Powerpoint presentation on the findings of some classroom research into the relevance of strategy-use in reading and listening from the learners' viewpoint.
Measures of Central Tendency: Mean, Median and Mode
Labci Presentation
1. The relevance of strategy-use in reading and listening from the learners' viewpoint. Santiago, July 14 Christiane R. Cacciari São Paulo, Brazil X TH LABCI CONFERENCE
2. ALTE 2 TEENAGERS CONTROL 15 STUDENTS EXPERIMENTAL 15 STUDENTS PART 1: skills + strategies PART 2: raising awareness
3. Sample 1 Objective Raising awareness: Elicitation + Investigation + Feedback Reflection: Sample 2 Objective Raising awareness: Elicitation + Investigation + Feedback Reflection: Final Lesson Objective Raising awareness: 2 experiences: Investigation and Reflection Comparing and contrasting groups : Experimental group and control group Conclusions
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12. The students ticked the strategies they thought they really had used. Part 2 – Raising awareness (SAMPLE 2) N of students who used them Strategies 03 Knowledge of the language 03 Guessing vocabulary Others 13 Summarizing 12 Activating background knowledge 14 Getting the main idea 13 Getting the details 11 Guessing / Inferring
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15. Objective (final lesson) P rovide students with two different listening experiences. Lead them to reflect about the differences between those experiences. Finally , state the relevance of strategies use when doing the listening activities.
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17. How am I feeling in relation to the learning tasks? What helped/hindered me from getting the answers? More comfortable because the first activity contextualized the second passage. 11 The prediction, the context, paying attention to the key words helped me get the answers right. 10 More relaxed and comfortable, the speaker spoke more clearly . 13 The first activity prepared me because of the similar context .14 It was easier and there was a picture .1 The key words helped me get the right answers .12 Raising awareness Confused due to lack of context. 12 Reasons why they didn’t get the answers : Lack of concentration. 13 Difficulty to distinguish ‘ can ’ from ‘ can’t ’/ ‘ are ’ from ‘ aren’t ’. 12 Misinterpretation of a piece of information. 06 Reasons why they got them right : More concentration . 06 Prediction from the context . 01 Strategies learned (first I got the general idea, then I paid attention to the details. 01 Confused due to the speed of the speaker . 15 Reasons why they didn’t get the answers : Lack of concentration .4 The sentences were not in order .13 Difficulty to distinguish ‘ can ’ from ‘ can’t ’ .7 Reasons why they got them right : From the context I inferred the answer .3 Key words : 4 Understood the words :12
18. The relevance of strategy-use in the student’s point of view. 2.Talking about workplaces I know prepared me for the activity. (I had an idea of what I was going to listen to) Yes – 11 No – 4 Yes – 14 No – 1 3.I didn’t have to understand everything to answer the first question. Yes – 13 No – 2 Yes – 5 No – 10 4.The second time I listened to the passage I focused my attention on specific details. Yes – 13 No – 2 Yes – 10 No – 4 5.Taking notes helped me during the activity. Yes – 5 No – 10 Yes – 3 No 11 (I didn’t take notes) (I didn’t take notes) 1.The picture helped me to predict the context of the listening passage. Yes – 9 No – 6 Yes – 13 No - 2 Experimental group Control group
I decided to investigate the relevance of strategy-use from the learner’s view point, because after teaching a lesson on reading skills, in which I guided the students to use the appropriate strategies, I applied a questionnaire about the utility of those strategies for that lesson and some students said they hadn’t been useful at all. It was my hypotheses that learners were not evaluating the utility of those strategies appropriately because they were not aware of the strategies they were using. Today I’m going to argue that raising students awareness of strategies won’t necessarily change the relevance of strategy-use in reading and listening from their point of view.
In order to test my hypotheses, I got two ALTE 2 teenager groups and planned a series of reading and listening lessons in which they were guided to use direct strategies ( as for example guessing intelligently, getting the idea quickly, taking notes etc).With the control group, I would just teach the lesson up to this part, but with the experimental group, I would have a raising awareness part.
Today, I will show you three lessons. A sample for a typical listening lesson and a sample for a typical reading lesson.The third lesson was common for both groups and its objective was to compare both groups opinion about the relevance of strategy-use.
I elicited from them what we had done and this is what I got. Talked about different kinds of parties, shared experiences about good/bad parties.(This activity aimed at setting the topic, activating they background knowledge about parties, relating it to their life etc.)
The students could relate different strategies to different activities. From my point of view, they were able to relate the appropriate strategy to a specific activity because they understood why to use those strategies and how they can help the task achievement. However ,again, to my mind the students used the strategies according to whether or not they needed them. They chose the ones that were necessary for them. Understanding the rationale behind the use of strategies and how the strategies can help task achievement was not the reason which made the students use the strategies.
The students from the experimental group did not attach importance to the strategies just because they had their awareness raised about how, when and why to use those strategies. Different students attached importance to different strategies according to their needs at that specific moment. However, because of the raising awareness process, they became more conscious of their own potential as learners. They saw themselves as part of the process when they could not accomplish a listening or reading task successfully, thus they could think of solutions to overcome the difficulties found. They were more mature and independent learners. The students from the control group were not so conscious of what hindered them from accomplishing the tasks efficiently. They were not equipped with the knowledge to spot what really went wrong, thus they couldn’t try and find efficient solutions for the problem. They didn’t recognize themselves as part of the problem being no source of possible solutions. Nevertheless, the fact that they didn’t go through the raising awareness process did not impede them from using, recognizing and attaching importance to some strategies. The students did a Reading test taken from PET exam. On average students from the experimental group scored higher than the students from the control group. All of a total of 35 questions, the control group scored 25 on average and the experimental group scored 30.