Applying languaging in learning metalanguage NoFa5 Changing Subjects, Changing Pedagogies: Diversities in School and Education Helsinki 28.5.2015 Kaisu Rättyä, University of Eastern Finland Pirjo Kulju, University of Tampere Jorma Joutsenlahti, University of Tampere
Background: Problems in school pedagogy and in learning metalanguage Tradition in school practises (including schoolbooks) emphasizes linguistic concepts, however: Types of exercises are limited to remembering and understanding factual knowledge in taxonomy table (Krathwohl & Andersen 2002) Examples are limited to prototypical cases which leads to thumb rules and minitheories (Negueruela & Lantolf 2006; Tainio & Marjokorpi 2014) The use of incoherent categories seems to be typical (Rättyä 2013) Students are not used to discuss on grammar (Paukkunen 2011) Nor are they used to languaging (Harjunen & Rautpuro 2015)
Negative attitudes and lack of awareness of metaknowledge This problematic tradition of school practice is reflected as a negative attitude towards metalanguage especially in lessadvanced students: they are not able to see the benefits in learning grammatical concepts. (Kulju et al. 2015) Lack of awareness of metaknowledge (cf. conceptual change theory, Chi & Roscoe 2002)
Aims of this study to create and discuss a model for teaching and learning metalinguistic concepts to develop exercise prototypes which are based on languaging and which leads to deeper understanding of metalinguistic concepts to develop an internalized understanding of the use of concepts in literacy skills and language awareness
Languaging (Joutsenlahti & Kulju 2010; Joutsenlahti & Rättyä 2015) means in this study expressing his/her thinking by own words (natural language) or by drawing (pictorial language) a student constructs meanings of concepts and his/her understanding in languaging prosess an evaluation method for the teacher > The new Core curriculum for basic education 2016 emphasizes languaging (Finnish National Board of Education 2014)
Towards a deeper understanding of metalinguistic concepts 1) Basic skill level o Aims in remembering factual and o conceptual knowledge Exercise prototypes: Underline, name 2) More advanced skill levels o Multiple aims: applying, analyzing and evaluating conceptual knowledge, procedural and metacognitive knowledge Languaging Anderson, L. A. & R. Krathwohl (eds.) 2001/2014. A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing:.
Exercise prototypes Traditional exercise + languaging Produce a sentence according to given model Visualisations + languaging Procedual knowledge Research based learning Underline predicate. Explain how did you find it. Viisuvoittaja: Me olemme kaikki sankareita! (Winner of Eurovision song contest: We are all heroes!) (News headline www.mtv.fi 24.5.2015) Write a sentence which has PREDICATIVE + SUBJECT + OBJECT. (e.g. Saimmeko me maalin? Did we get a goal?) Describe by using a diagram how the following concepts are devided into different categories noun, verb, adverb, inessive, adjective, partititive etc. Explain how would you proceed if the task is to analyse the parts of speech in a given advertisement? Analyse your text messages and argue how does your text in them differs from standard language in terms of inflection. e.g. kaupungil - kaupungilla (adessive -lla)
Conclusion In this presentation we have aimed to model exercise prototypes which would lead to a deeper understanding of metalinguistic concepts. In terms of taxonomy this means that also higher levels, like comprehending, applying and evaluating knowledge, can be achieved. Languaging as a tool gives possibilities not only for a student to express his/her understanding but also to a teacher to evaluate the level of learning. Next step is to collect data and analyse the students answers into presented prototypical exercises.
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