Course correction! Ay-Capt'n!

Over the summer I started working on my field experience, one of the last requirement for my MA in Applied Linguistics.  Honestly, last summer I would have preferred to have gotten the practicum waived and taken phonetics and phonemics instead, but now I am glad that I have to take it.  I am getting a lot out of observing a seasoned (and pretty awesome) instructor do what they do best. 

Over the summer, to get out of the "teaching" requirement (which seems to have been absent in previous semesters... but anyway...) I was thinking of creating an eLearning module, perhaps using something like captivate, where I would be able to use communicative approaches to teach content and language.  My initial thought was to teach a little bit about the Apple of Discord and Paris' choice.  This would have coincided with conditionals, so students could learn a little more about what supposedly happened that lead to the Trojan War and the events in the Iliad, and they would have had an opportunity to learn and mess around with conditionals in Attic Greek. After the students took this eLearning module they would be assessed for knowledge (obviously) and they would take a survey to see how they liked the method of delivery.

Based on my observations however, it seems like the class is based a lot on Grammar Translation (not much of a surprise there) so dipping toes into a communicative competence model near the end of the semester may not be a great idea - the " you don't switch horses in mid-stream" cliche comes to mind (not to mention that a proper eLearning course, with my workload will take a lot of mental power and time to complete, and I probably need to focus more on preparing for the comprehensive exams in December)

So at this point there is a need for course correction!  While doing research over the summer, I tried to find any research that pointed to Classicists using methodologies other than Grammar Translation (GT) to teach classical Greek and Latin, but unfortunately I could not find much.  Google Scholar found an intro chapter to teaching classics using Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) methodologies (yay!) but it was only an intro chapter and it was just a description of what GT is, how classics have been taught, what CLT is and so on (all info I already knew).  It seems to me that there is lack of information in this area so I've decided to do something along the lines of a traditional research paper (I've read most things anyway by this point so I don't have to do a lot of new reading) where I will write more about using CLT methodologies in a classical learning environment and how technology can be used to facilitate classical language learning.

Any thoughts? I'd be interested in hearing from classicists out there :-)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latour: Third Source of Uncertainty - Objects have agency too!

Image
Continuing on my exploration of ANT, and asynchronous and indirect dialogue with Latour - this blog post will cover the third source of uncertainty, which according to Latour, is that Objects have agency too! As with the previous blog posts, I've pulled out quotes from the book that seemed interesting, or that I reacted to in some way, and I am responding to them here. no tie can be said to be durable and made of social stuff (p. 66) This quote seems to continue Latour's assertion that there is no such thing as "social" or "social stuff" and that "social", or the meaning of needs to be negotiated and better understood.  It also continues the thought that social can only be seen from the actions of its actors, the traces they leave behind, and that these bonds are not durable because they need continuous reinforcement. I guess Social is a perishable item. Left to its own devices, a power relationship that mobilizes nothing but social skil...
Read more

MOOC participation - open door policy and analytics

The other day I was reading ZML Didaktik on the topic of MOOC participants. In MOOCs, one of the big questions is why are people lurking and not participating? If more than 500 people join a MOOC, why are only 10% contributing with any amount of regularity?  On the same blog, in a previous blog post, I had commented (it was an open stream of thought really) that perhaps there should be an open enrollment period, and then if the system sees that certain participants are bellow a threshold of activity, the system may give them the option to self-identify as a lurker, or un-register from the class. This line of thought went along a view that compared to the traditional classroom; in a traditional classroom students register for the course, they can attend classes for a week and then decide whether or not they want to stay with the course or not. If they do stay with the course they know that there is a certain amount of "lurking" that they can get away with, but they do have ...
Read more

You've been punk'd! However, that was an educational experience

Image
It's now the end of Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required (aka #massiveteaching) on coursera. Well, almost, we still have a couple of days left. I guess that the lesson here is that we were (the "learners") were punk'd† by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the Univerisity of Zurich. After that last blog post (and subsequent pickup of the post by George Siemens and others) Inside Higher Education and the Chronicle wanted to chat with me about this MOOC experience. I only had time for one of the two before things went to press, so my 15 minutes of fame went to IHE.  Both IHE and the C hronicle have written about the topic, and have received some information from Coursera on the incident.  Others have also written about it (see here , here and here ) It's surprising to me that the University, and Coursera, waited until after this thing was a big issue in order to respond in the class, and clue people into what was happening. On Wednesday (day 3 of Week 3/3 of the ...
Read more