Teaching ePortfolios as Evidence for One’s Practicum

(Infographic by The University of Edinburgh, 2008)

Teaching ePortfolios as Evidence for One’s Practicum

How practical and useful are these portfolios?

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano

Thursday, August 26, 2015

Twitter: @jonacuso

Post 189

                “Reflective self-assessment is a key competency and the most challenging aspect of learning to be a teacher” (Jaaniten, 2013). At Universidad Latina, as part of my Teaching Practicum training for ELT student teachers, reflection is key to have learners reflect upon their teaching practice and their experiences in a classroom with real learners. Our student teachers, as well as any graduate instructor elsewhere, “can learn a lot about teaching by discussing it and talking about materials and techniques but, like most skills, including using a language effectively, [they] can’t really learn it without doing it” (Gower, Phillips, & Walters, 2005). However, where should reflections be stored to attest one’s teaching reflections, materials, or even lesson plans? Is a teaching ePortfolio the answer to the former question?

          As Jaaniten (2013) puts it, “it is a constant challenge in teacher education to integrate theoretical knowledge with teaching practice.” Student teachers or teachers in in-service training tend to produce lots of materials and reflect upon their particular teaching circumstances and challenges derived from their comprehension of theory and teaching strategies, but where is all that data going? It needs to be placed somewhere so others can see it. For instance, at Universidad Latina it is not mandatory to keep an ePortfolio to store and organize thoughts and materials, student teachers are encouraged to keep one that can later on be used as evidence for one’s teaching practicum experiences, especially when one lacks work experience as a language teacher with a tenure. By means of teaching ePortfolios that instructors can keep, “the builder constructs meaning, makes the learning process transparent and learning visible, crystallises insights, and anticipates future direction” (Jaaniten, 2013) in their current or future teaching.

          If you are still wondering what a teaching portfolio or ePortfolio is, let us point out some of its most salient characteristics. As it can be viewed at the Center for Teaching of the Vanderbilt University (n.d.), these are the most relevant characteristics of a portfolio:

“Student teachers learn to reflect, set personal goals, develop their teacher identity, work more autonomously and collaborate” (Jaaniten, 2013). And the evidence of all these cognitive processes can be of great help for a future employer to see the potential new recruits can have in their school setting.

          The benefits for ePortfolios for language professionals or student teachers are many, and it is a great idea to have one of yours to be used as evidence that can attest one’s life as a language teacher or any other kind of instructor, because “through narrative texts, student teachers are able to express their personal voices and be heard by others” (Jaaniten, 2013) such as their college professors, their mentors in school, their supervisors or coaches, and their peers. If all language teachers were into having an ePortfolio to validate their teaching experiences, it will be simply awesome to count with all this reflective journaling that can help readers understand who these teachers are, what these individuals aspire in their professional life, and the level of mindfulness that can be actually seen in their writings, planning, and so on.

References

Gower, R., Phillips, D., & Walters, S. (2005). Teaching Practice A Handbook for Teachers in Training. Oxford, GB: Macmillan.

Jaaniten, R. (2013). Integrating Theory and Practice in FL Teacher Education. In IATEFL, & T. Pattison (Ed.), IATEFL 2012 Glasgow Conference Selections (pp. 23-25). Canterbury, GB: IATEFL.

The University of Edinburgh. (2008). What is Portfolio? [Infographic]. Edinburgh, GB, Scotland. http://www.scieng.ed.ac.uk/LTStrategy/eportfolio.html

Vanderbilt University. (n.d.). Center for Teaching. Retrieved August 27, 2015, from Vanderbilt University: http://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/teaching-portfolios/

Teaching ePortfolios as Evidence for One’s Practicum by Jonathan Acuña

A New Language Curriculum Development in Costa Rica

A New Language Curriculum Development in Costa Rica

Will this new proposal be successful?

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

Twitter: @jonacuso

Post 188

          In July 2015 I attended a presentation where several curricular developers from the Ministry of Education (MEP) in Costa Rica presented the new language curriculum proposal for 2016. In spite of the fact that the new ELT program is rather ambitious if compared to the one that is currently in use, the puzzling question that remains floating in the air and pirouetting in the attendees’ minds (well at least in mine) is, how can this great and earnest program yield the CEF B2 mark they aspire?

          Based on what we participants were explained regarding the new program, no doubt, as suggested by Richards (2001), the curricular developers from MEP followed a framework for their work. MEP developers must have considered the content for the new program, the students’ needs, contextual factors inherent to our teaching scenario, “the nature of aims and objectives” in the program, the planning of syllabi for each level, material design techniques, and the program efficacy (Richards, 2001). Additionally, as mentioned above, CEF standards and descriptors were also part of the planning of the new ELT program for high school. But was all this enough?

          “How can good teaching be provided in a program?” (Richards, 2001). How can MEP authorites guarantee that the new program can yield the expected CEF level they pursue? As explained by Richard-Amato (2003) and pointed out by Richards (2001), there are several language teaching methodologies that have been in the learning scene for over a hundred years. But somehow newbies, veteran instructors, as well as teachers with just a few years of working for MEP continue to favor those ones that were popular during the 70s and 80s though the Communicative Approach was born in the decade of the 70s. A communication-oriented curriculum as the one proposed by MEP developers cannot be functional as long as no agreement in CLT-oriented methodologies is agreed by all teaching participants working for public high schools.

          “In a communicative methodology, content ceases to become some external control over learning-teaching procedures” (Breen & Candlin, 1979). The agreement over content taught in class becomes crucial negotiations between “learners and learners, leaners and teachers, and learners and text” (Breen & Candlin, 1979). If learning and acquisition are meant to happen in our public high school classrooms, learning outcomes in course syllabi cannot be simply written on stone or overlooked by negligent instructors who are not that compromised with the philosophy behind the creation of this new program that really looks remarkable if compared to former ELT programs at MEP and impressive by the CEF language mastery standard that is intended to accomplish. If no CLT approches to language teaching are used, this program is going to be as useless as the one we have due to the lack of commitment from many MEP professionals.

          To conclude, long held assumptions to language teaching must change to go communicative. 1) Vocabulary and grammar are not the basic units of language. For Richards (2001), “the priority in planning was vocabulary and grammar and these were seen as the main building blocks of language development.” The new MEP proposal goes beyond this way of seeing language instruction much more connected to a cognitive-code approach as explained by Richard-Amato (2003), and if teachers do not understand this, no real change will take place in the new program. 2) If new analyses were carried out, learners in our MEP programs do not have the same exact needs. No doubt the fresh programs intend to cope with different high school populations individually, and that needs to stay like that; otherwise, the program will prove no good for CEF standards. 3) Student needs cannot be simply identified as mere language needs. As Richards (2001) suggests, instructors must teach learners how to solve their problems through English; thus, the program will prove useful in the teaching of 21^st Century skills needed today in any kind of job students may hold in their future.

References

Breen, M., & Candlin, C. (1979). Essentials of a Communicative Curriculum. Applied Linguistics, 1(2), 90-112.

Richard-Amato, P. (2003). From Grammatical to Communicative Approaches. In P. Richard-Amato, Making it Happen (pp. 15-28). White Plains, NY: Pearson Education.

Richards, J. (2001). Curriculum Development in Language Teaching. Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press.

A New Language Curriculum Development in Costa Rica by Jonathan Acuña

From Grammatical to Communicative Approaches?

From Grammatical to Communicative Approaches?

How Far are Costa Rican Teachers from these?

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Twitter: @jonacuso

Post 187

Though I am unsure whether my reader has gotten in contact with Richard-Amato’s (2003) book, Making it Happen, it is a great text to have us language teachers reflect upon what is happening around us in terms of language learning. As a college instructor interested in what is happening in my home country in terms of foreign language learning and acquisition, I come to ask myself how far are we from communicative approaches to teach foreign languages in our local context and teaching environment.

The more graduate students start work as language professionals, the more that I question how our teachers are being trained to deal with our teaching scenario. If humans are born with a LAD or Language Acquisition Device (Cook, 1993) based on Noam Chomsky’s linguistic postulates, which helps us learn language, why is it that our teacher students continue to work so much with non-communicative approaches? And though this is something that is re-studied and re-taken in my Teaching Practicum class with them, grammar-oriented approaches are the ones preferred by them.

Even though Grammar-Translation is not exactly present in Costa Rican teaching contexts, Audiolingualism and Direct Method are still alive in the public high school system. As explained by Richard-Amato (2003), Audiolingualism was “a new ‘scientific’ oral method” that “was based on behaviorism” as proposed by Skinner (1957). It still counts with many adepts in our teaching context because they are “adhered to the theory that language is acquired through habit formation and stimulus/response association” (Richard-Amato, 2003). No wonder how many teachers get to use books like Interchange Full Contact 1 (Richards, 2013) with lots of furmulaic scripts intending to be repeated to try to develop correct habits of speaking. If this were used, I bet lots of language teachers would be quite satisfied with their class performance, but this is not even happening when instructors start only providing translations and make their students move back in time when the Grammar-Translation approach was in vogue.

Do you still remember Lado English Series (Lado, 1978)? I must confess that I survived that Direct Method methodology used in the writing and production of the books. You probably survived similar language series from the 70s. But as Richard-Amato (2003) puts it, “books based on the direct method often move students so quickly through new syntactic structures that their internatilization becomes difficult, if not impossible.” And still today, the instructors from the old school continue to use this kind of method. But once again, teachers may spoil the whole method when they start to translate everything to their students.

I’m not exactly criticizing the Direct Method or Audiolingualism; I’m more into trying to make teachers aware that many people learned English, and other languages, by using this kind of methodologies. The one and only problem is the pervasive use of a 19^th Century method called the Grammar-Translation. It is incredible to think, and hard to believe, that teachers in Costa Rica in the 21^st Century are still transitioning to more communicative approaches, and after five years of high school language training, students barely know a few words and expressions in English as if these learners had been taught within cognitive-code approaches with a big twist into grammar-translation. Will we get into real communicative approaches some day? Only time will tell …

References

Cook, V. (1993). Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. Houndmills,Basingstoke, GB: Palgrave Macmillan.

Lado, R. (1978). Lado English Series 1. White Plains, NY: Prentice Hall College Div.

Richard-Amato, P. (2003). Making it Happen. White Plains, NY: Pearson Education.

Richards, J. (2013). Interchange Full Contact 1. Cambridge, GB: Cambridge University Press.

Skinner, B. (1957). Verbal Behavior. New York: Appleton Century Crofts.

From Grammatical to Communicative Approaches by Jonathan Acuña

Sound Strategies for the Integration of both Open & Institutionally Supported Technologies in One’s Teaching

Sound Strategies for the Integration of both Open & Institutionally Supported Technologies in One’s Teaching

How to effectively use both types of technology together

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano

Monday, August 24, 2015

Twitter: @jonacuso

Post 186

          “How do you effectively use both types of technology together?” As an educator working with F2F and online teaching/learning environments, the use of both open and institutionally supported technologies is a challenge. And it has been a provocation for not using open educational resources due to the lack of a manual for integrating them within a learning platform such as Moodle, Blackboard, or others. Though the task to integrate both types of technology is not meant to be easy, here you have some simple but effective suggestions I have found useful for my language and university teaching within a hybrid learning environment.

          First, it is a good idea to check whether your Web 2.0 tool allows you to produce an embedding code. Embedding codes will allow you to display material from an open technology available on the Web onto your virtual space in the LMS such as Moodle. Take the case of Prezi; it is a good example of an open educational technology that is commonly used by learners and instructors to create presentations for class content. By means of its auto generated embedding code, after being used in class, the teacher can have it displayed in their virtual classroom for students to see the presentation again. Viewing the presentation may help newly-acquired knowledge consolidate and become real deep learning.

          Second, something to always bear in mind is the control you must exercise over those open technologies. By control here, it must be understood the instructor’s ability to use the tool confidently. If such control is absent, desist from trying to use that open educational technology till you become an expert; you can experience lots of problems and/or embarrassing situations. But control also must mean the educator’s regulation of his/her own account for that open technology. Using somebody else’s account does not sound like a “sound” idea.

          Third, exchange of ideas, practices, and insights with other colleagues is as important as knowing how to use an embedding code or having control over an open technology. Talking to partners, or even to students, can be a highly satisfying “ritual” for a community of practice. Keep in mind that you are not alone in trying to integrate open and institutionally supported technologies; other partners can have insightful notions of how open educational resources could be used within a synchronous or asynchronous teaching environment. Talk to peers and strengthen your community of practice to grow professionally.

          Four, try to get a complete guide of the LMS your institution is using; that helps a lot and saves tons of time. Oftentimes, especially after an LMS training session usually led by an IT worker with no teaching background, we forget what we have been shown or demonstrated. A complete guide of all functionalities for teachers is really important to have. With it, you can start exploring what you are entitled to do within the LMS and on online forums you can see how that platform tool can be used and combined with open access technologies. Tutorials on video can also be tremendous assistance for us to comprehend what we can do and how we can do it.

          I am sure that any reader can continue to add more and more points to this short list of strategies to combine the use of open and institutionally supported technologies. It is our professional expertise in their educational usage that makes us better users of them to benefit students and help us foster deep learning among our learners.

Sound Strategies for the Integration of Both Open & Institutionally Supported Technologies by Jonathan Acuña