View Content #24054

by Zach Patrick-Riley, CASLS Fellow

Reflective learning has been gaining traction as an important tool for language learning and teaching and is defined here as the “process of internally examining and exploring an issue of concern, triggered by an experience, which creates and clarifies meaning in terms of self, and which results in a changed conceptual perspective” (Boyd and Fales, 1983). Through reflective learning, students will become more aware of their learning process and be better able to make creative use of their language learning opportunities.

Brown and Lee (2015) offer eight principles of language instruction as related to reflective learning. This week we examine four of those principles and next week the four that follow.

Agency: As teachers we want learners to feel empowered to take charge of their learning and look for multiple opportunities to facilitate autonomous learning. Reflection on one’s own agency through intentioned reflective practice (e.g., journaling, discussion, drawing) can increase students’ awareness of their own agency.   

Self-Regulation: If students are taught strategies for reflecting on their own behavior, for example, online browsing, they can better regulate their own patterns moving forward. The important thing to note is that the behaviors themselves do not have to be black or white. As students build their meta awareness around how to regulate themselves in a reasonable way while using these online platforms they begin to make their own choices about what feels right. It is okay if they get distracted reading a funny Buzzfeed article for instance, but with intention, they can begin to further internalize the potential learning they can extrapolate from that article.

Automaticity: Through successful strategy instruction, students will be better able to know what to do when they encounter a new word. They can reflect and search about the meaning, or often multiple meanings, of that word as well as practice using it in a variety of contexts. Reflecting on ways to use new words can help the learners uptake a variety of meanings, and ideally, work with these meanings until they become automatic.

Transfer: Learners already have a schema to use that helps them when encountering new language. Through reflection, learners can develop skills to transfer those schemata to varied contexts. For example, students that spend time on Instagram see a variety of images with associated hashtags and text below. If the text below is in a language other than their own, they can discover more about the meaning of that hashtagged word by simply clicking on it, which will take them to other images that use that hashtag, thus helping them better understand that word. They would then be able to associate those images with that word, having a larger schema to work with going forward.

Return next week for exploration of the other four elements offered by Brown and Lee.

References

Boyd, E. M., & Fales, A. W. (1983). Reflective learning: Key to learning from experience. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 23(2), 99-117.

Brown, H. D., & Lee, H. (2015). Teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. White Plains, NY: Pearson Education.  

Dr. Thomas Farrell has been a prolific advocate of reflective learning for quite some time and links to his articles/chapters can be found here: http://www.reflectiveinquiry.ca/.

A helpful link for learning more about reflective learning and example activities: http://study.com/academy/lesson/reflective-learning-definition-style-theory.html.