Reflective Blogs for Multiliteracies Class, May 3 2021

Reflective Blogs for Multiliteracies Class, May 3 2021 

In this module, we learned about designing curriculum using backwards design and about multiliteracies assessments. Backwards design doesn’t seem to be too difficult to understand as this is how I was trained when I taught at Kaplan in 2011, the second school where I taught English Comp, as well as at subsequent schools. (At the first school, I wasn’t given any training, just a grammar book to teach from, the core requirements of the number of essays and the types of essays, and the requirement to assign three additional books of my choosing.) However, it’s worth noting that the course objectives were created by the higher-ups in all schools where I taught, as I imagine they are for English Comp classes at most if not all accredited institutions since this has been part of the accreditation process—to have such things in place. I’m not sure, however, how accreditation works in Foreign Language programs, although I would surmise that they must have objectives in place. Still, it would seem that many decisions about what the objectives can be determined by the program leads, department chairs, etc. Given my experience and this likelihood, I did appreciate Paesani’s (2017) mentioning that “…by giving instructors a voice in programmatic decision-making, the desire was to increase their satisfaction as teachers and their investment in the program’s success (Baumgartel, 1957; Buller, 2013)” (p. 4).

Nonetheless, even if the ultimate course objectives are created by higher-ups and we have no say in them, we should be able to create the objectives for all of our lessons and, perhaps our units. With this in mind, I also greatly appreciated the focus on cultural teaching as designing objectives as well as assessment for these lessons is pretty tricky, and the default from my limited experience has been just to teach some cultural “facts,” predominantly about France but with some small highlights about other francophone countries. When I have the opportunity to create culture lessons, I’m glad to have some example objectives, as Paesani provided, emphasizing: “students’ ability to communicate appropriately in a variety of contexts and modes, to recognize connections among language, culture, and texts of various genres, and to interpret, analyze, and explain the content they study in class” (p. 5) as well as the guidelines she summarized from other sources for activities: “through collaborative activities that encourage interpretation, problem solving, and reflection (Kern, 2000; Paesani, Allen, & Dupuy, 2016)” (p. 5). Evaluating collaborative activities can be tricky sometimes given students’ perceptions about fairness, but it is possible to manage this and good to have them working together using higher-level thinking skills when learning about cultures.

Assessments that are consistent with Multiliteracies, however, isn’t quite as easy to understand as backwards design. I can understand the concepts of portfolios and essays as I’m pretty familiar with these, portfolios from a student and essays from a teacher perspective. I’m still not sure, though, how well these would work for the very beginners. Nonetheless, I definitely think there’s a place for assessing the process and the product. Beginning students make many, many mistakes, and so they need encouragement more than just criticism, and thus the portfolio has some elements that could be helpful in this regard. I appreciated Kern’s (2000) recommendations either not to grade form-focused work or to weight it more lightly (p. 273). This reminds me a little of the philosophy of Ungrading that we’ve learned about in my Assessments course, and which I have partially adopted, through the Grade-Free Zone encouraged by Jesse Stommel (2020) in the instructional unit I created for that course. Considering students’ learning processes, it seemed appropriate not to have any of the grades from the first third of the semester be counted toward the final grade in 101-type course, at least, and perhaps others as well. I’m still undecided for the instructional unit for this course. There’s also the option of letting the students decide to what extent they want to include those early-in-the-semester items, such as through a portfolio. 

I also appreciated Kern’s (2000) reminder and encouragement to incorporate both bottom-up and top-down strategies in assessment. He wrote, “What is needed are assessment measures that maintain a balance of top-down and bottom-up aspects of the reading process, so that some latitude is given for variation in learners' interpretations, but also so that students are held accountable to the text itself” (p. 275). I agree that for reading exercises, too many correct/incorrect questions are harmful to student learning and they need to be encouraged to bring in their background knowledge and use their higher-level thinking skills.

However, when it comes to pure grammar and vocab tests, my jury is still out. This semester in the French lower-level classes we’ve incorporated IPAs as the unit exams, and only had a final exam on grammar and vocabulary. They were, though, given quizzes through the online platform on grammar and vocab. However, when I sent a suggested poll to my students who had 101 here recently to see which type of test they preferred, all of them preferred the grammar-focused exams to the IPA. One student selected IPA but wrote N/A in the comments section to answer the question regarding why they preferred the one over the other, so I believe that student didn’t take 101 recently. All of the rest wrote something substantive in the why question. It’s important to note that the distribution of grades from A-D is pretty consistent with previous semesters. No test grades have greatly surprised me given what I expected from individual students. But they prefer the grammar-dominant tests. Their reasons largely had to do with their uneasiness about studying and feeling the tests weren’t really testing their knowledge of the unit, and I can see that. If anything, I think that affect needs to be considered not just in teaching grammar principles but also in assessing them, so having a number of correct/incorrect-based questions on a unit exams is probably helpful, and along the same lines, then, having exams could also be considered helpful. But, of course, these were cases of comparison. It would be interesting to learn how students would feel if they didn’t know the other side.

References

Kern,  R. (2000).  Evaluating learners’ Performance. Literacy and language teaching (pp. 267-301). Oxford University Press.

Paesani, K. (2017). Redesigning an introductory language program: A backward design approach. L2 Journal, 9(1): 1-20. http://repositories.cdlib.org/uccllt/l2/vol9/iss1/art1/

Stommel, J. (2020). How to ungrade. In S.D. Blum (Ed.) Ungrading: Why rating students undermines learning (and what to do instead) (pp. 25-41). West Virginia University Press.