Episode Transcript
[00:00:13] Speaker A: Welcome back to Talking elt, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in English language teaching. In this second episode with Carla Marshall and Fiona Bettel, we continue to explore the cutting edge methodology, concept based inquiry. We discuss how it can work for language learning and how learning a language at school can be as much about concepts as about the linguistic side of things. Enjoy the episode. I want to look a bit more now at concept based inquiry and its relevance to teaching languages, particularly teaching English.
Carla, can I start off with you? Do you think that concept based inquiry is relevant to teaching languages such as English?
[00:01:03] Speaker B: Of course. First of all, I mean, there's the learning the language, but then there's also learning through the language when we're in a language lesson. Right. Because you have to have some context from which you're drawing language meaning. So, so concept based inquiry does two things. It allows students to inquire into the nature of language, how languages are constructed, structured, and look for those patterns in language learning itself. But then also it provides a vehicle for more meaningful exploration of content within the language classroom. Because not only are you doing that work to help develop vocabulary and sentence structure and, you know, particular listening skills or writing writing skills in the classroom, but you can also help students be able to develop big ideas that transfer to other content areas. And we know from research that the more developed the cognitive academic language proficiency is in students, that's indicative of how well that they will succeed in school generally.
And so we really, we want to make sure that we're using that language learning time to the best of our ability to be the most efficient and most effective.
[00:02:21] Speaker A: Yeah, we're going to come back to the term cognitive academic language proficiency in a sec. I just want to check, Fiona, is there anything that you would like to add?
[00:02:34] Speaker C: Yeah, so I suppose, I mean, like all these things, it does depend a little bit on your context, doesn't it? If you have half an hour a week with your students and you need to cram in as much whatever language for a test that's coming at the end of the year, then, you know, maybe this isn't going to work as your methodology.
You need time with students to develop these skills and develop. You need space, you know, mental space and time space to deal with it. But it's, I mean, I think most people in most parts of the world, there are so many different contexts for teaching English, aren't there? But I think generally there is a feeling that we're doing more than just teaching the language. And I think this is a fantastic way to create something more, you know, and yeah, I think that it's going to be a good methodology for a lot of context, but obviously it's not going to fit everywhere.
[00:03:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it's certainly. I mean, what we see with a lot of national curriculum now is that need to build in transversal skills, global skills, those transferable skills.
[00:03:45] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:03:46] Speaker A: Beyond the particular curriculum syllabus that you are focused on. And that applies whether it's maths or science, but language as well.
[00:03:55] Speaker C: And I think this is. Yeah, this is a great methodology for doing that and building those critical thinking skills and confidence as well, and agency and all these things that we want our students to have.
[00:04:05] Speaker A: Absolutely. I'm going to come back a little bit to what you were mentioning before, Carla, about Jim Cummins distinction between basic interpersonal communication skills, BICs and the cognitive academic language proficiency.
There's a bit of terminology, but I think it's quite the really useful terms.
Would you mind just kind of reminding us what they mean to someone who may be new to them?
[00:04:37] Speaker B: Sure, yeah. So when Jim Cummings uses the idea of bics, he's talking about that first one to three years of language learning where the language is highly interpersonal and contextualized. So when students, you know, I would call it the playground language. You know, kids are on the playground and they're saying, you know, do you want to come on the slide with me? Oh, I need to use the bathroom, I'm hungry, you know, so it's all of that kind of highly concrete and contextualized language. The language of the curriculum, of the disciplines is, is going to be that calp, that cognitive academic language proficiency. It's where we get high levels of vocabulary that are very specialized. You know, when you think about something like biology and you're, you know, thinking about chloroplast and chlorophyll and, you know, photosynthesis, all these words would be examples of calp. It takes roughly five to seven years for that kelp to develop. And again, it depends on the age and stage of the learner. It depends on how many other languages the child has learned and how strong first languages.
Because the stronger the first language generally the easier it is for them to acquire a second or third language. But CALP is really important when we're thinking about concept based inquiry. Kind of going back to some of the examples that Fiona gave in the last podcast around, you know, we want students to understand specific concepts, whether that be imitation or diversity or choice.
These are all examples of calp. And we can Teach them in a shallow way, which is, here's the word imitation, here's the dictionary definition, what would that be in your first language? With a little bit of translanguaging and then done. Or we can teach it in a way that's much more deep to ensure that they have fully understood that idea in an abstract way. So that when it comes up in different forms, you know, instead of imitation, maybe it comes up as a verb, as imitate or imitated or something like that in a written form, then they're able to really understand what that means. And CALP is indicative of school success. So the more explicit we are with CALP development as part of that language learning process, then the more we can kind of ensure that our students are going to be the most prepared for those disciplinary areas that are highly specialized.
[00:07:05] Speaker A: Yeah. What's interesting in this conversation is we're most interested in people who are learning English as a second language, foreign language, third, fourth language. But in some ways these are issues for people learning their first language.
And so it's an interesting thing, as you say, children in their first, their mother tongue are often learning that academic language proficiency. If you are learning at a second primary secondary school, a second language, you're almost combining those two areas of learning. You're having to learn foreign language and you're learning the academic learning proficiency. I think this might be where the concept of common underlying proficiency comes in, which you talk about in the position paper.
[00:07:59] Speaker B: Yes. So the idea of the common underlying proficiency is that if you think about each language, you know, as a little iceberg, there's a little point that sticks out of the water, and those are the structural aspects of the language that are different regardless of the language. Right. Because there's different syntax, sometimes there's a different alphabetization, sometimes there's a different script. So I'm an English speaker. I also fluently speak German and I'm learning Japanese. My German does not help me with being able to read Japanese because it has different scripts, it has different sounds, it has different sentence structure. However, the fact that I know two language languages fluently, if you go under the waterline, you have particular skills that are common in terms of language proficiency that I can draw from. So, for example, looking for context clues would be something that I've done in those other two languages. Once I've done some of that work around the structural aspects of Japanese, then I can apply that to my learning of Japanese language. So what we're trying to do is ensure that that common underlying proficiency that we're drawing upon the skills that students have from a first language, from their strongest language and that they're able to apply those to be able to learn English or any other foreign language or second language that they might be learning. And that's really again those analytical skills, literacy skills that will be able to transfer to any other language work that they do regardless of its English or some other language in the future.
[00:09:44] Speaker A: Right, right. That's really interesting. Fiona, in your experience, when, when you're thinking about these different aspects of language proficiency, is this something that has come up for you?
[00:09:59] Speaker C: Yeah, so I think, I mean the bigs, the basic interpersonal communication skills language, you know, that that would be what would typically come in the early stages of a course. But you. Is all the, the tactile things like a plate or a dog or a nose or, you know, all these, the basic vocabulary that will all be that big stuff. But then, then the cop comes in once you're starting to comparing and contrasting, agreeing and disagreeing, hypothesizing, analyzing. So yeah, as Carla said, it's, it's the specialized subject knowledge. But I think I'm right in saying, Carlo, it's also that the language you need in order to do your comparing and contrasting and analyzing and that. So there'll be lots of, there'll be lots of useful verbs in there that you, you learn at a later stage than the, the, the basic vocabulary for plant or a glass. But yeah, so that would be what the calp. The cognitive academic language proficiency is.
Yeah. And I think the underlying proficiency thing is really big, isn't it? And that's.
Yeah. I mean we've all. Anyone who's tried to teach students how to write an essay in English as a, not as their first language, the ones that know how to write a competent essay in their own language, they're going to have an advantage, aren't they? And I think that's true with any sort of language task. If you can do it in one language, you're halfway there for doing it in the other. So. And I think that's. Yeah, so.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: And in some context, one of the things that's very interesting is the way that that might be taught quite explicitly in their English as a foreign language second language classes about essay structure, but may be taught less explicitly in their first language.
Perhaps not, you know, in some countries, but there are some countries where I've found that, that actually a lot of their academic language proficiency is coming through their English and being transferred back to their first language rather than the transfer Going from your first language, as you might expect.
[00:12:17] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I think that's very true. Having flashbacks to when I learned Latin at school. And we learned the only time we really learned grammar was through Latin, which was very specific context. But then that massively helped you when you were trying to grapple with writing in English or in French or in some of these other languages.
[00:12:39] Speaker A: It reminds me of a little bit of corpus research we did on use of language in English in school books. And what we realized is the word table, which in our kind of English language courses we think of as the physical object most of the time, in fact, mostly appears as that, you know, that structure of information that's actually the more common use of the word. Yeah. In books.
So. Okay, Carla, it's really interesting, these ideas of language proficiency. How would you relate that to concept based inquiry?
[00:13:24] Speaker B: I was reflecting a little bit as you were speaking about when we have more or less intentionality around particular strategies and who benefits from that intentionality?
So while it may be true that in some places first language speakers don't get that explicitness of structure or strategies to be able to unpack particular words which are important for cognitive academic language proficiency, actually everyone benefits. And I think that's the point of concept based inquiry, which is when you move to a place of being explicit and intentional, where you're thinking, these are the words that I want students to really deeply understand because they're going to need to form understandings and then apply them in some way in the world. Then students who may have more awareness of particular words and those students who may be beginners or less proficient, they all benefit from beginning to look more deeply at the meaning of those particular words. It's similar to what we see now with the idea of universal design for learning, where there's ideas like, oh, well, it would be really good to make sure that students are engaged at the beginning of their learning process. And there's a number of strategies for that. That's not just for students who happen to have an individualized learning plan that's for every learner. That's the idea of it being universal. So I think when we're thinking about CALP and we're thinking about concept based inquiry, it's really through that process of the focus phase and then bringing it through to organizing and generalizing that we're being very explicit about the cognitive academic language that is required to be successful in an inquiry and we have intentional strategies to be able to help students acquire them.
[00:15:25] Speaker A: Yeah, that's interesting. I'm Wondering if you. Some teachers who are teaching students at an early stage of learning a language might feel a bit nervous about this, that it sounds like it requires advanced language skills to be able to think about big ideas.
Is this what you have found? Do you feel that it works at an early stage of learning the language?
[00:15:48] Speaker C: Well, we think it does, yeah. So we've got blue dot that starts for six year olds, but we've also got little blue dot which is the same, essentially the same methodology for the 3 to 6 year old. So we think that the idea of looking at examples and bringing things together works at any age really. And yeah, so the issue is the BICs and the CALP and the more academic language they probably don't have at the age of three. They may not even have it in their own language yet because as Carla says, it takes time to develop. But, but we can, as teachers, we can help them to provide that for them. And yeah, when you're using a second or third or fourth language for your, when you're in that classroom context of a language learner, you don't need necessarily to be doing all the discussing and the generalizing in the target language. You can, because as Carla says, the using that language in your own language is then going to have long term benefits. The stronger you are in that in your own language, the more you're going to be able to do it eventually in English too. So if you're looking at the longer game, actually building, building that kalp, even if it's having some discussion, letting some native speaker language into the classroom, I think that's okay because it will have the long. It's building that structure, the scaffolding that you'll then apply your English onto later. So you've got the strong foundations.
[00:17:24] Speaker A: Yeah, so, so, so I'm kind of looking at both of you now.
The use of the mother tongue in the English language classroom. There are a lot of teachers who feel, you know, that they shouldn't be doing that, that it's all about immersion, et cetera. Do you feel that there are benefits in using the first language in the language classroom?
[00:17:48] Speaker B: I'll start and say absolutely. And I think it builds off of what Fiona just said, which is thinking about when is it going to be the most benefit for students to have a discussion or to do some thinking in a first language.
It could be that students have peers that happen to share the same first language and then they can have a conversation together. We know that when students talk to each other, they're constructing meaning and that is a really important part of learning a language and developing ideas. And so I would generally see more of that translanguaging happening in the focus phase, when we're being really intentional about the development of concepts. We might ask students to write down in their various home languages what that concept is in their home language. And sometimes, depending on the language, they don't have a concept that is exactly the same. And that's quite interesting to think about the way that languages express meaning and the fact that maybe English has an idea that Korean or Japanese or Chinese doesn't have, but maybe there's also something that they that's in that language which isn't in English. Right. And then what we can also do is in building off of what Fiona said, that students may not have the, you know, the sentence structure, the vocabulary to be able to fully form generalizations or big ideas in English. We can ask them to do some of that work in their home language in the generalized phase. And then, you know, they can explain it to the best of their ability in English. Because what we're thinking about there is them developing big ideas. And if these are ideas that transfer, it's not just locked in that one language that they've written it in, right? Then when they're looking at new examples, then they can still apply it and talk about it in English.
[00:19:49] Speaker A: Thanks for listening to this episode of Talking elt, the easiest place to learn about the big issues in English language teaching. Don't forget to like and subscribe if you want to learn more about this issue and others like it.
Tune in again next time as we explore another aspect of concept based inquiry with Carla and Fiona. If you want to learn more about concept based inquiry and how you can take that next step beyond inquiry based learning, you can download our position paper on the topic authored by Carla. Just follow the link in the description.
Thanks. Thanks for listening.
