Group 5

 Meeting place and time

We discussed motivation in second language learning. We agreed that the motivation alone was not enough because the students also need access to social relationships where they can be perceived as valued partners in communication. (Spada 2013:79) We mentioned that students who play video games achieve good proficiency in English by being valued partners in communication. All in all we had many good reflexions around the content from chapters 3 and 4 in Spada.

 

 

Online group session
 Sunday, 19 September 2021, 13:00

Topic 
Readings in the light of teaching languages to youths that have English as a third or fourth language. 

 

Readings 
CEFR: Common reference levels (Link in Compendium)
Lightbown & Spada (ch. 2, 3 and 4)

 

 

Participants 

Silje Løland
 Jane Iren Solbrekken-Nygård
 Daniela Silva
 
 

Experience with video chat/conference tool
 Teams. We all use Teams normally. Works great. 

Choose a couple of the readings from the term so far and discuss them. They could be something that you are having trouble understanding or something that you would like to explore in more depth. Agree on which readings you will discuss prior to meeting. 

Lightbown & Spada (ch. 2, 3 and 4)
 We like the book. It has good and practical approaches to language- teaching and learning. This perhaps get better later in the book, but we feel that the base so far is that they see a classroom with students on somewhat the same level. That is rarely the case in real life classrooms, and the core of our online group session.

CEFR: Common reference levels 

This is a definition that can help teachers get an understanding of where the students are (global scale). It also helps students defining their self in levels (self-assessment grid). Also in grading these forms can be good tools for us (Quality aspects of spoken language use). We think this seems like a good tool that is universal, and can be used in this age group. It also looks like what we normally use, when grading students, but perhaps it is more a complete and general. A more visual one. This can help us getting a picture of the situation in each class we teach, but the problem is still: How do we approach a class consisting of students on level A1 and C2? A little bit of both worlds? 

The core of the solution is always to differentiate the tasks, but this is never easy. All our students are different, and the adult resources differs from each class. 

Also it is important (but not always realistic) that we as teacher know their first/second language to compare language structure. 

The CEFR is a good tool. The group discussed why this is not used in our Norwegian school system.

Week 37/38: https://padlet.com/helen_m_murray/1cepb3ut6t0x4srn