Eric Hauser looks micro-longitudinally at how a student and a teacher focus on a particular word, first during a task-based classroom activity and then later in the day.
During a task-based classroom activity at Tokyo Global Gateway (TGG), in which middle school students prepared, rehearsed, and then made a mock television news broadcast, a student oriented to a particular word (“current”) during pre-rehearsal preparation by pointing to the word on the script and asking the teacher (or “agent,” as this kind of teacher is called at TGG) how to read/pronounce it. This can be understood as showing the student’s orientation to the word as one that he would need to read—in his role as anchor—during the mock news broadcast. The agent also defined the word for the student. The student then claimed understanding, closed the interactional sequence, and disengaged. Later during the preparation, the student again asked about this word. The agent then encouraged the student to read it himself, without help. After the student did this, the agent positively evaluated the student’s pronunciation.
During the rehearsal for and the making of the mock news broadcast, the student was able to read the word. His intonation was a little unusual, but there was no orientation to the word being problematic. A few hours later, during the end-of-the-day review session, the agent asked the student to remember a word that he had learned during the broadcasting class. The student replied with the word “current.” The agent then attempted to elicit the complete phrase within which the word had been used (“in current events”), but the student could only remember the first part (“in current”). After positively assessing the student’s remembering of this word, the agent asked for its meaning. When the student was unable to answer, the agent offered three choices. The student eventually chose the correct choice, but only after making two wrong guesses. The agent then closed the interactional sequence with a positive assessment.
By looking micro-longitudinally (i.e., across several hours) at the learning object “current,” it is possible to see how the student and agent oriented to it in different ways, with the student orienting to it simply as an item to be read as part of the task, but the agent orienting to it as a vocabulary item for which the meaning and a common collocation should also be learned.
Commentaires