ELC Faculty Forum

Several weeks ago, I witnessed a very interesting exchange between my mom and my son.  They were carrying on a lengthy conversation on a topic of Nathan’s interest.  They were both very engaged and it was obvious that they were enjoying each other’s company.  

However, that day, I noticed something for the first time!  They were carrying on this beautiful conversation in two different languages!  My mom would say something in Korean, Nathan would understand and respond to her in English to which my mom would understand and respond back to him in Korean.  This went on for a while!  They both understood what each other said, but if you ask either one of them to say it in the other person’s language, they would not have been able to!  This is a very common scene in an immigrant household.  Because it happens all the time, I never really noticed it until now.  I “noticed” it (hey another trigger word for this year!) because of our theme in our program this year, the year of “Facilitating Progress: Past the Plateau to the Mountain Top!”  If you want to refresh your memory, you can check out Rebecca’s presentation in the Teacher Resources Site (On CE6, under Presentations/Fall2011Inservice) document called “Facilitating Instruction Revised 3.”

In our study group last year, we talked about fossilization and the plateau effect in our students’ language acquisition.  We also spoke in depth about how our students perform better on the receptive tasks (listening & reading) than the productive tasks (speaking & writing).  However, in order for them to go over this hump (plateau), the research is saying that we need to have students focus on improving their productive skills!

I deal with students all the time and they frequently tell me how “easy” their class is.  However, they can’t tell me this in English!  If it is that easy, then they should be able to tell me their reasons in English!  The truth is, the students “think” that it is easy because they know the topic/skill/level receptively but they cannot perform productively at that level.  I recently read a book called The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons.  They are the researchers behind the famous basketball video Rebecca showed us during the All-Faculty Inservice night.  One of the chapters in the book talks about the “illusion of knowledge” and I thought it was very appropriate for our theme this year.  Here are some quotes from that chapter:

[after speaking about how we think we know how the toilet works, but we don’t...] “But when you aren’t looking at a toilet, your impression of understanding is illusory: You mistake your knowledge of what happens for an understanding of why it happens, and you mistake your feeling of familiarity [emphasis mine] for genuine knowledge” (Chabris & Simons, 2010, p. 122).

“We sometimes encounter students who come to our offices and ask how they could have worked so hard but still failed our tests.  They usually tell us that they read and reread the textbook and their class notes, and that they thought they understood everything well by the time of the exam.  And they probably did internalize some bits and pieces of the material, but the illusion of knowledge led them to confuse the familiarity they had gained from repeated exposure to the concepts in the course with an actual understanding of them.  As a rule, reading text over and over again yields diminishing returns in actual knowledge, but it increases familiarity and foster a false sense of understanding [emphasis mine].  Only by testing ourselves can we actually determine whether or not we really understand” (Chabris & Simons, 2010, p. 122).

If students need something to prompt them in order to activate their knowledge, do they really know the material?  In order to move our students from this “false sense of understanding” and the “illusion of knowledge” when they are only familiar with the topic, we need to really force our students to produce more and we need to examine how we test our students.  Are we testing them on their receptive knowledge (i.e. multiple choice questions) or productive knowledge?  When our students are pushed for more output, I strongly believe that they would be pushed over their plateau and overcome their fossilization!

I am interested in your feedback!  What are you seeing in your classes?  Do you see your students improving more when you have more production focused activities and tests?  Do you have activities or assessment strategies that you would like to share?  I am hoping that we can get this conversation started through this blog.  Please post!!