Project: My Story, Your Story

Capturing Stories in a Community ESL Setting

Lita Brusick Johnson

LING 583 - Materials and Curriculum Development
May 6, 2013

My Story, Your Story is a complex, multi-month project that is designed as an

integral part of the course described in my textbook adaptation paper. The students are
parents of elementary students who have limited English language proficiency who
attend an intermediate-level ESL class during regular school hours, which has limited
technological resources available. The programs goal is to increase parents
communicative competence in English so that they can engage more confidently in
community life and provide a positive learning environment for their children. The class
features an integrated four-language-skills communicative teaching approach and
utilizes the All-Star 3 textbook.
Project Structure and Goals. The Your Story, My Story project, which spans
the entire second half of the school year, comes after a half year of language
instruction. By this time, learners and their teacher will have achieved a relatively high
comfort level by this time, and the teacher will have had opportunity to both formally and
informally assess the needs and interests of the students.
Dedicated class time a minimum of 30 minutes is provided every Thursday, in
the Tuesday/Thursday cycle of 2.5. hour classes; the project accounts for 10% of
teacher-student face time. The projects language learning goals (in the areas of
listening, oral fluency, vocabulary building, and communicative competence/narrative)
are detailed in Appendix A (Project Design), p. 1.
On a scale that has accuracy on one end and fluency on the other, this project
tips toward fluency. The bulk of the class time is devoted to speaking and listening
activities using student-known language forms and the learners focus is on receiving
or conveying meaning (Nation 2007, p. 6). However, ample opportunities for peer

feedback on form (oral and written) are provided, as well for acquiring the vocabulary
needed to convey meaning. The project design assumes that key language forms and
elements needed for this project have been taught, as other class learning the scope
and sequence of All-Star 3. However, observation of problems areas arising in project
discussions enables the teacher to embed a focus on form on these areas in the more
controlled classroom sessions thus avoiding interruptions the flow of studentdirected project work.
Constraints and Affordances. Given the specific context of learners mothers
of K-8 children who have limited English language proficiency who are often
marginalized and economically disadvantaged the affective goals are at least as
important as language learning goal. These affective goals are detailed on p. 1 of
Appendix A (Program Design).
The project design anticipates some of the considerations (some might call them
constraints) related to the community ESL program context. However, on the flip side of
constraints are often affordances that can enhance the possibility of learning (Perry
2007). This program is completely voluntary. Students sit in the classroom because
they choose to; their goal not getting a good grade or passing the TOEFL. Attendance
and homework production could be sporadic, given the economic and social pressures
faced by parents and if learners have had limited schooling in their L1.
The nature of the learners has significant implications for the use of rubrics and
assessment measures, especially since a major goal of the program as a whole is
building the confidence of learners in English. Summative assessment, expressed as
grades, is not a major focus. Indeed, a teacher would need to take care to minimize the

possibility of rubrics and assessment tools/grading becoming a dis-incentive to learning

English generally or continuing in this program in particular.
However, the voluntary nature of participation can also mean that learners bring
into the classroom powerful motivations to improve as well as varying personal
English-language goals. Formal and informal needs assessments can enable the
teacher to shape opportunities for learning that are in alignment with student interests
and needs, and provide as much learner choice as possible, in the context of specific
language learning objectives. This speaks for this project being profoundly learnercentered and recognized by learners as a useful (and fun) way to acquire the skills and
experience they need to achieve their goals from better assisting their children in their
learning, to negotiating their English-speaking context, to enabling movement toward
personal employment or higher education goals.
Project Elements and Design Issues. The building blocks of this project are a
series of tasks that focus on a basic interactive communicative structure: the interview
format both reception (listening to the interviews done by others in the real world)
and production (a combination of speaking and listening, interviewing and being
interviewed). The project reflects a commitment to both meaningful and authentic input
and meaningful, authentic output in ways that enable student engagement at the higher,
analytical, evaluative, and creative levels of Blooms taxonomy
The sources of meaningful, authentic input include are both directly relevant to
students interests and can be used unchanged, two key elements highlighted by
McGrath (2002, p. 61): media interviews of students own choosing in their L1; input
from learners children, family members, and friends who are interviewed, in either the

L1 or L2; and interviews in English obtained from StoryCorps, an oral history program
of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio
(www.storycorps.org). StoryCorps has collected 45,000 stories, a significant number
done in the interview style. These are stories told by everyday people who chose
what they want to talk about and tell their stories in their own words, which are recorded
and archived in the Library of Congress. StoryCorps provides short, authentic and
meaningful speech samples about daily life issues of interest to students including
one that models a peer/student interview. StoryCorps also provides (1) several
interviews accompanied by simple animation and written texts (book of interviews)
useful in scaffolding listening skills development; and (2) classroom resources, which
have been liberally adapted for use in this project.
The projects meaningful, authentic output student-produced oral and written
stories/interviews is detailed in Appendix A (Project Design) , p. 1. What follows
describes why certain design decisions were made.
This project reflects a fundamental commitment to inductive learning processes and
use of critical thinking skills, which reflects, as Graves (2000) suggests, one of my
core beliefs about learning and learners (p. 31). This is illustrated in the positioning
of a key rubric for this project (describing excellent, OK, and poor interview
practices). Distribution of these rubrics follows completion of the first major task:
production of group posters and a class compilation of Interview Dos and Donts.
These are a kind of student-created rubric that is developed from observation of L-1
interviews and interviews in English (from Story Corps), and from learners first
interview experience. The rubric in Handout #6 (Appendix C), which in real life

would include student-developed elements from this process, is provided not as a

basis for grading but to facilitate learner self-assessment and peer and teacher
feedback. At the point of introduction, students have the opportunity to suggest
changes and additions to these rubrics and to make them their own. This reflects
the kind of negotiation of assessment described by Nation and Macalister (2010, p.
154) that is appropriate to this community ESL context.
While there is some teacher-fronted work (especially in the first part of the project
and in the listening segments), the context in which inductive learning takes place is
primarily within groups, where students manage their own learning and have
opportunity use a wide range of creative talents to produce the final project outcome.
Groups are formed and operate to facilitate specific tasks; their makeup is often
determined by the requirements of the task itself (e.g., common interests, age of
children); the membership of group changes during the course of the project to
provide students with different experiences of peer input.
Learning is intentionally scaffolded as are the activities and tasks that lay the
foundation for production of the final project outcome, a class Stories Book that
contains the following contribution from each learner: three short written stories
garnered from interviews with family, friends, and a fellow student, plus the
individuals recorded reflections in an interview conducted by a peer. An example of
scaffolding: the project moves from listening to interviews in the learners L1, to
interviews in English with visual and script support, to interviews in English (oral
only); student interviews progress from L1 interviews with family/friends, to students
speaking in English as both interviewer and interviewee. The production of written

stories from the interviews provides cross-skill reinforcement, especially useful when
the learner reverses roles and becomes the interviewee.
Closely related to scaffolding is the staging of activities to reduce in students
cognitive load when they speak, for example by extensive use of pre-planning
activities. The project design reflects an intentional commitment to address the
issues of cognitive complexity and communicative stress described by Robinson
(2011, p. 13) in order to assist students to balance fluency and accuracy.
Activities and tasks move from more simple to more complex (from observing
interviews to doing them) and from more controlled to less controlled. For
example, the first interview is more controlled (questions decided upon by the
group); the second is less controlled (individuals develop their own questions). This
also affords increasing scope for learner choice as the project progresses.
Summary. It is my hope that the project design of My Story, Your Story gives
expression to my commitment to live out many of the principles of communicative
language teaching articulated by Nation and Mcalister (2010). Of these, I would
highlight their depth of processing principle: Learners should process the items to be
learned as deeply and as thoughtfully as possible (p. 60). My Story, Your Story was
designed to provide a scaffolded, learner-centered space for learners to create a
significant and meaningful product using authentic speech and, along the four-month
way, to process deeply newly/previously learned language elements in ways that
enable them to communicate more effectively and confidently in their day-to-day lives in
their communities.

References

Graves, K. (2000). Designing Language Courses: A Guide for Teachers. Boston, MA:
Heinle Press.
McGrath, I. (2002). Chapter 4 Coursebook-based Teaching: Adaptation. Materials
Evaluation and Design for Language Teaching. Edinburgh, Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press.
Nation, P. (2007) The Four Strands. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching.
1(1):1-12.
Nation, I. S. P., & Macalister, J. (2010). Language Curriculum Design. New York:
Taylor & Francis.
Perry, K. (2007). More of the people want to know English: Sudanese refugee adults
participation in ESL programs. University of Kentucky. (Accessed online,
Feburary 2013, part of the Purcell-Gates Cultural Practices of Literacy Study.)
Robinson, P. (2011). Task-Based Language Learning: A Review of Issues. Language
Learning, 61, 136.