Design Principles for Language Education

1. Design Principles for Language Education Short cut to theory Gert Rijlaarsdam & Anne Toorenaar University of Amsterdam, g.c.w.rijlaarsdam@uva.nl

2. Theory: Starting point: FourInstructional Design Principles tried out in our research with teachers students write for a real audience and authentic purpose (students internalize audience’s perspective) Learning is meaningful • students’ reflection is stimulated by pretesting their communicative products Learning requires thinking students write collaborative products in collaboration with peers Learning requires sharing students apply competences and use written products in functional and authentic contexts Learning aims at transferable outcomes

3. Conclusion from our design studies All four design parameters are necessary to create effective learning units

4. Reconsidering the four design parameters

5. Social learning theory Language learners acquire language naturally by interaction with other language users Language learning is a social-cognitive process • Input • Perception / Noticing / Analysis / Abstraction / Generalization • Output / Production Feedback

6. Classrooms: • Natural environments for language learning • Teacher’s role: • Set up environments for goal directed language learning • = communities of learners • Producing language • Study the productions: Rule formation and specification

7. Reconsidering the four design parameters Classrooms as Communities of learners: three design principles

8. Design Principle 1 Link school with real worlds & language users • Learning the language, culture of language use as used in ‘real’ worlds of communication: • becoming a member of the communicative

9. Design Principle 2 • Guided discovery: • Teacher creates the set up for discovery • (knowledge building, knowlegde creation) • That implies, creating communicative situations • 1. that are meaningful to do • 2. that generates data for learning

10. Design Principle 3 Shared discourse • Teacher creates the set up for data-analysis • That implies, creating a task that stimulates a • 1. Learning dialogue, abstracting and generalizing from experience • 2. Using language in a natural way to communicate productively

11. Reconsidering the three design principles for language lessons Role theory

12. Role theory: A learner is a writer-reader-learner

13. In a classroom as a community of language learners, these three roles must be active/activated

14. Complete Communication Participation Learning Model ParticipantWriter ParticipantReader Researcher Observer • Communicative role/pairs: • Writing has a purpose and an audience • Writer has access to reader’s process. • Instructive role/pairs: • Reader informs writers about perceived quality of text. • Inquiry/Observing/Analyzing role: • Learners study the writing, reading or writing-reading process.

15. This requires two Design Principles

16. Design Task 1Creating a Communicative Task: Purpose and Audience ParticipantWriter ParticipantReader • Task: Language Processing Task: ‘Doing’ language • Communicative role/pairs: • Writing has a purpose and an audience • Writer has access to reader’s process (reader ‘shows’ (mis)understanding). • Instructive role/pairs: • Reader informs writers about perceived quality of text. • Reader acts as advisor, reader ‘teaches’

17. Design task 2: Creating Language Learning Tasks:Doing meta cognitive/linguistic work Sharing to think, analyse, abstact and generalize Learning dialogue