Week eight diary

I've been bad about keeping up my blogging habit. LP posted an interesting article about keeping a diary that resonates with much of my thinking about student blogs, my own ethnographic writing, etc, so I am resolving (again!) to better about writing here. V thanked me today for formatting the class the way I have and requiring them to document their learning, because she's finding the weekly diary very useful for her larger dissertation project.

The learners have finally gotten into a groove. Everyone has a language partner they are meeting with either by skype or in person, most of them just once a week, I think. Our meetings have been going well, and we've had a lot to say about the readings so are not spending as much time on learning reports (which is fine since they also post their reports online and share about their learning during our discussion).

Today SS noted that this week has seemed mark a turning point for everyone, which is really interesting because this time last year was also a marker for learners. At the time they attributed it to particular readings we did on meta-cognition, but maybe it's just the timing.

We talked about motivation a lot today, both long-term and short-term. LM noted that posting in the Facebook group motivates her to do something every day, but that she's fallen out of the habit of posting and wants to get back into. SS noted that she is motivated by educating her family about Somali culture because they hold a lot of negative stereotypes. SF is motivated by shocking other Iranians who are surprised to learn that she is studying Arabic, and also changing their perceptions of Arabs and Arabic.

Today V led our discussion of Ch. 4 in the Leaver et al book, about feelings, motivation, and personality. She formatted the discussion in a different way than I've ever been a part of: She divided the class into two parts and had half of us each present our reactions to and thoughts about the reading, while the others had to just listen and take notes and wait to respond. After half of us had each presented, then the other half had a chance to respond to us. I liked this a lot because it required everyone to really listen carefully to others and to frame their contributions in relation to what had been said before. I will try it in my other class. V also noted how our individual reactions to the discussion format related to our personality types, tying it back to our reading and discussion of Myers-Briggs types.

I'm getting ready to go to the NASILP conference next week and am planning to treat it as chance to do some fieldwork, keeping fieldnotes on the conference to compare to my own notes from our class.

Week fourteen diary

On Tuesday we met to assess our "multi-language seminar" after re-reading Marshall's article on a program very similar to ours and another piece that describes the NASILP program.  I was pleased to hear that for the most part students have found value in the format of the seminar, and surprised that at least a couple of them found it more work than a typical language class (which I take to be a good thing). One student had some concrete suggestions on how to improve the course in the future, specifically focusing more on helping students to become self-directed early on rather than assuming that they are already self-directed. She suggested moving some of the readings on motivation and learner strategies earlier in the course. She also mentioned that she would find it helpful to learn more about advanced-level strategies that might differ from those she learned earlier in her language study. I don't know if there is any literature on that, so now I have a small literature review project to work on! I asked her what strategies she thinks she's used that are specific to her level but she couldn't think of any at that moment. I suggested that she use the final paper as an opportunity to review her learner diaries to see if she could figure out which strategies she had used and how effective they were, and she seemed interested in that idea. I'm excited to see what she comes up with!

Week four diary

This week L led our discussion about two readings. The first was really old article about the so-called "linguist-informant" method for learning LCTLs whereby a small group of students would meet with both a linguist and a native speaker informant. The second was the materials that the NASILP program gives you access to if you pay to join their organization, materials designed for self-instructing learners who are working with tapes and a native speaker. L did a good job noting the similarities between the two methods in their focus on working with a native speaker but not treating them as a teacher.

I was pleased to learn that L had gained something from these readings that she is putting into immediate practice with the tutor in Uganda she is working with over skype, shifting from having him in a teacher role to more of a conversation partner. She initially planned to also have him "drill" her on pronunciation but she seemed receptive to my suggestions about other ways of using their time together to practice rather than drill.

The other students shared some minor successes and pitfalls.  E shared the difficulty of reading and having to look up lots of words that end up not being useful.  This is probably because she chose the text herself, at random, rather than having one assigned by a teacher who would chose one at an appropriate level of difficulty and/or of choosing one on a topic she might have more vocabulary about already.  N shared the challenge of knowing what grammar to focus on when she's only been in communicatively-focused classrooms in the past and never learned the grammatical terms for what she is learning.  None of the learners seemed too phased by these struggles -- they all seem determined and working hard.