Life in the time of the Roman Empire: Exploiting a short story in TBLT-CLIL

1. Life in the time of the Roman Empire: Exploiting a short story in TBLT-CLIL David C. Hall & Teresa Navés https://sites.google.com/site/navesteresa/apac https://sites.google.com/site/dchall01/ www.ub.edu/GRAL/Naves/ tnaves@ub.edu APAC 2011. Barcelona. UPF

2. I strongly disagree----- I strongly agree • Reading is an essential part of language instruction at every level because it supports learning in multiple ways. • Reading material is language input. By giving students a variety of materials to read, instructors provide multiple opportunities for students to absorb vocabulary, grammar, sentence structure, and discourse structure as they occur in authentic contexts

3. I strongly disagree----- I strongly agree • Reading for content information in the language classroom gives students both authentic reading material and an authentic purpose for reading. • Reading authentic / everyday materials that are designed for native speakers can give students insight into the lifestyles and worldviews of the people whose language they are studying

4. I strongly disagree----- I strongly agree • We are usually more interested in what we are going to read if we already have an idea of what the text is going to be about • In our mother-tongue we do not read unless we have a reason for doing so. This reason could be pleasure (e.g. reading a story or novel), it could be to find out how to do something (e.g. reading the instructions on a packet of custard) or it could be to look for something specific (e.g. looking up a number in the telephone directory).

5. I strongly disagree----- I strongly agree • It is not necessary (nor even desirable!) that the learner understands all the language presented in the reading text. • Post-reading activities help readers to focus on the meaning not on the grammatical or lexical aspects of the text. • Post-reading tasks can be conducted in learners’ mother tongue. • Pre-reading tasks are the most common tasks teachers use to help learners read more effectively.

6. Eaude (2007) Chpt 2: Tarraco … Catalonia had no independent existence in Roman times. It was a province of Rome, as later after 1714 and then under Franco, it was to be a province of Madrid. But the pleasure of many Catalans in a Roman history, in being part of Europe’s greatest Empire, is that Madrid did not exist then. Today’s state capital was just a wind-swept steppe. Catalonia’s Roman history underlines how it is so much closer to the Mediterranean - to the ‘centre of the earth’, the heart of Western civilization – and how its people are mixed. Carthaginians, Romans, Celtiberians, Greeks... even 2,000 years ago these had all passed through. Such thoughts of greater depth and fuller history do not help you eat, but have been comforting to Catalan nationalists in long decades of being dominated by the Spanish state’s power

7. “Learning is learning to think.” Dewey (1933/1986, p. 176) “Properly organized learning results in mental development”. Vygotsky (1978, p. 90) The process of putting something into words is similar to the process of working out a problem.

8. Underlying principles • Schema theory • Constructivism • Second Language Acquisition (SLA) • Task-based Learning and Teaching (TBLT) • Content-based instruction (CBI) & Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) • Communicative Language Teaching (CLT)

9. Pre-reading tasks • Schema theory research provides strong evidence for the effectiveness of pre-reading tasks (Chastain, 1988). • Pre-reading tasks motivate readers to read the text • Pre-reading tasks help learners complete the task better • Activating readers’ prior knowledge of a topic before they begin to read help learners’ comprehension (Carrell and Eisterhold 1983; Grabe 1991; Ur 1996)

10. Pre-reading tasks by Williams (1984) • To stimulate interest in the text. Research shows that when we are asked to predict what is going to happen in a text this facilitates our comprehension when we actually read it. • To give a reason for reading. None of us read in a vacuum and learners also need a reason to read if they are to be genuinely motivated. One of the ways in which a pre-reading activity can provide a "reason to read" is by getting learners to set their own questions according to their own interest in the text). Another way could be to create an "information gap" activity where students have different information and have to read and Exchange information to complete a task. 3. To prepare the reader for the language of the text.

11. Sample pre-reading tasks: • Using the title, subtitles, and divisions within the text to predict content and organization or sequence of information • Looking at pictures, maps, diagrams, or graphs and their captions • Talking about the author's background, writing style, and usual topics • Skimming to find the theme or main idea and eliciting related prior knowledge • Reviewing vocabulary or grammatical structures • Reading over the comprehension questions to focus attention on finding that information while reading • Constructing semantic webs (a graphic arrangement of concepts or words showing how they are related) • Doing guided practice with guessing meaning from context or checking comprehension while reading Source: http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/reading/developread.htm

12. Reading Research: Good readers • Read extensively • Integrate information in the text with existing knowledge • Have a flexible reading style, depending on what they are reading • Are motivated • Rely on different skills interacting: perceptual processing, phonemic processing, recall • Read for a purpose; reading serves a function http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/reading/reindex.htm

13. Reading Strategies to help students read more effectively • Previewing: reviewing titles, section headings, and photo captions to get a sense of the structure and content of a reading selection • Predicting: using knowledge of the subject matter to make predictions about content and vocabulary and check comprehension; using knowledge of the text type and purpose to make predictions about discourse structure; using knowledge about the author to make predictions about writing style, vocabulary, and content • Skimming and scanning: using a quick survey of the text to get the main idea, identify text structure, confirm or question predictions • Guessing from context: using prior knowledge of the subject and the ideas in the text as clues to the meanings of unknown words, instead of stopping to look them up • Paraphrasing: stopping at the end of a section to check comprehension by restating the information and ideas in the text

14. Task-Based Learning TBL • Task complexity ¿=? Linguistic difficulty • Cummins’s (1984) highly cognitively demanding yet heavily contextualized tasks • Two-way tasks (Long, 1994) • Planning time results in better learners’ performance. • Meaningful tasks: • Info-gap • Non-linguistic but content aims • Purposeful • Etc.

15. Task-Based Learning TBL

16. Initial Evaluation aims to • Check learner’s prior experience • Check learner’s background knowledge • Raise expectations • Anticipate some content and objectives • Detect potential problems

17. ContentSchemata Content schemata are more helpful to EFL reading than linguistic simplification - Steffensen, Joag-Dev, and Anderson (1979). • Steffensen and Joag-Dev (1984), • Carrell (1987), • Johnson (1982), Kang (1992), • Oh (2001), • Hossein Keshavarz & Reza Atai (2007)

18. Against Linguistic Simplification • Blau (1982) Learners benefit from the information regarding relationships that is revealed by complex sentences. Short, simple sentences actually are an obstacle to comprehension • Strother and Ulijn (1987) NS and NNS comprehension of original texts v. texts that are simplified syntactically but not lexically confirms that LS does not make texts more readable. • Parker & Chaudron (1987) LS does not make a text easier to understand as a whole • Britton, Gulgoz, and Glynn (1993) Presenting content in appropriate ways improves readability much more than text simplification

19. Against Linguistic Simplification • Yano, Long, & Ross (1994) Elaborated input • Oh (2001) Elaboration is more facilitative than simplification. Low-proficiency students did not significantly benefit from simplification. • Byrd (2000) “these [simplified] materials can remain difficult because of the loss of connectors and other language used to guide the reader through the text” (p. 2). • Hossein Keshavarz & Reza Atai (2007) LS impeded the comprehension and recall of the content-familiar texts.

20. Extensive Reading • Krashen (1994) makes a strong case for extensive reading as an effective and efficient path to obtaining input for acquisition. • Ellis (1995) points out that moderate to low frequency words occur much more frequently in written texts than in common speech, thus offering greater opportunity for acquisition. • The reader also has time, when needed, to form and confirm hypotheses about meaning and usage. • Speech, on the other hand, may pass by too quickly for this to be done.

21. Benefits of Extensive Reading • Janopoulos (1986) found pleasure reading in English the variable correlating most strongly with English writing proficiency among ESL students, • Tsang's (1996) study, time spent reading proved more helpful to learners' writing (language use and content) than time spent writing. • Hafiz and Tudor (1989; 1990), in companion studies in ESL (England) and EFL (Pakistan) contexts, also recorded significant gains in writing proficiency (accuracy, fluency, range of expression) resulting from extensive reading, • Mason and Krashen (1996) reported that students in extensive reading based courses enjoyed greater relative gains in reading speed, writing proficiency, and performance on cloze tests than their counterparts in reading skills/grammar-translation based courses.

22. While-Reading Tasks • Hyland (1990), Nunan (1999) and Brown (2001) discuss scanning and skimming activities. According to Brown, skimming and scanning are thought to be the most valuable reading strategies. Through skimming, a reader is able to predict the purpose of the passage, and gets the writer’s message (Flowerdew and Peacock 2001).

23. Post-Reading Tasks • According to Chastain (1988), post-reading activities help readers to clarify any unclear meaning where the focus is on the meaning not on the grammatical or lexical aspects of the text. • Ur (1996) discusses summarize as a kind of post-reading activity where the readers are asked to summarise the content in a sentence or two. It is also possible to give this post-reading activity in the mother tongue.

24. Main References • TBLT by John Norris (2005) http:www2.hawaii.edu/~jnorris/TBLT%20presentation.ppt • Strategies for Developing Reading Skills by NCLRC available from http://www.nclrc.org/essentials/reading/stratread.htm • Williams, E. Reading in the Language Classroom. London: Macmillan, 1984.(p37) Urquhart, Sandy, and Cyril Weir. Reading in a Second Language: Process, Product and Practice. New York: Addison Wesley Longman Ltd, 1998. (p185)http://www.facli.unibo.it/NR/rdonlyres/2774552D-C3DB-4F78-B7F9-E720C852E529/16539/blundellreading1.pdf