process of language acquisition. At one point he asserts that other countries may not want English native speakers to be involved in their educational efforts because of the cultural baggage attached. However, you can’t really ever separate language from culture, and I certainly don’t think you can separate culture from the affective aspects of the learning process. I think I’ll leave additional comment on this point for a future post.

The other thing I want to try and think through is his assertion that the rise of global English will seemingly paradoxically create an increasing demand for multilingualism. My gut tells me if you look at the frame of reference of the next hundred years, while the numbers of multilingual people will rise in societies, the functional trends will inexorably point towards English for most practical purposes. And that’s because global human interaction as a whole system is just going to be easier conducted through English. In most kinds of systems- without artificial outside interference- everything naturally flows towards the easier ways of getting things done. I guess that’s a somewhat long-winded way of saying I’m not sure I agree with his assertion that monolingual native English speakers will be at a “severe” competitive disadvantage in the future.

English Next 2006 was definitely thought-provoking, and I’ll be posting further thoughts when I finish up with “English Next India 2010″ in the next couple of days.

English Next

Although I had intended to do a screencast functionality test with Camtasia today as my blog post to demonstrate Articulate Engage’s labeled graphic and timeline interactions as e-learning tools for practicing reading comprehension in an immersive way, I’m instead going to be spending the day reading David Graddol’s The Future of English 1997, English Next 2006 and English Next India 2010.

Debates about “learning styles” crop up from time to time in the ELT blogosphere, and the subject elicits very strong reactions across the board. (Here for example.)

I’m starting to get into the very bad habit of commenting on threads that have long since lain dormant. I’m not going to do that this time and instead post my thoughts here.

Although in the above referenced discussion there are a number of very cogent, very erudite responses, I find it interesting that two issues which seem obvious to me weren’t really addressed by anyone: a) students at the margins, and b) the conflation of methods with outcomes.

Taking these in reverse order, is the fact current methods for implementing them in classrooms can’t be proven to be very effective an indictment of the principle of learning styles? (The conclusion a lot of the commenters in the referenced thread seem to make.) Or is it possible that at the moment we’re just not very good at it, or that the currently utilized frameworks aren’t adequate, or that we just don’t have our educational spaces organized in the ways needed to effectively support genuinely individualized learning? Instead of asserting that learning styles represent a “dead-end,” maybe what we should be looking are the basic assumptions of how education is organized, including whether or not there are better models than the traditional classroom paradigm. Maybe?

The traditional classroom model is designed to organize educational spaces for majorities. It endures for precisely the same reason. That a student is a “visual” learner may or may not be a valid excuse for doing poorly on a given test, but isn’t it worth asking, say on a vocabulary test, whether or not the form of the assessment is more testing mastery of the form itself and not the underlying understanding of the meanings of the words? If the form of something we do truly creates access barriers for a student, shouldn’t we try to do something about it?

It’s very easy to understand how being blind, deaf or suffering from cerebral palsy create educational barriers and need accomodation, but there are also any number of other conditions or circumstances that also create profound impediments to learning that may not be immediately obvious to the teacher. The pernicious thing about marginalization of any kind is it’s a process of invisibility and silence, especially if no one in a position to do something about it is looking at or thinking about the issue.

How do you really know if a given performance/result by a student is a lack of effort or in fact something else, if you don’t ask the question in the first place?

The Holy Grail of English Language Teaching

The title for this post comes from a recent post and subsequent discussion on Jason Renshaw’s blog about the application of Sir Ken Robinson’s recent TED talk to ELT. Jason posed the following question as a summative response to my comments: “Individualized instruction… is it (and should it be) our new holy grail in teaching?”

As far as “Holy Grails” in this field go, I suppose anything that focuses the pedagogical debate away from circular arguments on pet theories or techniques to the questions of how people as individuals actually learn is all to the good. I don’t mean to sound flippant, but asserting that everyone learns in different ways and we increasingly have the ability to tailor the process of learning to the individual needs of everyone is not the same thing as saying, “Hey, I’ve got the universal magic wand and here’s how everyone should be learning English.”

Jason is absolutely correct that it’s going to be hard work, but I strongly suspect that within two generations students in at least much of the world are going to wonder why the heck it was done any differently. (Much like the children of today in many places just can’t fathom a pre-Internet, pre-cellphone and pre-hyper-connected  existence.)

The “Holy Grail” of the Immersion Quest Project, however, is to utilize technology, resources and best practices make the process of learning English by children as accessible and leverageable  as possible by the widest range of interested parties.  This includes being portable into, say, the Peruvian Amazon villages my father did projects in close to twenty-five years ago, and which haven’t changed all that much in the intervening time. (One of those projects involved using donated HP “laptops”- this was the mid to late 80s- powered by solar panels we soldered together in our garage in Lima to assist the primary healthcare providers in those villages to make more effective treatment decisions.)

There has to be an option where comprehensive resources for English language learning by children are effective, flexible and free.

That’s my “Holy Grail.”

Five Observations

I started the Immersion Quest Project at the beginning of May. It was always my intention to use this first month to primarily absorb as much as I could related to the goal of creating a comprehensive standards-based open source ESL/EFL curriculum for young learners. If you were going to apply the paradigm of the writing process, the stage I’ve been in is essentially the pre-writing step of  ”brainstorming.” This is reflected in all the different threads of ideas I’ve explored that have gone in widely varying directions. I’ve deliberately sought out more questions than answers, but in June I’m going to shift to the “drafting” step and focus on building out the repository for the IQ ESL/EFL Curriculum.

Here are my top five observations (and not necessarily conclusions) gleaned from my activities this month, in no particular order:

1) Although closely related, there seems to be very little functional overlap between the worlds of ELL and ESL/EFL.

2)  Presentation matters, even with free online content, and while there’s a lot of crap, there’s also quite a bit of really good stuff freely available… if you take the time to look for it, which isn’t always easy to do. Given all the amazing resources buried in poorly organized and/or defunct websites all across the internet, a well-designed custom search engine- especially one that searched the Internet Archive- would be an extremely useful tool.

3) In support of the previous point, the two most exciting open educational resources currently out there, Tar Heel Reader and the Khan Academy, are remarkably utilitarian in form and function, and all the more impressive because they are essentially unpaid labors of love by their creators.

4) There are currently no online flash card systems that fully meet the needs of young English learners. To qualify for that distinction, a system would have to a) allow for spaced-repetition-enabled multi-sided cards with flexible options for mapping relationships between knowledge and representational elements in the forms of  text, images, sounds, video and speech recognition, b) be printable, shareable, embeddable, and collaboration-enabled, and c) be integrated into robust testing and game-based practice systems that work on all browsers. Quizlet, FunnelBrain and Anki all provide the “best-in-class” functionality for different pieces of what I just described.

5) There is remarkably little genuinely practical free advice for Teaching English to Young Learners (TEYL), so blogs like Carol Read’s ABC of Teaching Children, Barbara Hoskins Sakamoto’s Teaching Village and Jason Renshaw’s English Raven blogs really stand out.

Formative Assessment