“Understanding is the result of facts acquiring meaning for the learner:
To grasp the meaning of a thing is to see it in its relations to other things: to see how it operates or functions, what uses it can be put to. The relation of means consequence is the center and heart of all understanding.”
When I read this, I immediately thought about the idea of Teaching in context. Again we can see the importance of teaching a language as a whole and by no means as isolated items or grammar formulas as it was thought in the past.
Reasons? Very simple, if we teach pieces of language for our students to memorize, we are developing empty knowledge and not meaningful understanding.
“Doing something correctly, therefore, is not by itself, evidence of understanding: It might have been an accident . TO UNDERSTAND IS TO HAVE DONE IT IN THE RIGHT WAY,OFTEN REFLECTED IN BEING ABLE TO EXPLAIN WHY A PARTICULAR SKILL, APPROACH,OR BODY OF KNOWLEDGE IS OR IS NOT APPROPRIATE IN A PARTICULAR SITUATION.
Of course, a student can memorize thousand of words, formulas or whatever you ask him to, and if you do that, you will possibly also test all those items and mark them.
But what for? That student can easily get a 7, since he memorized everything just as you taught him, but is he going to be able to use those items in situations different from the ones that appeared in his text book? (If any), I don’t think so.
Understanding is about TRANSFER, to be truly able requires the ability to transfer our knowledge effectively involves the capacity to take what we know and use it creatively ,fluently ,in different settings, ON OUR OWN.
That requires an education in how to plug in specific facts or formulas.
On our own, those are the key words. If we want autonomous individuals, with ideas and opinions, critical thinkers able to agree or disagree and willing to express intelligent and coherent ideas then we have to train them on how to use the abilities learned in previous experiences when facing new challenges, in other words, how to TRANSFER.
This concept also reminded me of my neurolinguistic classes in pregrado and the empty slots to be filled with new info. transferred from our mother tongue. That was always an interesting topic for me and now that I find it again here, I am more convinced that teaching English is far beyond teaching about English.
Evidence of misunderstanding is incredibly valuable to teachers, not a mere mistake to be corrected. It signifies an attempted and plausible but unsuccessful transfer. The challenge is to reward the try without reinforcing the mistake or dampening future transfer attempts
Error analysis is a very interesting field that is not very often approached by teachers.
Our student’s errors are a precious source of information for us, again, remembering linguistics in pregrado I was thinking about this concept of “overgeneralization” that I found pretty fascinating. For example, a student thinking that “fishes” is the plural for “ fish” is over generalizing the rule for plurals, that can be considered an error, but if you think about it, the student IS transferring previous knowledge, so the mechanism in his brain is in fact working, so we have to feel satisfied with it and help him internalize the concept of exceptions then.
Pretty interesting……
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Dear
ReplyDeleteI still remember the exact day when I was taught the plural of ox, which you all should know, a very important word. Obviously I thought I will never use that word again in my life; however, I couldn't forget it. It was a sort of ox-ssesion until I used it in a real context, in front of a real ox while I was in England. Now, based on this rather silly example, I question the concept of context. Are we really teaching in context? I absolutely disagree with the use of this word/concept. Perhaps, I myself do not understand what’s behind the ‘context’idea itself, but as far as I picture it, a context to be 100% meaningful has to be real and concrete in which you are an active and interactive agent, at least for me. What I think we can do instead is to create 'challenging' tasks that could be applied in a real context. If we challenge students, it will certainly be more effective learning ,since the involvement level is higher (however I acknowledge lack of proofs for this statement, this is just what I think)Is for example a text in English a real context?
That’s why I learnt that silly plural during my first year, as my teacher was so wit planning such an activity with weird words that he caught our attention; and consequently, our participation. Today, I was working with some students at university, students who literally don’t give a fig for English, and in one of my lacks of originality, I used a game I learnt some days ago. These students, who are supposed to be brainy and intellectual-like, behaved as mad children in this silly game. And I can say I used no ‘context’ whatsoever for the language I was using, and I can tell you that their organization, analytical and cooperative skills turned on as they have never done before. So, I question the concept of context, perhaps this is due to the ‘context’ of a contest in which everybody is over-excited and therefore they rushed to reach the goal or the hidden answer. I leave this concept open to discussion. As I think I might not be clear enough..
xxx
Claudio
Vicky!
ReplyDeleteThere are a couple of things that summarise what you have tackled: Effective lesson planning and teaching are the clue. Time cannot be an excuse to give our children a turn in what we do to make a class meaningful and successful.
A class has certainly to be a moment of learning with activities which will remind in time, not only because they were fun, but also because of the contents which were learnt successfully by the students.
On the other hand, error analysis can be done by themselves and supervised by teachers. I have been doing that lately in my classes, with great success. That releases you of loads of work, and they start building their own systems of 'preventing' slips.
It's on us!
Hi Maria Virginia,
ReplyDeleteIn relation to your second quotation and how students perform very well at certain tasks and then you realize he or she didn't understand a thing because he couldn't repeat the level of performance as when he got the 7.0.
I think it has to do with all the EFL issue in Chile and how it has failed over and over.In all kind of schools we find good students with very good marks, they can be very good students indeed,but maybe they are not interested in learning English at all, maybe they just want good marks in order to enter a good university at the end of their secondary studies.What I'm trying to say is that thay are in a system which most of the time does not help them to perform well in other situations rather than the standards tests.
Vicky,
ReplyDeleteI think it’s a good point to mention the need to encourage autonomy in our students in order to have students who express their opinions and ideas, and as a consequence they will be able to build up knowledge, permanent knowledge which will help them to achieve their goals. But to encourage autonomy in students we need to have autonomous teachers; therefore the question is: are teachers in Chile autonomous? or, are we ready to assume the responsibility of being autonomous?
Vicky
ReplyDeleteWe normally tend to thing that understanding is a synonim of doing something correct, follow the pattern of what was thaught in class, and therefore that student passes the course.
If we stop for a second and really think how difficult it is to say the reasons why somthing is actually not correct we can see assessment from another perspective. We should promote challenges to discover and question different issues instead of rewarding those who just reproduce exactly what shown in class.
My dear,
ReplyDeleteYou have just made me remember my first lesson as teacher... "subject+ verb + rest of the sentence" ...who cares?. I can't believe that I was so lost. Fortunately, that was only at the beginning of my teaching. I realised about the important meaning of contextual and coherent lessons as you mention in your post, so I totally agree with you about meaninful understanding and applicability of this concept. I also think that we can achieve this goal by providing tasks relating with real life to be solved so in that way we help our students to develop autonomy and therefore real and effective learning.
Thx for your reflection
in this case I must say that I agree with Claudio on the idea of "context". it is true that we have to teach English in context, but if there is not a possible context to teach something, Do we just simply do not teach it?. It is difficult to teach something IN CONTEXT because we do not live in an English context, I think that is more valuable how we develop an idea (challengues) than try to find the ideal context to something. To try to identify the correct strategy to develop our classes can be (sometimes) more meaningful for our students. Don´t you think so? ....
ReplyDeleteWhen you teach a language you can not only consider the fact of conveying isolated pieces of information which in most of the cases is not meaningful by anyone. However this practice is more frequent than we thought. This is why Chilean students can not reach the necessary learning which allows them to give answers to a variety set of problems, causing frustration and lack of motivation. So it is essential to change our perception about what students need and create new instances in the classroom to give space to the applicability that given information may have.
ReplyDeleteVicky:
ReplyDeleteFirst, I would like to refer to Claudio's post. It happened something very similar to me once when I was just starting my carrer as a teacher. One student asked me what the plural of Ox was and I felt embarrassed because I din't know... After that, I never forget such weird plural form: OXES (just kidding). The point is that before that class, the plural (and the singular) form of Ox (and even the animal itself) was not important to me, I don't know those animals, I haven't eaten one of them, and they are completely out of my sight (therefore, context). Nevertheless, after that class, oxen have become a trick when teaching irregular plurals and they are important now because they are part of my teaching practice/context/world. The question i: How can we make our students to understand (not only know) what the plural of ox is, when they haven't seen one before in their lives and they possibly will learn such a plural form by heart just to pass a test? It is true, we try to achieve students' understanding in favour of transferability, but what happens when there is no context to transfer such knowledge?
Bye!