Welcome

Designing

 

               Available designs are all the ways in which students are presented the material, but as students process the information from the available designs they are involved in the designing process.  “Designing transforms knowledge in producing new constructions and representations of reality”(New London Group, 1996, p. 76). My project has the students engaged in several different design processes for several different tasks and outcomes.

 

              First, students are engaged in the design process when they are trying to construct their understanding of the audio, visual, and oral information provided by the elders.   I was purposeful in my decision to make sure the videos are in Yup’ik.  I chose to do so because I wanted students to have to work together to negotiate for meaning. I wanted students to negotiate for meaning because the “interaction provides opportunities for learners not only to negotiate the message of the input, but, in doing so, to focus on form” (Swain 2000, p. 98).   When students are negotiating for meaning they are working on a variety of skills.  Students must discuss with each other what they think the interlocutor is saying, but also must focus on the linguistic elements -- forms of bases and post bases -- that the interlocutor is using.   Swain and Lapkin (1998) says, “…language use is both communication and cognitive activity.  Language is simultaneously a means to communication and a tool for thinking.  Dialogue provides both the occasion for language learning and the evidence for it.  Language is both process and product” (p. 320). For example two students were trying to write a script to interview an elder in Yup’ik, and they could not know how to say the word ‘because’ in Yup’ik.  They decided to look it up in the dictionary, but when they found the word they felt like it was wrong.  The students ended up discussing the word and negotiating what the word should be and how it should be used. (link to audio clip)

Each week, the students listen to elders to gain background knowledge on a specific topic.  The students discuss the information, and decide what questions they have on the topic.  They then use these questions to interview elders so they may be able to write on the topic in their weekly journals.  This process is part of Task-Based Learning theory.  According to Ellis (2003), “ A task is an activity which requires learners to use language, with emphasis on meaning, to obtain an objective” ( p. 5).  They are not focused on the grammar structures that the elder is using, however they are focused on making meaning of the information. They need to process this information so they may further  learn what  questions they may want to interview elders about so they can gather as much background knowledge as possible so they can write their journal entries.

 

               However in focusing on the content they may notice a gap in their own understanding.  For example, one group of students was working on writing their interview script, and they wanted to end with saying how thankful they were for the information. They knew how to say “thank you very much”, Quyana Cakneq, but they wanted a word that was more thoughtful.  Through this interaction, students notice that they do not know how to show how thankful they were for the information in Yugtun.  They have noticed they have a gap in their own understanding that they need help with in order to be able to thank the elder. Noticing is when students “realize what they do not know or what they only know partially” (Swain, 1995, p. 126).  

 

              This noticing leads to a focus on form. Focus on Form is  “Instruction that draws attention to the forms and structures of the language within the contexts of communicative interaction” (Lightbown & Spada, 2013, p. 218). So then as students noticed that they did not know the word they needed to show how thankful they felt, therefore they went to our Yup’ik teacher to ask him.   He explained to them that they wanted to use the word Quyanaqvagcit, which means “you make me feel thankful”(it is a more heartfelt way to say thank you and that you appreciate the person). He then showed them that they wanted to add the postbase aqvagcit to quyana.  He then explained that when they add aqvagcit to the base quyana they must first drop the letter  a of the postbase because if they don’t it would geminate the n in quyana and make a nn sound.  He then explained that you pronounced the v in aqvagcit with a vv sound, but you write it with only one v because it follows a stop, q. He was able to help the students focus on form. (include link to student example)The students do all of this in order to come up with interview questions. Students first negotiated for meaning, then noticed a gap in their understanding leading them to  focus on form to write and ask a correctly formulated question in Yup’ik.

 

                 Throughout this project students are working to create comprehensible output.  Merrill Swain’s comprehensible output hypothesis states “that when learners have to produce language, they must pay more attention to how meaning is expressed through language than they ordinarily do for the comprehension of language” (Lightbown & Spada, 2013, p. 119). The comprehensible output hypothesis explains that when students have to produce language they must make sure that it is comprehensible for the intended audience. There are three parts to the comprehensible output hypothesis.  

 

                 The first is noticing “a gap in what they want to say and what they can say” (Swain, 1995, p. 126). The students did this throughout their interviewing process, but they also do this when they are working on their journals.   As my students worked on their journals, many noticed that they did not know the English names for some of the plants that they learned during the medicinal plants unit.  They knew what the plant looked like, what it was used for, and the Yup’ik word for it, but they did not know the English word.  This lead to them noticing a gap in their own understanding.

 

                 The second part of output is hypothesis-testing. According to Swain (1995), “Producing output is one way of testing a hypothesis about comprehensibility or linguistic well-formedness” (p. 126).  Throughout this project students work together to construct their knowledge and test out hypotheses on each other. They do this through the process of collaborative dialogue. Swain (2000) explains, “Collaborative dialogue is dialogue in which speakers are engaged in problem solving and knowledge building.  It heightens the potential for exploration of the product” (p. 102). Students are repeatedly asked to create collaborative dialogues. The first time they do this is when they are trying to come up with interview scripts to use, next when they have to create their own shelter, thirdly they must do so when they create their weekly journals, and finally when they collaborate to create digital stories from what they learned during the game.

 

                  The final aspect of the comprehensible output hypothesis is the use of metacognition. The metacognitive function refers to the students reflecting on their language use, analyzing it, correcting if needed, and internalizing the correct structure (Swain, 1995). As my students worked on their writing journals and digital stories, I would often hear them read aloud their writing and exclaim “wait that’s not how you say that, oh yeah it should be....” The students were able to think about their own language usage, analyze it, and correct it thus helping them to internalize the correct structure.