Teach English in Zhaodian Zhen - Zibo Shi

In his chapter of The Cambridge Guide to Second Language Assessment, Neil J. Anderson (2012) proposes a “classroom culture of collaboration and evaluation” (hereafter CCE) aimed at enhancing each student’s abilities in self-assessment (p. 194). I believe that this is the best conceptualization of “peer learning:” a classroom in which students mindfully and critically work both together and alone to produce their knowledge. CCE is not merely valuable for assessment (i.e. evaluating whether students’ needs are being met), it can serve as the basis for a more energetic and productive language learning experience. In my mid-twenties, I spent two summers volunteering at a classical music competition in Sicily. The first summer, I was pretty much on my own to interact with the local Sicilians and learn Italian, doing what I could with guidebooks, textbooks, and a lot of immersive trial and error. All my co-workers were monolingual Americans. The next summer, however, one of the volunteers came directly from a semester abroad on the Italian mainland. Interacting in a kind of triangle with her non-native Italian (which was far superior to mine) and the Italian of Sicilian locals combined to heighten my learning through immersion. She could explain things to me in a kind of interface between English and Italian and moreover, I could observe her effort as distinct from her acts of expression, such that I could more easily imitate what she was trying to do rather than what the local, native speakers were doing “naturally.” Stating it thusly might actually overcomplicate things: the advanced non-native speaker was nearer my “zone of proximal development” (here I reference Vygotsky) than any native speaker. The above, in a nutshell, is what CCE can bring to the language classroom. Instead of one teacher, in parallel, working within each individual student’s zone of proximal development (or worse: working within the zone of proximal development of an imaginary “ideal student”), the entire classroom works in series, each classmate being able to give pushes and pulls in the developmental zones of the others ahead of and behind him. In many language learning situations, I’ve had insights both when someone “below” me makes a certain mistake (I see why he is wrong and I am right) and when someone “above” me can do something I can’t (I see why she is right and I am wrong). Whether the teacher intervenes or not, this likely happens anyway. CCE, then, simply has the teacher taking charge of this process and leading students, independently and in groups, in discovering the metacognitive capacities that make this “series learning” work. This model can be especially effective in writing-intensive EFL classes, since CCE increases the classroom’s total capacity for analytic evaluation. The instructor has two distinct projects here. First, she must ensure that all the students have a borderline ability for accurate, sensitive, and constructive self and peer assessment. That is, all students need to be taught and buy into an ethos of peer critique. Then, the instructor decides whether groups should be vertically or horizontally structured. Based on previous assessments, students will exhibit different levels of writing ability (including everything implied under this simple heading – like grammar knowledge, rhetorical skill, and editing technique). CCE will work differently if work groups are composed of those at the same level (horizontal structure) or if each member has a different level (vertical structure). I would expect that series learning will occur more dramatically in vertical groups. However, horizontal groups may be easier for the instructor to monitor, guide, and evaluate as a group. In either case students are not just accountable to the teacher for “right answers,” they are also accountable to their classmates for useful feedback, critical insight, and technical knowledge of the L2 (grammar, vocabulary, etc.). Another benefit of CCE in the writing classroom would be to increase the validity of writing tasks. Students in the traditional writing classroom are merely accountable to the instructor, who requests writing for more or less fictitious purposes – even when the assignments are authentic, like writing a job application cover letter, the occasion is false, unless the instructor is the one to whom the students are applying for the job! In the CCE classroom, though, the teacher requires writing, but the classmates have their own requests among one another, as I’ve outlined above. As a result, the work they do on their writing is not just to meet the arbitrary demands of the instructor, but also to meet the real needs of their classmates. Writing, in such a classroom, becomes something like a self-validating assessment since students’ performance improve to the degree that they perform the assessment itself. Anecdotally speaking, I have had success with this model of CCE serial learning, especially in classes focusing on productive skills (reading and writing). I would be most interested, though, in developing this model as one meant to bridge the gap between classrooms and other language-learning experiences and environments. Most ELLs will be part of a cohort of ELLs during their language learning career—whether as part of a study abroad experience, living in an ethnic enclave, or travelling abroad with coworkers for business purposes. In each case, ELLs will benefit from reactivating learning and coping strategies acquired in the EFL classroom. A class focused on peer learning—one with a “classroom culture of collaboration and evaluation”—would arguable inculcate these strategies with greater intensity. Simply put, an ELL who has experience with peer learning will make a better team member in the future. Reference Anderson, N. J. (2012). Student involvement in assessment: Healthy self-assessment and effective peer assessment. In Christine Coombe et al. (Eds.), The Cambridge Guide to Second Language Assessment (pp. 187-197). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.