Jim Cummins The University of Toronto

1. Authentic Assessment of Language Teaching and Learning as a Component of Whole-School Language Policy Jim Cummins The University of Toronto

2. Why Do We Need a Whole-School Approach? What options do we have to reinforce plurilingualism and language awareness across the curriculum? • Traditional approaches to language teaching where the target language (TL) is taught as a subject and isolated from the rest of the curriculum have frequently not been very successful for a large number of students (e.g., FSL in Canada; Irish in Ireland); Better results are obtained in situations where there is extremely high motivation to learn the language and/or significant exposure outside school (e.g., these conditions are often met in bilingual contexts or when English is the target language). • Content-based language teaching approaches (e.g., bilingual education, CLIL, L2 immersion) tend to achieve better outcomes; • Contexts for language teaching have become much more complex—increasing diversity means that there may be many L1’s in the classroom—do students’ multilingual skills have any relevance for TL teaching? • Changes in technology are having major effects on all forms of learning—what are the possibilities for TL teaching/learning?

3. Issues for Formative/Authentic Assessment • What is being assessed? What assumptions are being made about what constitutes “language proficiency”? How are these assumptions reflected in the emphasis placed on different language skills (e.g., speaking, listening, reading, and writing) in the curriculum and in the sequence in which these skills are taught? • What is the impact of summative assessment on formative assessment? If the final test or examination for a particular course focuses on written language (e.g., paper and pencil tests of vocabulary, grammar, reading, writing), to what extent will formative assessment pay attention to the development of speaking and listening skills? • Who is doing the assessing? Obviously the classroom teacher will play a dominant role in most forms of formative assessment, but should students also be involved actively as partners in the assessment process? How can self-assessment by students be integrated into a broader pedagogical philosophy of self-regulated learning? • How does the pedagogical orientation operating in the language teaching classroom affect the possibilities for formative assessment? Formative assessment in transmission-oriented classrooms can only assess the effectiveness with which students have learned the transmitted content; however, in classrooms oriented to social constructivist or transformative pedagogies, formative assessment can focus on performance assessment—for example, the quality of inquiry in student projects using the target language, etc.

4. Nested Pedagogical Orientations

5. Nested Pedagogical Orientations • Transmission-oriented pedagogy is represented in the inner circle with the narrowest focus. The goal is to transmit information and skills articulated in the curriculum directly to students. • Social constructivist pedagogy, occupying the middle pedagogical space, incorporates the curriculum focus of transmitting information and skills but broadens it to include the development among students of higher-order thinking abilities based on teachers and students co-constructing knowledge and understanding. • Finally, transformative approaches to pedagogy broaden the focus still further by emphasizing the relevance not only of transmitting the curriculum and constructing knowledge but also of enabling students to gain insight into how knowledge intersects with social realities and power relations. The goal is to promote critical literacy among students

6. New Contexts: New Reserch and Theory • Growth of bilingual/CLIL approaches—should we be teaching explicitly for L1-L2 transfer or keeping the two (or more) languages completely separate? • Increasing diversity of student populations—bilingual/multilingual students no longer the exception in many contexts; • What do content teachers and administrators need to know and do in order to implement effective content-based teaching and assessment? • How can technology be harnessed effectively for instruction and assessment in plurilingual contexts?

7. Enabling Literacy Engagement across the Curriculum L1 and L2 Literacy Attainment ↑ Literacy Engagement ↑ ↔ Activate prior knowledge/Build background knowledge ↔ ↔

8. Competencies for Content-based Language Teaching TL Attainment ↑ Active Engagement with the TL (input and output – listening, viewing, reading + speaking, emailing, texting, and writing) ↑ ↔ Activate prior knowledge/Build background knowledge ↔ ↔

9. Scaffold Language • Graphic organizers • Visuals in texts • Demonstrations • Gestures • L1 transfer • Hands-on experiences • Collaborative group work • Learning strategies (planning tasks, visualisation, grouping/classifying, note-taking/summarising, questioning for clarification, making use of multiple resources fortask completion) • Language clarification (explanation, dictionary use, etc.)

10. Prior Knowledge and L2 Learning “Nowhere is the role of prior knowledge more important than in second language educational contexts. Students who can access their prior knowledge through the language and culture most familiar to them can call on a rich array of schemata, whereas students who believe they can only use that knowledge they have explicitly learned in the second language are limited in their access” (Chamot, 1998, p. 197).

11. Beyond Transmission: Opening Up the Classroom Space for Student Creativity • Tomer arrived from Israel in Grade 6 with no English; • Madiha arrived from Pakistan in Grade 7 with no English; • In a “normal” classroom their English oral and written production would be severely limited for 1-2 years while they are acquiring basic English skills. Their literacy engagement (in English) would also be very restricted because of the gap between their English language skills and both the curriculum and books in English that they might want to read.

12. Classroom Consequences of Shifting from Monolingual to Bilingual Instructional Strategies

13. Tomer’s Identity Text I think using your first language is so helpful because when you don’t understand something after you’ve just come here it is like beginning as a baby. You don’t know English and you need to learn it all from the beginning; but if you already have it in another language then it is easier, you can translate it, and you can do it in your language too, then it is easier to understand the second language. The first time I couldn’t understand what she [Lisa] was saying except the word Hebrew, but I think it’s very smart that she said for us to do it in our language because we can’t just sit on our hands doing nothing.

17. Kanta’s Perspective • And how it helped me was when I came here in grade 4 the teachers didn’t know what I was capable of. • I was given a pack of crayons and a coloring book and told to get on coloring with it. And after I felt so bad about that--I’m capable of doing much more than just that. I have my own inner skills to show the world than just coloring and I felt that those skills of mine are important also. So when we started writing the book [The New Country], I could actually show the world that I am something instead of just coloring. • And that's how it helped me and it made me so proud of myself that I am actually capable of doing something, and here today [at the Ontario TESL conference] I am actually doing something. I’m not just a coloring person—I can show you that I am something.

18. Lisa Leoni What I love about using identity texts as a teaching strategy is that it validates students’ cultural and linguistic identities. They also help connect what students are learning in the class to their prior lived experiences and when these connections happen, learning becomes real for them because they are using their language and culture for purposes that have relevance for them. Most importantly, they end up owning the work that they produce. The book The New Country was written by Kanta, Sulmana and Madiha when we were studying a unit on migration. It represents the immigration story of all three girls.

19. Bilingual Instructional Strategies • If cross-lingual transfer is occurring naturally, then it makes sense to give it a helping hand and teach explicitly for transfer; • A bilingual instructional approach might include the following strategies: --where cognates exist, draw students’ attention to them; --encourage students to create and web-publish bilingual books and projects; --engage in sister-class projects where both languages might be used for knowledge generation (e.g. Chinese [L1] might be used to carry out Internet research on a topic but output would be in English [TL]).

20. The Cognate Connection speed velocidad velocity sick enfermo infirm meet encontrar encounter

21. Sister Class Projects • Pre-cursors: The work of Celestin Freinet in France and Mario Lodi in Italy; Both Freinet and Lodi used the printing press to create texts and newsletters for sharing with sister classes (and community members) while Lodi also used audiotapes (“spoken letters”) that resulted in students becoming aware of and analysing regional varieties of Italian; • The DiaLogos Project: Grades 5/6 students in Rhodes/Kassos (Greece) and Toronto (Canada) (Kourtis-Kazoullis, 2001).

22. DiaLogos: Focus on Meaning • Greek students carried out extensive research in both English (e.g. on the web) and Greek (e.g. local museums) on topics such as ancient Greece; • As a result of this research, students wrote to the editors of Dr. Dig magazine (a web-based archaeological magazine intended for students) to complain about their use of the term “Elgin Marbles” (marble statues taken from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin in the early 1800s whose ownership is currently under dispute between Greece and the UK);

23. DiaLogos: Focus on Language [Student from Canada] Katerina – I didn’t have much of a Christmas this year because I was moviong and we didn’t put up a tree and stuff like that but it was fun moving and stuff. On Christmas eve we went to my aunt’s house and had a big feast and me and cousin Maria were chilling out. On New Years eve we went to my moms friends house and clebrated it there and we brought in 1999 we [with] a really big bang!! BYE FOR NOW KATERINA!!!!!!!!! *********** Expressions in the letters from Canadian students such as stuff like that, and stuff, chilling out, with a really big bang, we had a blast and whaz up, fueled the students’ curiosity and resulted in critical analysis of language forms.

24. DiaLogos: Focus on Use • Students collaboratively completed a short story begun by Evgenios Trivizas (a well-known Greek children’s writer) called The Dance of the Ostriches; • 80 different stories were written. 59 stories were written by the students in Greece (35 stories in Greek and 24 in English) and 21 stories were written by students in Canada (9 in Greek and 12 in English). Some texts included both languages, reflecting students’ attempt to use the target language.

26. Types of Cross-Lingual Transfer • Transfer of concepts (e.g. understanding the concept of photosynthesis); • Transfer of cognitive and linguistic strategies (e.g. strategies of visualizing, use of graphic organizers, mnemonic devices, vocabulary acquisition strategies, etc.); • Transfer of specific linguistic elements (knowledge of the meaning of photo in photosynthesis); • Transfer of phonological awareness;

29. Rethinking Traditional Language Teaching • Teaching L2 as a subject typically yields disappointing results for a large majority of students except in situations where there is extremely high motivation to learn the language and/or significant exposure outside school (e.g., these conditions are often met when English is the target language). • Committee on Irish Language Attitudes Research (1975): Those who received Irish-medium instruction in their school years were ten times more likely to be now using Irish intensively than those who had studied Irish as a subject only. • Evans (1976) on Welsh: “To state the matter bluntly, this policy, at least until quite recently, has been a disastrous failure. Even minority Welsh speaking elements in these second language schools [i.e., English-medium with Welsh taught for 30 minutes per day] frequently failed to retain their natural bilingualism and lapsed into becoming monoglot English-speakers.” (pp. 54-55) The major problematic assumption in teaching languages as subjects is the misconception that we first have to learn the language and only then can we think about using it. Under these circumstances students frequently never cross the threshold to using the target language in a way that is identity-affirming.

30. The Potential of Bilingual/Trilingual Programmes • L2 immersion and bilingual education can contribute very significantly to revitalization of threatened languages. • Basque Autonomous Community (Cenoz, 2008) • Steady increase in Basque proficiency (over 16-year olds) from 24.1% in 1991 to 30.1% in 2006; • >90% of primary students are now in bilingual (30%) or full Basque-medium (60%) programmes. Less than 9% are in Spanish-medium programmes with Basque taught as a subject; at the secondary level, more than 80% of students are in bilingual or Basque-medium programmes; • Evaluations have consistently shown over the past 20 years that students in Basque-medium (Model D) schools are more proficient in Basque than students in bilingual (Model B) schools who, in turn, are more proficient than students in Spanish-medium (Model A) schools; Minimal, if any differences exist in Spanish between the three models.

31. What Is English Language Proficiency?Conversational Fluency • The ability to carry on a conversation in familiar face-to-face situations; • Developed by the vast majority of native speakers by the time they enter school at age 5; • Involves use of high frequency words and simple grammatical constructions; • ELL students typically require 1-2 years to attain peer-appropriate levels.

32. What Is English Language Proficiency?Discrete Language Skills • Refers to the rule-governed aspects of language (e.g., phonics, spelling, grammar, punctuation, etc.); • Can be developed in two independent ways: (a) by explicit instruction, and (b) through active and extended engagement with literacy; • ELL students can learn these specific language skills concurrently with their development of basic vocabulary and conversational fluency. However, there is little direct transference to academic language proficiency (e.g., vocabulary knowledge, reading comprehension).

33. What Is English Language Proficiency?Academic Language Proficiency • Includes knowledge of the less frequent vocabulary of English as well as the ability to interpret and produce increasingly complex written language; • ELL students typically require at least 5 years to attain grade expectations in language and literacy skills; • In order to catch up to grade norms within 6 years, ELL students must make 15 months gain in every 10-month school year; • Because academic language is found primarily in books, extensive reading is crucial in enabling students to catch up; • Frequent writing, across genres, is also crucial in developing academic writing skills.

34. Sample of Most Frequent 150 Academic Words

35. Impressive Evidence for the Effects of Extensive Reading in L2 Acquisition From Krashen The Power of Reading (2nd edition, 2004, pp. 4-5): “Elley (1991) also showed that free reading had a profound effect on second language acquirers in Singapore. In three studies involving a total of approximately 3,000 children, ages six through nine, and lasting from one to three years, children who followed the ‘Reading and English Acquisition Program,’ a combination of shared book experience, language experience, and free reading (‘book flood’), outperformed traditionally taught students on tests of reading comprehension, vocabulary, oral language, grammar, listening comprehension, and writing.”

36. The Centrality of Literacy Engagement • Amount and range of reading and writing; • Use of effective strategies for deep understanding of text; • Positive affect and identity investment in reading and writing; Guthrie notes that in all spheres of life (e.g. driving a car, doing surgery, playing golf, gourmet cooking, etc.) participation is key to the development of proficiency. He notes that “certainly some initial lessons are valuable for driving a car or typing on a keyboard, but expertise spirals upward mainly with engaged participation” (2004, p. 8).

37. PISA: Reading Engagement • For example, data on the reading attainment of 15-year olds in almost 30 countries showed that “the level of a student’s reading engagement is a better predictor of literacy performance than his or her socioeconomic background, indicating that cultivating a student’s interest in reading can help overcome home disadvantages” (OECD, 2004, p. 8)

38. Empirical Support for the Role of Engaged Reading Drawing on both the 1998 NAEP data from the United States and the results of the PISA study of reading achievement in international contexts, Guthrie (2004, p. 5) notes that students “…whose family background was characterized by low income and low education, but who were highly engaged readers, substantially outscored students who came from backgrounds with higher education and higher income, but who themselves were less engaged readers. Based on a massive sample, this finding suggests the stunning conclusion that engaged reading can overcome traditional barriers to reading achievement, including gender, parental education, and income.”

41. Rethinking Language Teaching Methods and AssumptionsHistorical Trends • Exposure and input are clearly important (e.g., John Carroll’s work on time-on-task in the 1960s) – necessary but not sufficient condition for L2 learning; counter-evidence of a linear relationship is provided by Clare Burstall’s research in the UK in the 1970s, early vs. late French immersion comparisons, and bilingual education evaluations; • Grammar-translation method replaced by the direct method in late 19th century. The direct method embodied the “monolingual principle” (Howatt, 1984). Later audiolingual and audiovisual approachesalso emphasized instructional use of the TL to the exclusion of students’ L1, with the goal of enabling learners to think in the TL with minimal interference from L1. The monolingual principle is also incorporated explicitly or implicitly in many “communicative language teaching” (CLT) programs.

42. Current Assumptions in CLT Policy and practice operate as though the “monolingual principle” had been established as axiomatic and essentially “common sense”. Cook (2001), for example, points out that most teaching manuals consider the avoidance of L1 “as so obvious that no classroom use of the L1 is ever mentioned” (p. 404). “Recent methods do not so much forbid the L1 as ignore its existence altogether. Communicative language teaching and task-based learning methods have no necessary relationship with the L1, yet ... the only times the L1 is mentioned is when advice is given on how to minimize its use. The main theoretical treatments of task-based learning do not, for example, have any locatable mentions of the classroom use of the L1. ... Most descriptions of methods portray the ideal classroom as having as little of the L1 as possible, essentially by omitting reference to it. “ (p. 404)

43. Three Monolingual Instructional Assumptions • In second or foreign language teaching, instruction should be carried out exclusively in the target language without recourse to students’ L1; All recourse to L1 by teachers or students (e.g., bilingual dictionary use) is discouraged (= direct method assumption); • Translation between L1 and L2 has no place in the teaching of language or literacy In L2 teaching, use of translation by teachers or students represents a regression to the discredited grammar/translation method; In bilingual programs, use of translation is assumed to equal the discredited concurrent translation method; • Within bilingual and dual language programs, the two languages should be kept rigidly separate (= two solitudes assumption);

44. THE DEVELOPMENT OF ACADEMIC EXPERTISE Teacher – Student Interactions Maximum Cognitive Engagement Maximum Identity Investment • Focus on Use • Using language to: • Generate new knowledge • Create literature and art • Act on social realities • Focus on Meaning • Making input comprehensible • Developing critical literacy • Focus on Language • Awareness of language forms and uses • Critical analysis of language forms and uses