Session Information
31 SES 07, Different Research Approaches towards Multilingualism
Paper Session
Contribution
This presentation intends to describe and summarize the process and findings of a collaborative action research (CAR) project conducted by a university teacher working in the Language and Literacy Education Department, at the University of Valencia (Spain), and 7 of his postgraduate student-teachers. The project was aimed at strengthening the process dimension of ‘English as a Foreign Language’ high school curricula (Nunan, 1988; van Lier, 1996; Newby, 2004). The motivation behind it was twofold: First, a desire to intensify the intrinsic educational worth of the EFL classes, since this school area tends to be justified on professional, intercultural or economic grounds rather than on the intrinsic quality of the educational process itself, as betrayed by the regional curriculum (Conselleria d'Educació. DECRET 112/2007, 2007, p. 30546) and even by the European Common Frame of Reference for Languages (1991) on which it is based. Actually, students tended to find the EFL classes impoverishing and alienating (Doiz, Lasagabaster, & Sierra, 2014, p. 118). Secondly—this time from a teacher perspective—the research project addressed the need for a specifically educational criterion to design and implement curricular language tasks, since the communicative framework for EFL teaching (Canale & Swain, 1980) did not provide this specific standard. The researchers felt that even Task-based approaches to language learning were too oriented towards the goals of the learning processes—the acquisition of certain competences—and not towards the intrinsic educational value of the tasks themselves.
In order to exercise this turn in the FL curriculum, the university researcher decided to draw on Stenhouse’s (1981), McKernan’s (2008) and Elliott’s (1991) framework for designing and developing a process model curriculum, even though the latter had generally been applied to areas related to the Social Sciences. As such, this framework entailed different steps: (1) formulating discipline-specific principles for a given area of knowledge—language and literature, in the case of this research project—, ones which captured the “logical structure” or “in-built standards” of the discipline (McKernan, 2007, p. 4); (2) translating them into concrete pedagogical principles of procedure for the educators of the corresponding areas to follow in their classes (school and high school EFL teachers, in this case); (3) design curricular tasks through which the teacher was capable of fulfilling these principles in the classroom; (4) and also specific methods of curricular assessment.
In our case, the aim was for the language teachers to give the learners the chance of directing their thoughts and actions in the classroom by the same principles that directed the thoughts and actions of experts working on the field. In the FL area, this meant that FL learners should feel like poets and linguistics in class (no matter their FL level), and this was considered as the perfect example of an educational experience which was intrinsically worthwhile, regardless of the specific outcomes which derived from it.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Canale, M., & Swain, M. (1980). Theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics, 1 , 1-47. Conselleria d'Educació. DECRET 112/2007. (2007, July 20). Retrieved January 20, 2015, from http://www.docv.gva.es/datos/2007/07/24/pdf/2007_9717.pdf Council of Europe. (1991). Common European Framework of Reference for Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. Strasbourg: Language Policy Unit. Cummins, J., & Early, M. (2011). Identity texts. The collaborative creation of power in multilingual schools. London: Trentham & Institute of Education Press. Doiz, A., Lasagabaster, D., & Sierra, J. M. (2014). Giving voice to the students. What (de)motivates the in CLIL classes? In D. Lasagabaster, A. Doiz, & J. M. Sierra (Eds.), Motivation and foreign language learning. From theory to practice (pp. 117-138). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Elliott, J. (1991). Action research for educational change. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. McKernan, J. (2008). Curriculum and imagination. Process theory, pedagogy and action research. Oxon: Routledge. McKernan, J. (2007). The action inquiry seminar: Education in democratic classrooms. College Quarterly , 10 (4), 1-6. Newby, D. (2004). Syllabus and curriculum design. In M. Byram (Ed.), Routledge encyclopedia of language teaching and learning (pp. 590-594). New York: Routledge. Nunan, D. (1988). Syllabus design. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stenhouse, L. (1981). An introduction to curriculum research and development. London: Heinemann. van Lier, L. (1996). Interaction in the language curriculum. London: Longman. Wang, Q., & Zang, H. (2014). Promoting teacher autonomy through university-school collaborative action research. Language Teaching Research , 18 (2), 222-241.
Search the ECER Programme
- Search for keywords and phrases in "Text Search"
- Restrict in which part of the abstracts to search in "Where to search"
- Search for authors and in the respective field.
- For planning your conference attendance you may want to use the conference app, which will be issued some weeks before the conference
- If you are a session chair, best look up your chairing duties in the conference system (Conftool) or the app.