Friday, February 26, 2010

Information for teachers

The following is taken from an introductory sheet we're giving out to teachers who have shown an interest in the project. It outlines some of the key areas we want to focus on.

Teaching English Grammar in Schools
Creating a Web-Based Platform for English Language Teaching and Learning

The structures of English are a major part of the National Curriculum and underpin much English teaching at secondary level, but are often viewed with a mixture of suspicion, scepticism and fear by many teachers: suspicion that grammar is just a dry way of learning a narrow, feature-spotting approach to language; scepticism over whether teaching grammar actually helps pupils’ reading and writing; fear that grammar is scary and that they don’t know enough of it. We hope to be able to support teachers in finding ways to make grammar teaching practical, dynamic and accessible, but most of all relevant, because the language we’ll be using is all sourced directly from examples of actual usage.

Our project is designed to help teachers of English at Key Stages 3-5 develop their teaching of grammar, from the basics of word classes such as nouns and verbs, through to more demanding areas such as phrase and clause structure. We are constructing a web-based teaching and learning platform made up of an interactive, structured English language course, which will consist of lesson modules dynamically accessing a grammatically analysed corpus of English.

What is a corpus?
A corpus is a body of data – in this case written and spoken English - which has been collected with the intention of providing material for analysis and illustration of actual usage. ICE-GB, the International Corpus of English, which began in 1990, is being used to provide a large range of material to support this project. 200 written and 300 spoken texts make up the million words of this corpus and every text is grammatically annotated, permitting complex and detailed searches across the whole corpus. One of the major benefits of the ICE-GB corpus is that it also contains a mass of contextual detail, ranging from audio files to accompany the spoken data, to information about each speaker’s and writer’s age and gender.

The objectives of this project are to:

•    Translate our rich corpus resources into effective English language teaching tools and curriculum materials for teachers to use in the classroom;
•    Provide pupils with high-quality web-based learning materials in both classroom and self-directed modes; and
•    Provide quality Continuous Professional Development (CPD) resources to enable teachers to make the most of the resource.

The approach

Using material from the ICE-GB corpus, we are putting together units of work on word classes, phrases, clauses and sentences, as well as material on written and spoken language, different forms of writing and speech, and texts from a range of genres, to form a programme of lessons that can work together as a whole, or as smaller chunks of work through Key Stages 3-4 and into more advanced and open-ended work at AS and A level.  Underpinning this is an approach towards grammar that encourages students (and teachers) to ask questions about language usage and to think not simply in terms of the traditional categories of the “parts of speech” but a more rewarding and systematic method of studying language, which looks at form, function and distribution.

The benefits to teachers

Along with the material that we will produce for individual lessons, we will be developing units of work with activities for reading, writing and speaking & listening tasks, a range of CPD materials to support teachers’ developing knowledge of grammar, and suggestions for ways to incorporate the teaching of grammar into other areas of the curriculum. All of these should have practical benefits to classroom teachers, but we also hope that the interface between the ICE-GB corpus and the Moodle VLE will allow flexibility in course planning, so that individual English teachers, and English departments as a whole, can select appropriate lessons and extracts to use with their classes, tailoring the material to the demands of their own pupils.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

What the project is about

The impetus for this proposal is a recent review of Key Stage 3 Grammar Teaching, published by DfES in 2007, which concluded that teaching should make use of formal and informal English in different settings, and that grammar teaching must be driven by real examples.
We will construct a web-based teaching and learning platform consisting of an interactive structured English language course, tailored to the goals of the National Curriculum’s Key Stages 3-5. This will consist of lesson modules dynamically accessing a grammatically analysed corpus of English.
The objectives of this project are to:
  1. Translate our rich corpus resources into effective English language teaching tools and curriculum materials for teachers to use in the classroom;
  2. Provide pupils with high-quality web-based learning materials in both classroom and self-directed modes; and
  3. Provide quality Continuous Professional Development (CPD) resources to enable teachers to make the most of the resource.
Our partner is the School Improvement Service of the London Borough of Camden.

Benefits

The dynamic selection of real language examples taken from the corpus has many potential benefits:
  • Since the source material is independent from the teaching modules (the system design is modular and extensible) modules can easily be revised;
  • A great deal of context and contextual information is available (e.g. the setting in which a conversation is conducted, who the speakers are, etc.), as well as audio material;
  • Material can be selected for a particular student group or purpose (e.g. to teach students the features of formal English, or how to write a letter).
The proposed platform will have a modular design to provide a very high level of adaptation for teachers and students.
Outputs
The specific outputs are:
  • A fully-functional web-based system for teaching and learning the English language and its grammar, built in Moodle, interfaced with the ICE-GB corpus;
  • Course materials for English language students at Key Stages 3-5 and equivalents used in the classroom by teachers or in a self-directed mode by students working alone. Examples will be sourced directly from the corpus providing context, alternative examples, etc.
  • A course management component for teachers including:

    • tools for creating courses from existing modules;
    • tools for selecting modules from restricted material sets;
    • guidance on the selection of modules;
    • randomisation controls, etc.
  • Exercise and project materials;
  • Continuous Professional Development materials for English language teachers to support the above;
  • Evaluation results of the platform;
  • User documentation on the system, integrated into the website;
  • Technical documentation, including the interface to the corpus management system.
The main beneficiaries will be teachers and students of the English language in the local community, but with the long-term aim of producing a resource that is available across the UK. Teachers will benefit from the availability of pre-written, but flexible and adaptable, courses and modules for building their own course plans. They will be able to access corpus materials, including texts and audio recordings. Students will benefit through the acquisition of grammatical concepts being made relevant to them through lessons and interactive hands-on exercises.
Further benefits:
  • Teachers can monitor students’ progress, and can support their homework, exercises, projects and self-study;
  • Teachers can decide on course modules, and then select specific text genres to teach (formal/informal, spoken/written, etc.). They can also select materials written by different authors in different periods and opt for different complexities of analysis;
  • Teachers can select source materials and determine a set of possible lessons, exercises and student projects.
The resource will be will be compliant with the Special Education Needs and Disability Act (SENDA), and can also be used for the following categories of students: ESOL students (English for Speakers of Other Languages), ‘Skills for Life’ students, and Adult Education students. The use of web technologies is designed to maximise access from schools, libraries (via the People’s Network, www.peoplesnetwork.gov.uk), and home.
The entire development system will be available over the internet from UCL and requires no additional software at the user’s end, aside from standard internet browser programs. This will enable the community in general, and teachers and students of English in particular, to gain access to the system.

Monday, February 15, 2010

Teaching English Grammar in Schools

This is a project based at the Survey of English Usage in the English Department at University College London. It is funded through the AHRC Knowledge Transfer Fellowship Scheme and is developing in partnership with the London Borough of Camden.

More details about the project can be found here.