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| 2019年度 異文化言語教育評価論 |
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Ch.
7 Interact and Higher Proficiency
Students: Addressing the Challenges |
7.1 Introduction
n Interact
may not
be ideal for students working at the lower levels of proficiency because
students had not yet achieved a sufficient level of spoken communicative
proficiency to exploit its expectations.
Ø level of proficiency
potentially a factor in contributing too perceptions about the successful
implementation of interact.
n Spontaneity may be that
the full potential of interact is
brought into play at the highest level of NCEA level 3 (B1 and B2 in CEFR)
Ø Spontaneity becomes an
explicit criterion at NCEA level 3 whereas the requirement to be spontaneous is
more implicit at level 1 and 2.
n NCEA level 3 is an
interesting text case of how interact
in theory might be operationalized in practice with regard to three domains:
(a) Task Types, (b) Spontaneous and Unrehearsed (a focus on fluency), (c)
Accommodating Grammar (the place of accuracy).
n This chapter explores
aspects of the teachers’ interviews (n
= 13) and a survey of students who were the first to take interact at level 3 (n =
119).
7.2 Examples of Task Types
n The typical restaurant
conversation requires one person being the waiter and other person ordering.
Ø These traditional kinds
of transactional role-play were just automatically going to close it down and
the interaction often become kind of dead evidence. That is, students just
memorize the passage in the textbook. The “best evidence” comes when
“spontaneity, authenticity, questioning, pausing, all the rest of it” are in
evidence.
n Tasks should be
open-ended. At level 3, task topics gives the social issues demands of interact to students.
Ø For example:
What are you doing when you leave school next year? / What are you doing for
these holidays? → NCEA level 1/2
What is your opinion on part-time work? / How engaged in the environment are
you? → level 3 (CEFR
B1/B2)
n It is apparent that
these tasks are the top of a range of scaffolding strategies that has
implications for teachers’ understandings of spontaneous and unrehearsed.
7.2.1 Talking About the Environment
n Having done a unit of
work on the environment, the whole class may talk about it a bit. It is time to
give the students suggestions on two or three questions to get them into
discussing things.
Ø “People say New Zealand
is a very green country, what do you think about it? If you want to go
somewhere else in the school to work on it with the person who you are going to
speak to, that is fine.”
n The goal of this task is
to give students a lot of room to do the work. This kind of task is based on a
reasonable amount of time in class. In other words, it includes allowing the
students to have a considerable amount of prior preparation with the partner
with whom each would be interacting.
n Other teacher introduced
a similar environmentally-focused interactive task called ‘Why should I care?’.
It encourages students’ autonomy. The following context is provided in the
task:
New
Zealand is a land that produces part of its own energy and has the benefit of
being an island far away from pollutants, sparsely populated and windy. Why
should you even care about environmental challenges, how do they affect you and
your generation? Discuss with a partner aspects of environmental threats and
opportunities in the context of New Zealand and globally. You could consider
the following: Explain the challenge or opportunity to the environment, why you
consider it significant, discussing the impact of inaction, the historic
reasons for the situation, negotiating possible solutions.
n The kinds of topics that
NCEA level 3 appeared to expect would not necessarily promote the most
effective (i.e., interactionally authentic) interaction with the task. For
example, 17 year-old boys don’t talk about the environment with their mates,
and this is an artificial situation.
n These tasks have the
dilemma.
On the one hand, they encourage students’ autonomy. On the other hand, the task
topics are quite difficult because students lack lived experiences or
background knowledge. In addition to this, the environment is not one of the
best one for interaction. Thus, the task is crucial to the success of the
interaction, at NCEA level 3.
7.2.2 Mariage Pour Tous
n One solution for the
disadvantage of interaction task is to give students an ownership of the task.
Ø Topic about marriage pour tous (marriage for all) is
one of the familiar issues for all students because it receives considerable
media attention in both France and New Zealand. The interaction lent itself to
the societal dimension, comparison across two different contexts, and the
opportunity to explore and justify opposing views.
n To help the students to
prepare, students are given a collection of fifteen “controversial statements”
about the issue to act as initial prompts to the discussion.
n There is, however, a
limitation of the task in practice. If your partner is very quiet, what are you
going to do?
7.2.3 Cat Café
n One Japanese teacher
says that the task topic should not be controversial nor provocative.
Ø Instead of that, topic
such as “Does New Zealand need a cat café?” is suitable for interactional
tasks. The cat café is weird in New Zealand, but it is typical in Japan.
Ø The task would lend
itself to a range of interactions that could explore different perspectives and
enable reflection on cultural differences.
n This teacher uses flipped classroom model. This approach
reversed the traditional teacher-led teaching model, and students gained their
first exposure to new material outside the classroom (i.e., by working on it at
home). Subsequent time in class is used to build on this preparatory work, with
the teacher operating as a facilitator. Thus, the work is shifted from passive
to active learning and towards a focus on the higher older thinking skills.
7.2.4 Getting Students to Take the
Lead
n There are four
interaction tasks developed in German.
1.
Pairs
of students would look at each other’s web-pages, and comment on and discuss
them.
2.
Focusing
on the role of film and TV in learning, students discuss what they found useful
or not useful, the place for dubbing or whether it was better to watch something
that was originally made in the language.
3.
The
third task topic is about learning a second language. Having been learning
foreign language for several years, students have experience in learning L2.
4.
The
final task is about identity and what it is like living in your country:
Are they from here or not? If they are from elsewhere, how do they find living
in your country? What is interaction with people living here like? What is done
to integrate people into this society? In comparison with other country, if
they have something to compare.
n Key to the successful
interactions are students recording it when they are ready, going off and
recording it with somebody and coming back and perhaps recording it with
somebody else as well.
→The process leading to
the interactions is based on the Task Based Language Assessments (TBLAs).
n In summary, the examples
of tasks presented above indicate a range of different operationalization in
different contexts. They suggest that successful interactions at level 3 are
embedded within, and arise from, quite structured scaffolding and preparatory
phases, rather than being completely spontaneous and unrehearsed.
Discussion
Point
n In Japan, the textbooks
deal with environmental problem such as desertisation,
ozone hole, and acid rain. Actually, 17-year-old boys in Japan do not suffer from the
desertisation, but those in Australia suffer from the ozone hole. Although
learned from textbooks, talking about environment may not be suitable for interaction. How can teachers associate
the topics in the textbooks and interaction activity?