This week I chose not to dive straight into choosing my
Module 1 paper topic. Instead I wanted to spend the week reflecting further on
my classes and making sure I had a good grasp of the CI techniques as lain out
by Xie. It’s proving quite a challenge!
The class I recorded for my week 1 assignment, which is due
to be the focus of the paper, is full of what I thought CI techniques to be before I read Walsh and Xie. This means
that I gave the techniques we learned for our week 2 test a full run, and felt I
had been very successful at it; after all, I had included a good percentage of them
within a 12 minute clip.
Xie revealed to me, however, that almost everything I did in
that class was unadulterated monologic IRF discourse. This was a big shock,
hence the overflow of regret in my most recent post. It’s not that I consider the
use of monologic discourse entirely unhelpful, but it often compromised the
entirety of my classes!
Since then I’ve been doing my best to discover just what
dialogic discourse could look like in my elementary classes to varying degrees
of success. It is these changes that are causing me problems with the paper; the
difference between the video and my classes now is just so large!
I would like to be able to tie my current practices with the
contents of that video, but have had difficulty coming up with a reflective
research question that ties them all together. Whatever route I consider taking
the conclusions seem a little removed from the original purpose.
The best I have come up with until now is the following: To what extent can using a variety of CI
techniques within a purely monologic IRF discourse aid L2 learning?
I would set out my attempt to engage the students with the
techniques learned for the week 2 quiz, cover a couple of specific instances
where the techniques didn’t work, and demonstrate the strengths of drilling
language in the context of large classes. The conclusion might be that while
the technique is useful to an extent, its overuse results in learners with a
very narrow language proficiency characterized by asking and answering a set of
questions rather than developing the ability to communicate fluently. Action to
be taken would include the things I’ve been trying in my classes since then.
Looking over this post again my proposal doesn’t sound too
bad. Then again, lots of the things I think look good on paper until I try
discussing them out loud. Maybe I should read Xie one last time just to make
sure I’ve got this down…
Hey -- great thinking and wrestling all teh way through here. Like Jason, sounds like you've already headed into the territory of paper 2, which may be OK, but is perhaps a little hasty and way more than required at this stage.
ReplyDeleteThe thing is, the week 2 CI techniques can all be used in support of either a monologic or dialogic style, and there are times when monologic might be necessary. The paper question is to UNDERSTAND your tendencies and suggest changes, not to implement the changes and reanalyze (that's sorta the Module 2 topic). That said, you could of course discuss in what ways your 2nd batch contains more dialogic use CIs than the 1st.