INTERLINK

INTERLINK Curriculum Guide

7. Core Project Descriptions

Core Projects are designed to keep the focus of the class on what students are doing rather than on what the teacher is presenting. They are templates or frameworks for managing an assortment of related activities over the course of the entire term. Activities may be thematically related to the project (for example, the theme of law or justice for the mock trial) or connected through the skills they are designed to impart (for example, a pronunciation activity as part of a presentation project). The projects allow teachers extraordinary freedom to develop a wide assortment of activities and to assign time frames for each activity.

One important element of every project activity is making sure that students understand what is expected of them and how the activity will benefit them. It is equally important for each activity to end with some form of debriefing that allows students to reflect about what was done, what was learned, and what they liked or disliked about it. The importance of reflection cannot be overstated. When students reflect about an activity, it helps make them aware of what they have experienced and learned. Furthermore, attempting to express what has been experienced is a very powerful communicative activity in and of itself that not only promotes awareness but enhances community feeling. When students reflect about an activity, they are likely to come to an understanding of why that did the activity and what was gained from it, and thereby become more accepting of classroom strategies that may be quite different to those they are more accustomed to. Finally, reflection sessions help keep the teacher in touch with the feelings and experiences of students and are instrumental in improving activities and keeping classes focused on student needs. Reflection may be done in writing, as full-class discussions or in small groups, in class or out of class (for example, in journals or blogs), and using a variety of techniques may be helpful. However it is done, it should be done on a daily basis.

Descriptions of all the Core Projects are provided below.

CS

I. The Team Project typically requires students to do research, synthesize ideas, and work effectively together and usually culminates in a presentation. Skills used include listening, speaking, reading, writing, research and gathering information, organizing ideas, time management, cooperation, presentation, computer and Internet use, note-taking, summarizing, etc. Activities may include viewing videos, listening to tapes, guest speakers, field trips, observing and reporting, research, discussions, (whole class/small group), brainstorming, role plays, simulations, interviews and surveys, data collection (note-taking, summarizing), data synthesis (reports, graphs, PowerPoints), presentations, etc. Throughout the project, individuals' abilities and needs are monitored so that other additional activities can be devised to address areas of deficiency. The team projects for each level are:

CS1: Shopping Spree
CS2: Travelogue
CS3: Ad Campaign
CS4: Debate
CS5: Mock Trial

Alternative CS Team Projects

For a variety of reasons, there may be circumstances when an alternative Team Project is useful. For example, a teacher may wish to add another project to the 3 already being used, or to substitute one of the regular projects because there is a multi-level class or because students have already done a regular project, or just because a substitute project may be more appropriate. In exceptional situations and only with the approval of the Center Director, a teacher may devise and implement a new project. When such a project is used, a full description must be submitted to the Center Director (and then transmitted to the Curriculum Director). Several alternative projects with descriptions are listed below:

Symposium
News Show

II. The Presentation Project requires each student to collect information and then prepare and present a report to classmates. This activity not only provides opportunities for authentic communication with a variety of people, but involves INTERLINK students in the community, develops interviewing skills, and generates content for further discussion. This project is useful academically because it prepares students for the kind of presentation work they will be required to do in their college classes.

CS1: Show and Tell
CS2: Peer Reports
CS3: Community Exploration
CS4: Education Exploration
CS5: Vocation Exploration

III. The Independent Listening Project encourages out-of-class listening practice. The importance of out-of-class English use is elaborated on in the Homework and Out-of-Class Activities section, and of all the skill areas, listening is perhaps the most critical and certainly the most time-intensive to be addressed by out-of-class activities. The productive skills of speaking and writing are impacted tremendously by the receptive skills of listening and reading and are also somewhat easier for students to practice independently. While reading is an activity students can engage in fairly easily and conveniently in their native countries, listening is the activity for which studying in the US represents a true benefit. It therefore makes sense that we should do everything possible to maximize listening opportunities for students outside of class. Watching movies, videos and TV programs, listening to the radio, podcasts or tapes provide great passive listening opportunities. Activities such as talking with friends and host family members, participating in sports or other club activities provide more interactive opportunities. Core Projects can easily include after-class listening activities such as meeting with team project members, interviewing people or listening to media as part of the research.

How students fulfill the requirement of the independent listening project depends on the teacher and the students themselves. There is no prescribed theme or mechanism for this project at each level. The goal is to find ways for students to spend 4-6 hours on listening activities every day outside of class. Since students will do more listening when it is connected with activities that are enjoyable and entertaining, we must help students identify and get involved with such activities. It is not necessary that all students engage in all of the same out-of-class activities, but it may be easier for the teacher to monitor and assist students if some of the activities are the same or at least related. The issue of monitoring is an important one, because it is not enough for the teacher to assign the independent listening project and then leave it entirely up to students whether they satisfactorily accomplish what is intended. Almost certainly there should be class activities part of whose purpose is to make sure students are actually doing what they say they are doing. If students watch TV commercials as part of the ad campaign, an in-class activity might be a comparison of commercials including summaries and analyses of what students observed at home. If students watch a TV program, they may be asked to summarize or critique the programs in full class or small group discussions. If students conduct out-of-class surveys or interviews, they could be expected share the results in class. Students might be asked to keep a log or journal of their listening activities. By these means and many others which teachers can devise, we can try to assure that students are engaging in the listening activities they are supposed to engage in. If students appear unable to "fulfill their contracts" in regard to out-of-class listening activities, students and teacher can revise the activity contract not by decreasing the time requirement but by identifying alternative activities that can replace those that were unattainable.

There may be some concern that out-of-class listening activities may not satisfactorily improve students' listening skills and prepare them for meeting the Benchmarks of the level because the activities may not be difficult enough or may not be academic in nature. The fear that students will prefer to listen to something easy rather than something difficult is pretty much unwarranted. For the most part, students will prefer what is interesting, regardless of how difficult it is, over something easier and more tedious. It should not cause concern if students choose to view something entertaining such as The Simpsons over something academic such as Nova. The skills that develop from regular, engaged listening can be put to academic use, and if the student is more likely to attentively watch The Simpsons, it could be a better program choice than Nova. There may also be some concern that a student's vocabulary and grammatical accuracy cannot be improved as a result of passive listening and that specific attention to lexical development and syntactic rules is needed to improve language skills, but such a notion is contrary to the underlying pedagogical assumptions of our program. As to concern about whether students' selected listening activities adequately prepare them to meet the Benchmarks, since students and teacher are privy to Benchmark samples, the appropriateness of specific listening activities can be gauged.

RW

I. The Portfolio Project produces collections of writing and revisions. The purpose of the portfolio is to keep track of writing progress throughout the course of the term. Each level focuses on a different kind of writing, but even basic classes work on multi-paragraph compositions. Skills are worked on not as discrete, disjointed topics but as part of an integrated writing process. The letter-writing project, for example, necessitates writing grammatically accurate sentences, organizing those sentences into coherent paragraphs, having an awareness of audience, spelling correctly, indenting and punctuating according to conventions, and most important of all, having a message or an idea to express. As is the case with all projects, the goal is not for the student to create a flawless product but to learn from the process how to do things that couldn't be done before. It is not particularly helpful for a student to produce an errorless essay or exceptional research paper if, while working on those products, skills have not been acquired to allow replication of the feat in subsequent writing. In the portfolio, the first draft of essay #2 should be more similar to the final draft of essay #1 in term of writing quality than the first draft of essay #1. If that is not the case, whether the student has actually learned anything of value can be questioned.

The writing objective for all levels is to make students better writers, capable of expressing their ideas clearly, coherently and effectively and producing writing that is syntactically and mechanically accurate, well-organized and focused. Just as our strategy for language improvement is to foster acquisition and not to teach about language, our strategy for writing improvement centers on producing better writers and writing rather than teaching about writing. The discovery process is just as important for writing as it is for language acquisition, and students are more likely to learn and retain what they learn through personal experience than from information presented to them or exercises worked through. The central element of writing is self-expression and not the application of mechanistic rules or formulas. Because the teacher's focus should be on helping students improve their ability to express themselves in writing and not on presentation of information, the use of writing texts is strenuously discouraged. Portfolios support the development of students' writing from first to final draft, and the teacher's role is to help students become aware of problems or elements that could be improved and assist them in figuring out how to make those improvements. To a large extent, the teacher's challenge is to get students to care about their writing and become invested in it.

To encourage students in their writing endeavors, error-correction should be as individualized (needs-based) as possible and feedback should nurture students' talents and development of a unique voice for self-expression. Students' writing will improve if they write a lot and derive satisfaction from their writing. Excessive criticism or relentless pointing out of errors, which only make students dislike and avoid writing, are bound to be counter-productive.

RW1: Informal Letters
RW2: Narrative Composition
RW3: Exploratory Essays
RW4: Critical Essays
RW5: Research Paper

II. The Independent Reading Project is much like the independent listening project described above and most of what is stated in that section is applicable here and should be reviewed to understand this project. Students should spend 2-3 hours reading outside of class each day and the best way to enable them to achieve this goal is to help them find interesting and enjoyable reading material. For low level students the reading might consist mostly of comic books, closed captioned movies or TV programs, magazines and modified novels, while higher level students have a wider range of possibilities open to them. From the very lowest level, independent extensive reading is meant to foster love of reading and the ability to read as fast as possible with good comprehension. To become good readers, students need to read for meaning and read in chunks without using a dictionary or parsing sentences. Reading for meaning helps students use context clues and develop schemata that help them navigate texts more efficiently.

Reading speed is an important part of overall reading ability and is an implied if not explicitly stated element of reading assessment. Students should be able to read texts at a reasonable speed and not have to decipher the written page as if were an impenetrable code. Time, as well as comprehension, needs to figure in the equation for assessing reading skill, but there are complications related to reading rate. For one thing, reading rate is not simply a ratio of words to time, because rate is related to complexity of the text as well as the purpose of reading. We do all kinds of reading, from reading for enjoyment to skimming for general information to scanning for specific details. The very act of measuring speed can affect how fast or how well someone reads a text. Nevertheless, if a level 5 student takes 10 minutes to read a page of a novel, there is a problem with his/her reading that will affect future academic success. It is with some apprehension and reluctance that the chart below is offered as a general guideline for what kinds of reading rates to expect of students at each level. Keeping in mind the variability of text and kind of reading already discussed, the chart below offers a basic range of how fast a student should be reading level appropriate material at each level:

Of course, this chart should not be used in an absolute way. If a level 3 student reads at 90 wpm or even 70 wpm, there is not necessarily a problem. One of the purposes of the daily extensive reading that constitutes the Independent Reading Project is to get students to read for meaning and take in chunks of text rather than individual letters or words, and it is hoped that in most cases, reading practice alone will succeed in increasing reading rates to acceptable levels.

The phrase level appropriate material was used above and readability scales should be mentioned as tools that can be used in gauging the appropriateness of texts for different levels. Once again, a word of caution is in order: these are all tools based on various formulae and algorithms but none of these tools or combination of them should be accepted as an absolute measurement of text difficulty. Two of the best known are the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Flesch Reading Ease scales, both of which are included in MS Word. Two other useful mechanisms for assessing text difficulty are the Gunning fog index and SMOG. One more tool that teachers may find useful for analyzing texts (including student writing) is the Word Frequency Counter.

III. The Journal/blog Project provides an opportunity for daily writing. The emphasis is on expression and sharing ideas and feelings and developing fluency and ease in writing rather than grammatical accuracy or structure and organization. For this project to be effective, students must write in their journals every day and the journal must have real meaning for the student for that to occur. The greatest challenge to the teacher for this project, therefore, is to help students figure out what to write about and how to keep it meaningful. Another challenge is to create mechanisms to make sure that students are writing daily. The format of the journal is up to the class and teacher to decide. A blog has the advantage of being an interpersonal form of communication and is thus a shared (and easily monitored!) experience, but it may not be suitable for all classes. However it is done, the practice of at least 15 minutes of daily writing should be adhered to.