Brendon Clark (Interactive Institute Swedish ICT & Umeå University)
Nicholas Torretta (Interactive Institute Swedish ICT)
The Interaction Navigator: A reflection & planning support template for “in the wild” L2 learning
This poster presents the “Interaction Navigator” as (1) a “learning tool” to support planning of and reflection upon everyday interactions as language learning opportunities; and (2) as a “design artifact” resulting from a participatory design with L2 teachers, conversation analysts, and design anthropologists. The interaction navigator is a paper-based template with a simple structure for identifying a central interaction, and considering what can or did take place before, during and after the interaction. Its repetitive use is meant to sensitize learners to identify and engage with physical and digital materials, people and places that support “interactional competence” in the target language. Over the last 9 months, it has been used as a central piece four language learning courses in Finland and Iceland, where the classroom functioned as a type of “navigation system” for identifying material and human resources in everyday situations.
M. Cristina
Giliberti (CLIC, Rice University, USA)
Practices for the display of affiliation and assessment in Italian
This poster illustrates a teaching unit that focuses on the interactional practices through which participants display affiliation and assessment. In this unit, students will:
(a) be guided to identify responsive turns that display affiliation and assessment through the analysis of a natural conversation in English;
(b) listen to a casual conversation in Italian and respond to comprehension questions;
(c) identify the responsive turns produced in the conversation and their functions;
(d) compare the formulation of responsive turns in English and in Italian;
(e) practice the production of responsive turns that display affiliation and assessment in short written dialogues;
(f) engage in an interactional activity in which they are prompted to produce such turns.
The poster will also include two forms of assessment:
(a) a homework assignment in which students are required to complete two written conversations in Italian;
(b) a class quiz in which students are required to transform a monologue into a more dialogic interaction.
Hee-Jeong Jeong (CLIC, Rice University, USA)
Teaching active listening to KFL students using authentic interactional data
This poster provides practical ideas for teaching active listening to second-year students of Korean as a foreign language (KFL) using authentic language data. It also shows the benefits of using authentic video materials for enhancing students’ recognition and production of response tokens and more elaborate responsive turns. According to Clancy et. al. (1996), a responsive turn is “a short utterance produced by an interlocutor who is playing a listener’s role during the other interlocutor’s speakership” (p. 356). Olsher (2011a, 2011b) also considers short responses offered by a coparticipant to show that s/he is following or (claiming) understanding. For the purpose of teaching active listening, I identified five types of responsive turns: i) backchannels (e.g., a, e, um, ung ); ii) information receipts (e.g., kulayyo, “(it) is so”; macayo, “(it) is correct”); iii) assessments (e.g., cohayo, “good”; caymi.isskeyss-neyyo, “(it) must be interesting”); iv) collaborative completions; and v) repetitions.
The teaching material presented in this poster has already been used in the classroom. Preliminary observations indicate that students learn how to formulate responsive turns in appropriate ways and therefore develop their ability to keep conversations going. Overall, the students’ interactional competence improved: the students became more active participants in interaction.
Naoko Ozaki (CLIC, Rice University, USA)
Beyond the textbook: Japanese final particles in naturally occurring conversations
This poster introduces a series of activities which guide students to analyze naturally occurring conversations in order to identify interactional practices beyond the realm of the textbook. Specifically, the focus is on the Japanese final particles yo, ne, and yone. Such particles are first presented through the textbook material and then through authentic data. The pedagogical activities designed to teach these particles include: interactions between students and L1 speakers of Japanese; in-class analysis of authentic data through guided induction; further reflection on authentic data and on the students’ interactions; and assessment of students’ awareness about the use of these particles by modifying previously produced data. The poster: (a) describes how these activities were used in an actual classroom; (b) reports the students’ reactions and comments; and (c) illustrates the process of revising and improving the activities for future iterations of the same teaching unit.
Luziris Pineda Turi (CLIC, Rice University, USA)
Spanish for medical professions: Interactional practices for non-compliant patients
This poster will showcase a lesson plan that guides students to analyze scripted and naturally occurring interactions between doctors and diabetic patients who do not comply with recommended treatment. The reference point for the scaffolded activities is an article written by the Grupo-Programa Comunicación y Salud de SEMFYC, an organization dedicated to effective communication in medical settings. The article provides recommendations for this type of interaction. Ultimately, students analyze the interactions reported in the article and compare them with authentic audio recordings. Through a series of specific questions, charts, and tasks, students identify parts of the interaction and their function as related to responding to and effectively communicating with non-compliant patients. This analysis is then contrasted with the recommendations provided, which are based on scripted interactions. Such comparisons highlight the differences between scripted dialogues and naturally occurring interactions and show how students can benefit from being exposed to authentic data that illustrate what people actually do in conversation. This poster will provide a glimpse into the way CLIC is transforming how Languages for Specific Purposes are taught.