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[ProfessionalDevelopment 2396] Re: Critical Thinking-Student InvolvementSteve Kaufmann steve at thelinguist.comMon Jul 21 22:38:21 EDT 2008
I gather from Jacquie that the link did not work. The article is quite relevant to the discussion so I am posting it directly here. Some background: People involved in helping immigrants learn English are highly committed but often have the following attitudes. 1) Only people who are duly accredited and established in the ESL sector have anything useful to say on the subject. 2) Existing methods and practices, built around the classroom and face to face teaching, are the only way to go. Rather than looking at ways to increase the reach and therefore effectiveness of teachers, we demand more money. ESL is not a matter of results but of entitlement. It is a social cause first, and an educational objective second. 3) Immigrants are poor, weak, disfavoured and easily fooled. Language learning cannot be achieved by weak people. I do not believe that immigrants are weak people, or they would not have made it here. Only intense study and an intense commitment can bring about the transformation that is involved in achieving fluency in another language. The learner needs to like the language, culture and society. The learning environment needs to be positive. The means exist today, with the Internet and MP3 players etc. for people to learn independently, more effectively than ever, while maintaining close relations with teachers, who can guide them, give feedback, and measure their progress, in the class and remotely. I know that many immigrants are discouraged at their lack of success in language learning, and discouraged at their position in society. The challenge is how to make them positive about their language learning so that they take it over. Once they do, they will succeed. The US Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) announced its latest digest,"Effects of Instructional Hours and Intensity of Instruction on NRS Level Gain in Listening and Speaking."<http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/levelgain.html.>The digest reports on a descriptive study examining the relationship between student performance ..and class attendance. *..*Results showed that the greater the number of instructional hours, the higher the percentage of students who made an NRS level gain. There was also a general trend toward greater NRS level gain for students with high levels of instructional intensity than for those with low instructional intensity. .. To the people at CAL this is a "seminal report" justifying all their hard work. But is it really? More hours of classroom instruction, and more intense instruction, should lead to better results, otherwise why bother? The real question is how much improvement is required to justify the time and money expended by learners, teachers and tax-payers. Here is my analysis based on information contained in the report. We are told in the survey that 1.2 million adults are enrolled in federally funded adult ESL classes in the United States and that 36% of these students attained a measurable educational level gain after a course of instruction.The scale used is here <http://www.cal.org/caela/esl_resources/slspls.html>. In a survey of 6,599 adults, 60% showed improvement. Obviously being in a survey has a big impact on improvement results! The fact is that there are probably close to 20 million adults in the US who need to improve their English literacy, just among the immigrant population. Almost half (49%) of the ESL learners in the survey were at level 0 and 1 on the scale, i.e. "no ability whatsoever' or "functions minimally if at all in English." Almost 20% were Low and High Beginner level learners (2 and 3 on the scale). Level 3 is described as "understands simple learned phrases, spoken slowly with frequent repetitions". At the other end of the scale 7% of the adults surveyed were Advanced or level 6 on the scale, described as " can satisfy most survival needs and limited social demands." So, even the advanced learners were still at a basic level. The results appear in tables below. It appears that contrary to the claims of the Center for Applied Linguistics, the biggest factor affecting grade improvement was not hours of instruction but the level of the learner. Beginner learners (level 2 and 3 on the scale) improved the most and were the *least* affected by the amount of instruction. Of those Low and High Beginners who had the least amount of instruction ( between 2 and 60 hours) almost 75% still managed to improve, whereas this only went up to 84% for those who had between 140 and up to 512 hours of instruction, i.e. at least 3 times as many hours of classroom instruction . We are told in the report that 78%, or almost 4 out of 5 of these Low and High Beginner learners improved *regardless of the number of hours of instruction*. The largest group, those with essentially no English skills(49%), as well as the most advanced group (7%), showed the lowest level of improvement, but seemed to benefit the greatest from instruction. The report does not explain this nor the fact that t*he rate of improvement sometimes declines with increased instruction*.(see tables below) Intensity of instruction does not have a great affect on results. The largest group ( 57%) studied an average of 4.5 hours per week and 61% of these learners showed measurable improvement on the scale. However 31% of the survey group had less than 2.8 hours per week of instruction and yet 56% still managed to improve. The intense group, roughly 12% of the learners, studied more than 9.3 hours per week. Despite more than double the hours of instruction, compared to the middle group, the percentage of learners with measurable improvement only increased from 61% to 66%. Again it was the Low and High Beginners who improved the most, with the least impact from instructional intensity. To me the conclusion is that class instruction obviously does help, but not as much as CAL and teachers like to believe. Instead, I suspect that what really matters is what the learner does outside the classroom. As the report says, an adult ESL learner has limited time to spend, "typically 4 and 8 hours per week". Surely to help these learners it is better to focus on finding ways to enable these learners to create more time for learning. In other words we should find ways to make it easier and more effective for them to learn outside the classroom, and to encourage them to do so, instead of trying to justify bringing them to class. Classroom time does not seem to have a decisive impact on their improvement. To paraphrase Rubem Alves<http://rubemalves.wordpress.com/category/a-arte-de-produzir-fome/>, we need to make them hungry rather than giving them cheese. Table 6. NRS Level Gain Related to Instructional Hours by NRS ESL Educational Functioning Level Instr. Hours Beginning ESL Literacy n=1,720 Low Beg. ESL n=407 High Beg. ESL n=543 Low Inter. ESL n=614 High Inter. ESL n=408 Advanced ESL n=252 Below 60 Hours n=536 46% n=112 75% n=160 72% n=146 60% n=96 54% n=51 50% 60 to 79 Hours n=284 52% n=86 79% n=85 69% n=93 51% n=68 49% n=44 48% 80 to 99 Hours n=247 56% n=57 72% n=95 79% n=105 60% n=74 58% n=33 45% 100 to 119 Hours n=159 54% n=34 81% n=52 81% n=75 68% n=42 58% n=29 64% 120 to 139 Hours n=120 62% n=37 86% n=52 87% n=49 66% n=43 64% n=30 67% 140 or More Hours n=374 67% n=81 84% n=99 83% n=146 71% n=85 62% n=65 66% Table 8. NRS Level Gain by Intensity of Instruction Intensity Level Beginning ESL Literacy n=1,720 Low Beg. ESL n=407 High Beg. ESL n=543 Low Inter. ESL n=614 High Inter. ESL n=408 Advanced ESL n=252 Low Intensity (<0.50) n=548 50% n=116 77% n=165 75% n=140 55% n=121 57% n=52 49% Mid Intensity (0.50-0.99) n=935 55% n=247 78% n=321 77% n=386 64% n=236 56% n=140 54% High Intensity (>1.00) n=237 60% n=44 83% n=57 83% n=88 68% n=51 61% n=60 Steve Kaufmann www.lingq.com 1-604-922-8514 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://www.nifl.gov/pipermail/professionaldevelopment/attachments/20080721/abe111aa/attachment.html
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