Principles of Design

Designing a Digital-based Language Teaching Activity for CALT: Principles of Design

Kho Chung Wei

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To be successful in this topic, I can:

• Apply the six principles to design a digital-based language teaching activity

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Open Ended

What does "authentic" mean to you?

1: Authenticity

• Learners perceived the task as related to the real world.

• An authentic task is one whose topic, process, content, or other element learners perceive they will use outside of class in their real world or that parallels or replicates real functions beyond the classroom.

• Students who perceive a task’s how and why will also be

  more attentive and more motivated to learn.

• Even grammar drills and practice can be engaging if learners see them as enabling them to use language outside of the classroom.

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Open Ended

What type of learning task will engage your interest? Do you think it'll be the same for young learners?

2: Engagement

• Interesting = one or more aspects of the task hold deep interest for learners

• Input that is interesting and meaningful is more likely to become actual language intake and be processed by the learner than input that is uninteresting and unconnected to students’ lives.

• Many teachers do not know what their students are interested in, but they can find out and integrate the ideas into tasks.

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In a digital learning environment, how do you think we can provide opportunities for learners to interact with each other? Apart from fellow learners, who else could they interact with?

3: Interaction Opportunities

• Opportunities for social interaction = conversation, cooperation, and / or collaboration with peers, teachers, experts, and others

• Social interaction holds special significance for engaging language tasks because it is a main feature of both engagement and language learning.

• The interaction is based on two-way give and take rather than one way where either only one person is talking or no one is listening and responding.

• Technology has evolved since pandemic to provide a creative, responsive interactive environment.

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Why is it important for us (teachers) to strike a balance in giving challenging tasks that students have the skills to complete? Why can't we just give an easy task?

4: Support Challenge/Skills Balance

• Includes choices of challenge

• The amount of stress or pressure that helps students learn effectively is different for each person.

• Language learners should feel comfortable enough to take risks with the target language, but they should not be put to sleep by

  overly simple-minded tasks and exercises.

• Educators can create optimal stress (eustress or good stress) by matching the degree of difficulty, or challenge, to the students’ skills (Cziksentmihalyi, 1990), giving them enough difficulty to keep their attention while providing them with tasks that are possible to complete.

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4: Support Challenge/Skills Balance

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Poll

Which do you prefer when learning a language?

• Teacher provides you with a rigid structure/aspect to follow.

• Teacher allows you some freedom in choosing certain aspects when learning the skill.

• Teacher allows you total freedom in learning the skills.

5: Support Autonomy/Structure Balance

• Includes choices of task aspects

• Many language classes push learners along a rigid schedule requiring a certain number of book chapters, exercises, and essays in a given amount of time.

• This teacher-directed syllabus may be effective for some students, but it may ignore the needs of others.

• Allowing learners to control some aspects of a task can make them much more likely to engage.

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Open Ended

Recall your own language learning experience. What is an effective "help" or "guidance" or "assistance" given by the teacher when you are learning a skill or completing a language task?

6: Scaffolding

• Effective scaffolding (a range of resources, including just-in-time feedback)

• Feedback is an important aspect of both language learning and engagement.

• Some students work more slowly than others, and some need more or less guidance for different tasks.

• Giving students the right amount of time and administering appropriate feedback are among the most difficult but also most important conditions to meet.

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Tutorial Task

• Think about your CALT project.

• How would you apply all the six principles that you have just learned in designing your digital-based language teaching-learning kit? Explain it in any written form of your choice.

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