View Content #26502

By Julie Sykes, CASLS Director

The notion of learner-centeredness in the world language classroom has been a focus for quite some time. With the prolific application of a focus on communicative competence and proficiency-based language instruction, learner communication in the classroom appears in the majority of best-practice guides for world language education.

Despite this focus, a common complaint often made by world language educators is the lack of student participation when they are placed in groups or pairs. These complaints often stem from results in  which learners go through the motionx to complete a task and, at worst, end up with them not completing the task at all. While, pair and group work are not always met with these results, they also are not a panacea for facilitating learner-centeredness in a world-language classroom. In addition to giving students time to work together and creating the conditions under which all students have the opportunity to be successful, learner-centered approaches also require attention to the interests and needs of the learner beyond their classroom behavior. In this week’s Topic of the Week, we explore two ways to extend learner-centered experiences beyond small group work.

1. Learner agency and choice can be about topic and domain and also about how learners choose to complete a task.

For example, let’s imagine you are teaching the function of descriptions and you want learners to be able to practice different ways of describing different kinds of things and people. A common approach to this task is giving learners an information gap activity in which one learner describes something to the other so that their partner can guess what or who they are thinking of based on their description. This task, while certainly facilitative of potential learning, does not guarantee a learner-centered experience. To augment the opportunity, one might offer the opportunity to describe anything a learner wishes. For example, they could select five images of the things they would like to describe. Critical to the learners’ experience of this activity is their choice. The instructor can provide a model of things they like to describe why they would like to describe them and give learners the same opportunity. In this way the activity not only becomes communicative and collaborative with the learners working hands-on in small groups, it also adds an element of personalization to the language that they work with and practice with.

2. Support learners’ opportunity to become experts and share that knowledge with the class.  

Another opportunity to facilitate a learner-centered classroom is to give learners an opportunity to create lessons and teach each other. This can entail selecting new types of words they’re interested in learning, maybe things like hashtags or social media terms, or, alternatively, creating activities for their peers in which the learners facilitate the learning experience. This does not become the core of every lesson, rather the opportunity for learners to not only think about the consumption of information, but also the skills they would want to share to teach that information or categorize that information in a way that works in their particular context.

Regardless of the approach one takes, extending learner ownership and agency can increase awareness and success in the world language classroom.