You're CLILing me, Smalls

Hello Faithful Readers,
This blog is intended to be used as a tool/ motivational device for me to get work done on my thesis project for my doctorate, and also a fun way for everyone to see how the project is progressing. I'm guessing that it will probably end up as a procrastination device more than anything, but it's a risk that I'm willing to take.

First off, this is not my first foray into the blogosphere. I actually have kept a blog semi-kindof-not-so-religiously for years all throughout college and for some time after, as well. But let's face it, that blog was just an excuse to prattle on about Rex Manning day parties and the Maxi Pad (my sophomore year apartment) and this blog will be must more sophisticated. Oh yes, everybody loves a good academic blog. I can't say that it will be academic, but hopefully semi-project focused and a place for me to vent about my frustrations and get some input and feedback.

Speaking of feedback, let me explain to you the nature of the project. Basically, I was interested in studying the effects of assessment in bilingual schools here in Madrid. For those of you not familiar with the bilingual project, it is a huge initiative from the Comunidad de Madrid (Madrid government) and several other smaller entities to raise the level of English starting in elementary school. This is happening all over Spain, in typical Spanish fashion when the collective population realized "Damn, the percentage of Spaniards able to communicate in a second language is hovering around 17% the same as the Italians! We have to do something about this and beat those Italians" and thus the bilingual project was born.

Here is a useful glossary of terms associated with the bilingual project and my project:

Comunidad de Madrid (CAM) bilingual project: The Madrid government's bilingual project set up in public primary schools all over the Madrid community (community in Spain= county or region). This project was set up about six years ago in 2004.

British Council/ Ministerio de Educacion y Ciencias (MEC) Bilingual project: The original bilingual project set up in about 1996. There is still a lot of bad blood between the British Council/ MEC and the CAM because basically the government stole the British Council/ MEC's idea and is implementing it in a wider range of schools at a rapid pace.

Coordinator: The person in charge of coordinating the English bilingual program at each school

Auxiliar de Conversacion: A native language assistant either from the UK on their year of studying abroad or from the US or Canada who come after they graduate to act as an assistant in the classroom.

Second Language Acquisition (SLA): The process of learning (or acquiring, depending on the context) a second language.

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL): one of the key methodologies of the bilingual program that basically means combining content and language teaching into one class. In the Comunidad de Madrid bilingual schools the following subjects are taught in English: art, science, physical education, English and in secondary schools they teach history, music and technology courses, as well. Note: the British Council hates this term, and prefer to refer to their method as bilingual education.

Summative Assessment (SA): The type of assessment that we are used to, which involves taking end-of-unit tests, midterms, finals, and standardized tests like the MEAP (the Michigan version of State Testing) to see what our progress is and whether or not we are learning the proper material that  our teachers and/ or external entities want us to learn.

Formative Assessment (FA): A different approach to assessment that involves continuous evaluation on a hourly, daily, even minute-to-minute basis. This method keeps students and teacher up to date on where they are in the learning process and what they need to improve upon. It is very effective and much less stressful on the student than preparing for a big state-commissioned summative test.

Assessment for Learning (AfL) A subset of Formative Assessment that uses a variety of different techniques to offer continuous evaluation. It involves: setting learning goals, peer assessment, self-assessment, effective teacher's questions used to diagnose what the students know and what they need to know more about, and feedback to tell them how they're doing. This is the crux of my project.

Which leads me to....

...A little bit about me...I'm a doctoral student at the Universidad Autonoma Madrid, and I was interested in studying more about the bilingual project. I did a variety of different studies while I was doing my coursework to see if the bilingual project was an effective means of teaching English to young learners. One of my main projects was concerned with whether or not the students were learning content effectively in English in one of their science courses. So I gave the students a post-exam, which was the same exam that they had just taken on the digestive, circulatory and respiratory systems, in Spanish to see if there was a difference in their performance. The interesting part? There was no difference. The students who did well on the exam in English did just as well in Spanish and the students who did poorly did poorly in both languages, obviously because they didn't study (not because they didn't know English).

My amazingly brilliant advisor, Rachel W. suggested that I continue on in this vein for my trabajo de invesigacion (basically a Master's thesis) and my doctoral thesis. I was having trouble connecting with bilingual schools who might be interested in being a part of the study, so she contacted the British Council and they were thrilled to help, though they had another idea in mind.

Enter AfL!

Me: Oh, hello, AfL, how are you?
AfL: I'm fine, Rachel, and you?
Me: I'm good, what's up?
AfL: I want you to study meeeee!!!
Me: Umm....ok, how so?
AfL: Make me the focus of your project!! Please!! Please!! Do it!! I am so much better than all the other boring teaching methodologies.
Me: But we just met, I don't know anything about you.
AfL: You won't be disappointed.
Me: Ok....prove it.

Basically, the British Council asked me and one of my lovely cohorts, Irene, to study the effects of AfL on second language learning in their schools. So we have been in the process of getting in contact with the three schools using AfL in Madrid and getting everything set up to record classes, which is a pain in the ass because you have to get permission from the government of each district to allow you to do this, and that is much easier said than done. We are still waiting for one of the permissions to come through.

The Focus
The hardest part of designing a study is coming up with a focus, a very very specific focus that you want to concentrate on in your findings. Basically, this focus will define every step that you take in terms of collecting data. Irene's focus is on teacher's questions and how the questions differ in AfL and non-AfL schools. She has already done her trabajo de invesigacion, so she decided on her focus last year and is now working on collecting all of her data for the thesis. But I'm just starting out, so I need to create a focus and also think about all of the data that I need to collect for my thesis, so I don't have to backtrack later. That is a lot of pressure!  Especially because of the number of recordings that we will have to take, which neither of us had any idea what would be the right number. 30? 300? 3000? No idea! What is too much and what is not enough? That's what we're trying to figure out now.

The British Council basically just wants to know if AfL is working, and if it would be worth their while to train more teachers in these techniques. There are plenty of studies that show AfL works, so how do I focus? My initial gut reaction from all of the reading that I did over the summer was to focus on lower achieving learners and see how this method was benefiting them, because they are supposed to be the ones that are impacted in the most positive way.

I had a great meeting this past Friday with Ana, one of my former CLIL professors and an incredibly intelligent woman. She helped me and Irene hone our focus, so basically I am going to be doing a longitudinal (a long term, in-depth) study comparing the effects of AfL in lower achieving learners. Ana told me to focus on at least four different schools (two AfL and two non-AfL) over the course of the year , recording full units at the beginning and end of the year, in order to see which lower level students made more strides. The focus within a focus is motivation, with the idea that the student who were motivated more in class will feel the most confidence in their own learning and thus their achievement will be higher. I just updated my project proposal and I'm hoping that my tutor will agree that it's the way to go. I can always include more schools later if I need to, but at this point, I think that the comparison of the AfL/ Non-AfL will be very valuable.

The two things that I need help with now are the following: first off, I need to find two non-AfL bilingual schools that will collaborate with me and let me start recording in the next two weeks. I have already emailed a bunch of contacts including my former school where I used to work as an Auxiliar de Conversacion, so hopefully something will pan out. If anybody knows of any schools that will help a sista out and let me go in to film, it would be much appreciated.

Secondly, how the eff do you measure motivation in students? I mean, in the actual classroom. You could look at participation, eagerness, initiation of comments, but how do you really measure whether or not the students are motivated? Any ideas for things to look at within the recordings or questions to ask when I interview the students would be much appreciated.

Well, that's all that I can think of for right now. I can already tell that this blog is going to be really beneficial and helpful if for no other reason than getting my thoughts out and warming up with writing. Time to put these fingers to work and start focusing on the review of literature.

Thanks for taking the time to read and for your comments!!

Sincerely,
Your favorite AfL enthusiast