The V-task discourse analysis

Currently, I am working on my module 4 essay for the University of Birmingham. My question is to do with the discourse analysis of a class, using Sinclair and Coulthard's Model. My transcriptions are done and I'm ready to start typing and analysing.

The discourse to do with a traditional classroom setting much outlined in Sinclair and Coulthard's model are pretty straight forward. The teacher asks a question, the student responds to the question and the teacher acknowledges the response. But the classroom lesson I have chosen to analyse is a lesson based on the V-task parameters.

I have found that to analyse my lesson based on their model is virtually impossible. For the following reasons, I'm running into panic state!

I virtually have no IRF exchanges. I don't ask my class questions, and if I do, it isn't for the purpose of extracting information. The students themselves ask questions to access the language they need and in most cases, as even outlined in Kumaravadivelu's book Beyond Methods, my role as a teacher is to make sure there are learning opportunities made for each student in the classroom based on their needs. So if a student asks me a question, more often than not, another student will answer, or I will redirect the question back to the class to create a more dynamic learning environment.
In my classroom discourse, with 5 people present (myself and 4 students) there are at least 2 conversations going on simultaneously. Students asking students, or students asking me with me redirecting. My role of a teacher now has become one of not teaching, but creating learning opportunities and opportunities for sharing.

My students have been studying plural forms. Their job was to design their own zoo, labeling all the animals and designing a layout for the zoo. They were to go home and draw the animals later.
Why I did this lesson;
1. I wanted them to create a zoo, based on the animals they wanted to put into the zoo. One of the students actually labeled his zoo 'My dangerous zoo' since he had a good variety of the more 'dangerous' animals.
2. I wanted the students to interact in the classroom, not go home and look up animals and write them out at home. I wanted them to share ideas, a student struggling to come up with animals for his/her own zoo, might get ideas from other students during interaction. The term for moment to moment learning in the classroom is microgenesis which from the interaction happening here, was happening.
3. I wanted the drawing to be done at home - why? so the students would have to remember the animals they wrote. One student wrote 'dolphins' and when he got home he couldn't read it. So he had to look it up again, in order to draw the picture of the dolphins. Reinforcement of the lesson.
4. The students needed to use plurals to create the zoo. A popular question from me was 'do you only have one monkey in your zoo?' with students realizing that -s needed to be added.
5. The variety of plural forms were addressed, adding an -s or an -es, and although this never came up, some animals the addition of -s or -es is sometimes not enough... wolf - wolves, sheep -sheep, but this was not important for this lesson,.
6. The most important part of this lesson that I need to point out, was every student was so excited about creating their zoo that they forgot about the English. Although they needed to use English to create the zoo and they needed to write, ask, converse, share ideas and so forth to come up with 10 animals for their zoo, they were more intent on creating a zoo that was their zoo, with the animals that they liked and wanted to use.

So with the lesson done and now transcribed (it really is a mess and I have no idea how to analyze it) I look back and watch the video, listen to the voices of the children and realize with a tear in my eye that these students really had a good lesson.

I wanted to name my essay 'V-task discourse analysis' but under the guidelines from the University of Birmingham, I cannot reference my previous essays and my previous essay was all on the parameters of the V-task and its workings. So I will call it something else and panic for the next two weeks on what to write.

Overall though, this kind of discourse analysis is useful for learning what actually happens in the classroom and discovering things we can do as teachers to change our roles to make learning in the classroom more student-centered and more enjoyable!

Mike Cole

I've been part of the xmca mailing list for the past few months and have encountered many e-mails from Mike Cole. His web site can be found under the links on the right of this page.

Not too long ago I was interested in what someone had to say about my research, and Mike being the 'main' on the xmca list, he seemed to be the best choice. He had encouraged me to 'not be the newbie' on the list but instead to add my thoughts and my comments on my own research. My initial posts were commented on by others and my thoughts were shot down by one or two, which left me wondering what the heck I was really doing. Mike was kind enough to look at my paper on the V-task and comment. Although the list for the most part is a little too esoteric for me, witnessing the communications between some of the greatest minds has been an experience in the least.
The amount of contributions Mike has made to the world of psychology and the world involving Vygotsky is astounding. His CV is 21 pages. I'm very embarrased to have asked him to read my paper. I simply hadn't done my homework to find out who the man was behind this xmca mailing list.
But putting that all aside, his warm nature, his vitality and support on the list has been inspiring and I look forward to many more discussions!
His link will lead you to many web sites, so I encourage you to look around!

Vygotsky

This is a picture of Lev Vygotsky, because of whom the evolution of this blog came to be.
In my quest as a teacher to make a difference, many of the lessons I have been doing of late have been a result of the theories of Vygotsky.
In the past, a teacher largely of the PPP methodology and yet unsure of why we taught this way, began an MA course through the University of Birmingham. After a year of the course and about halfway completed, my dissertation has been decided. I have decided to use the Vygotsky's concept of ZPD and social interaction to tie in a link to TBL. The current TBL concept is more of a communication based focus, but under my research I have decided to to a revision of the TBL methodology to make it fit with the concept of social interaction, scaffolding and ZPD. A recently submitted paper as part of my studies proposed a new type of task, called a V-Task, which the students in their efforts to acquire language need to access it first. But the accessing of the language would need to come from a type of task that motivated students to become autonomous learners, and realize that the best way to learn is through social interaction within the classroom. The teacher, also playing an autonomous role, is not the only resource in the classroom to get information from, but other students, books and dictionaries etc, are also available. The V-task, based around this concept differs from a procedural or a process type syllabus, where the task can still be centered around a certain target or theme, yet in order to complete the task, the students need to access language and the completion of the task is a by-product of language access.

Teachers, providing scaffolding, and also providing the means for students to understand how to learn the language rather than just learning the language, play a much different role in the classroom rather than the traditional one which we are so used to.

So the link between Vygotsky and this new type of task V-task, is a type of lesson which I will be focussing much more on in the future, already having many classes work with this type of task. The results are amazing and the students are putting more and more energy into their lessons.

If anyone wants to comment on the V-task, or would like to discuss it further, I would be more than happy to share or exchange ideas.

Mark

Learning through songs

Here are some students studying the song 'I can see a Rainbow' from the Finding Out Series. (Finding Out 2)

I leave the students alone and they practise the words first. Then I let them listen to the CD and then they practise some more this time practising the melody as well.

The students more often than not help each other with the words. In the second video (the actual performance) you can see two of the students.




I stress that it is best to leave the students to teach each other. Questions do come, like 'what's this word?', but most of the students now know that I encourage them to ask each other questions before asking me. I'm the last resort. I'm giving them a valuable lesson in how to become interdependent learners. The scaffolding that happens in the classroom is fantastic and the students are much happier learning this on their own. Who would have thought that a ten year old 'bully' would put so much passion into singing the rainbow song? He loved it!

Mark

Dictogloss

Here is a group of students doing a dictogloss exercise. We did a song from the SuperKids 3 book, the 'Did you play baseball yesterday?' song.

The students responded much better than I thought they would and I tried to do as much scaffolding as I could; for example getting them to spell a word as much as they could before I helped them the rest of the way, rather than me just spelling the word for them when they asked. Of I redirected the question back to the group to see if anyone else could help spell the word. This was the first dictogloss that I did with them and I did end up playing the song about 6 times. (I also played the last part of the song once as you'll see in this video).

Overall the dictogloss was a surprise success, the students had a slow start, but to be expected having never done this before, but the students ended up doing a lot of communicating amongst themselves to get the words all down. In the end, I let them check their version against the version in the book. They were almost all perfect.

As you will see in the video too, the Did you....? version was OK, but when it came to the simple past sentence, they couldn't catch the -ed on the end of play, or paint.
This was only their second week on this chapter - simple past with regular verbs adding -ed only, so I will try something different next time to see how much they were able to notice.

Running Dictation

A favorite lesson for students is always the running dictation game.

In this class, there are 4 students, all aged 10, and they are studying from the SuperKids 3 textbook. Since I don't like to follow the PPP method, I use the text mostly as a guide for the students to get a jist of what we are doing in the class. We still do a bit of the pairwork but mostly it is learning on their own and if they have questions, please ask me sort of lesson.

This lesson was all about learning some of the skills, the students did them all, reading, writing, listening and speaking. But they also learn other skills such as understanding, expressing, indicating, recognizing, learning the elements of sentence structure and using punctuation. (see White, R.V. (1988) The ELT Curriculum. Blackwell Publishing. Malden, MA. pp. 70-71)

Not only did they have to find out spelling, but they also had to find out where the beginning of the sentence was, capital letters, the comma, period, question mark and even the apostrophe.

They learned that the beginning of a sentence always starts with a capital, it ends with a period and 'it is' is abbreviated to 'it apostrophe s'.

The way the lesson goes;

Students are in pairs. One student writes, the other runs. In this case, the paragraph the runner had to dictate to their partner was in another room. They run to the other room, memorize as much as they could, then come back and tell the writer - who then writes it down in their notebook. 'How do you spell...?' 'Once more please.' are popular phrases they use to be able to correctly write down everything they are told to write.

When the paragraph is finished, then the students switch and a new paragraph is started. I don't use the same paragraph for all the students, it's too easy for them to copy from each other. The point is that they listen and write. And if they don't understand, then they have to ask to get the correct spelling and punctuation.

It keeps them busy and occupied and it's great exercise for the students too! I only do this lesson once every few months with a class.

It's great for all ages. I even do it with the little ones, but with words only, like cat or dog. They get so frustrated after only remembering the 'c' or the 'a' and having to run back to remember the word again, but they remember their letters and they have so much fun! And they get to practise their writing too!

Mark

Fumiaki-san is one of my adult students. He comes whenever he can, as he's very busy, but his keen interest in English and his perseverence make him a joy to teach.

He has his own blog, which he faithfully keeps everyday; http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/fumiaki_sasaki38

In his class we cover so many different aspects of English.
We read numerous books, he has had his favorites (The Firm) and his not so favorites (1984) but currently we have switched to movies. We did study John Grisham's 'The Runaway Jury' last year and now we have switched to an all movie mode studying the nuances of the English language through Mission Impossible 1. It's amazing how simple the story becomes when you actually sit down to teach it, the scenes are short enough for a 90 minute lesson, we can cover a 8-10 minute scene every week. We look at different nuances between words that are used versus the ones he already knows, but his interest lies mostly in the interesting phrases that are used in the movies. They differ so much from books in the language they use that despite books being more descriptive, the movies have the language which I think is much more effective for studying conversation. Not to say that extensive reading is not important; it is, just that movies have a different language about them and the language that is used can be used to teach things like collocations, concepts like overgeneralization and just plain natural ways of saying things.

The next movie we will do in conjunction with the book 'Snow falling on cedars'. We are about halfway through MI1, but we'll finish it within the next few months.

Thank you Fumiaki-san. I really enjoy our lessons!

Mark

This is R-chan.
She is currently in SuperKids 4, yet, most of the lessons we do are from a variety of sources, as well as from whatever R-chan wants to do. She pretty much decides what she wants to learn. She has gone from a student who followed the PPP method to one of now who much prefers learning things on her own using a much more holistic method. So the SuperKids 4 book isn't followed from the traditional PPP format it was designed for, but instead we move around a lot, covering things from the book but in a TBL format.

The picture here was taken after we played 2 games.

The first game was based on the lesson in SK4 making comparisons between 2 animals.
We played the memory game. But when two cards were turned over they had to be compared in some way.

So I went first.
I turned over the ostrich and hippopotamus cards. I said 'An ostrich is faster than a hippopotamus'. Her response was one of '???' So I said the word 'fast' again and then repeated my sentence. This time going slower and emphasizing the faster.
She agreed and then it was her turn.

She turned over the lion and the elephant. 'Elephant big is lion.' Far from a perfect sentence, but the word order was correct.

The game progressed to the point where she heard enough of my language so that she could begin to create the comparisons herself with much more sentence structure.

Then came the moment that defines the new v-task. She asked me to help her with a new word so that she could make the sentence.

She turned over the elephant card and the bear card. She could have said bigger, but she asked me 'How do you say 'omoi' in English? I replied 'heavy', I didn't want to give the comparitive form, she didn't ask for it. Her sentence 'A elephant is heavier is than bear.' Her interlanguage was working its way through and she was discovering that the adjective -er form was used for comparisons. The word order remained correct and the emergence of the -er form told me she was on her way.
The rule she then applied to the peacock and snake card which she used the word beautifuller.

The next game we played was designed to reduce this simple form to something more applicable. In the picture, on the table you can see all of the cards face up. The object of this game was to choose an animal and the other person had to guess which animal it was.

I went first. I chose 'elephant'. She guessed lion. I said 'it's bigger'. She then said 'rhinocerous'. I replied 'It's heavier'. So every animal she guessed I used her new guess to compare it to my animal. She was pretty much in tune with this game. It was simpler, the language was simpler and it allowed me also to focus on the 'more' structures, although these structures were not part of her ZPD on this day. She wasn't able to distance this zone.

It came to the point in this game though that she could guess my animal within 3 guesses based on the clues I gave her. Also using the idea of the v-task, I added new adjectives and in order for her to guess the animal, she needed to know what this new adjective meant. She was allowed to ask me. I used slower, more beautiful, taller (she got the word longer, but the concept of taller wasn't there until I had picked giraffe as my animal to introduce this new adjective). She immediately guessed 'giraffe' and then turned around and used 'taller' herself in her next turn.

Having a student by themselves at this age can sometimes be very tedious, but R-chan has the personality and the motivation to be able to learn on her own.

Other things we do in class;

She does 10 minutes of reading out loud, from Penguin Readers 'Anne of Green Gables' level 2 book. At the 10 minute mark, I stop her and we look at the progress she has made based on previous week's readings. She can read a little over a page in 10 minutes, as opposed to 3/4 of a page from when she first started.
She also signs out a book a week from our library, she picks it. She has read over 50 books since the library began.We have a variety of readers from various publishers, so there is a variety for her to choose from. She has no favorites, but she has read a lot of the Story Street series from Longman. She is reading level 5 of that series. Sometimes she chooses a much lower level book than she is more capable of, but it is her choice.

We also do a lot of writing in class, she does study a little grammar when the need arises, or when the homework dictates that grammar needs to be covered, but I design the lesson around a more 'noticing' approach. For example when we covered past tense. I laid all of the cards on the table, so she could see the words. I asked her to point out similarities between the cards, and she immediately pointed out the -ed ending.

A pleasure to teach. Her dream is to work at Disneyland as a guide.

Good luck R-chan!

Mark

Here is Y-kun, recently he joined our school in Shiwa.
He is going to be in grade school starting next year and well, he's the blog of the day article.

His perseverence to learn English is amazing. Today he walked in to the school and said, Mr. Mark? Excuse me, Mr. Mark? So I replied, yes? There was no reply after that, but his mom explained that he learned a new phrase and wanted to use it.

He refuses to speak any Japanese in class, and to all other students his favorite phrase is 'no Japanese please'. Of course when he says it, he isn't sitting down, he is standing on his chair, shaking his finger and demanding.
Today, in class, we didn't do any TBL lesson, we did some phonics, they use the reading rods to match the letters and then we did a small science lesson, learning about planting seeds, giving them water and seeing the plant grow, flowers blooming and then turning into tomatoes. 'I don't like tomatoes! Yes!' was his reply.

His greetings and his funny character make the class so fun to teach, and due to his love of copying everything I say, he is so fun to teach! Recently I bought colored pencils from Canada, and they all have unusual names, there are even metallic colors. He has them all memorized. If the children want to color in class, they have to ask for the color they want before taking it. He loves the metallic colors, maybe not so much because of the color, but because he loves saying the colors. 'metalllllllic purrrple please!'


I don't have to teach anymore. Not this class. He makes sure everyone knows what the new vocab is, or the new activity is, before we move on.

He will be in my next research group when I start to link Vygotsky to TBL. It will be fun to design a lesson around Vygotsky's ZPD and keeping him in mind, see how I can have him teach others through scaffolding and through his world of social interaction.
He will be learning to read soon so his demands will increase I'm sure.

Thank you Y-kun!