Overt Teaching Research Articles

Teaching Critical Vocabulary to Filipino Heritage Language Learners

Engaging in critical dialogues in language classrooms that draw on critical pedagogical perspectives can be challenging for learners because of gaps in communicative resources in their L1 and L2. Since critically oriented classrooms involve discussing social issues, students are expected to deploy “literate talk” to engage in critiquing society and a wide range of texts. Although recent studies have explored teachers’ and students’ engagement with critical materials and critical dialogues, research that explores language development in critical language teaching remains a concern for language teachers. In this paper, I share my experience of fostering language development, specifically the overt teaching of critical vocabulary to students of (Tagalog-based) Filipino language at a university in Hawai’i. Through a discussion of racist stereotypes targeting Filipinos and the impacts of these discourses on students’ lived experiences, the notion of “critical vocabulary” emerges as an important tool for students to articulate the presence of and to dismantle oppressive structures of power, including everyday discourses supporting the status quo. This paper defines critical vocabulary and advances its theoretical and practical contribution to critical language teaching. It also includes students’ perspectives of their language development and ends with pedagogical implications for heritage/world language teachers around the world.

Re-thinking employability with a literacies lens

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to draw on the outcomes of an Higher Education Academy funded project, Literacies for Employability (L4E) to contribute to discussion of the interface between university learning and workplace settings and the focus on employability that dominates the English context. The paper will be of interest to colleagues from any discipline who have an interest in critical (re)readings of employability and practical ways of engaging student in ethnographic approaches to understanding workplace practices, particularly those with an interest in professional, work-based, or placement learning.Design/methodology/approachL4E is grounded in social theories of communication from Sociology and Education that understands literacy as a complex social activity embedded in domains of practice. These ideas recognise workplaces as domains that are highly distinctive and diverse contexts for literacy (rather than generic or standard) and that to be successful in particular workplace settings students must be attuned to, and adaptive and fluent in, the nuanced literacy practices of that workplace. However, evidence suggests (Lea and Stierer, 2000) that HE students (and teachers) rarely experience overt teaching about literacy in general or workplace literacies in particular.FindingsThis project developed a framework to scaffold and support this process across the disciplines so that students can develop the attitudes and behaviours they will need to be successful in the workplace.Originality/valueThe approach chimes with recommendations from Pegg et al. (2012) that employability is most effectively developed through a focus on more expansive, reflexive approaches to learning and through “raising confidence […] self-esteem and aspirations” (Pegg et al., 2012, p. 9).

Social Media Training for Professional Identity Development in Undergraduate Nurses.

The growth of social media use has led to tension affecting the perception of professionalism of nurses in healthcare environments. The aim of this cross-sectional study was to explore first and final year undergraduate student use of social media to understand how it was utilised by them during their course. Descriptive statistical analysis was undertaken to compare differences between first and final year student use. No difference indicated there was a lack of development in the use of social media, particularly concerning in relation to expanding their professional networks. There is a need for the curriculum to include opportunities to teach student nurses methods to ensure the appropriate and safe use of social media. Overt teaching and modelling of desired behaviour to guide and support the use of social media to positively promote professional identity formation, which is essential for work-readiness at graduation, is necessary.

Model of interactive clinical supervision in acute care environments. Balancing patient care and teaching.

Progressive trainee autonomy is considered essential for clinical learning, but potentially harmful for patients. How clinical supervisors and medical trainees establish progressive levels of autonomy in acute care environments without compromising patient safety is largely unknown. To explore how bedside interactions among supervisors and trainees relate to trainee involvement in patient care and to clinical oversight. We conducted a qualitative study based on constructivist grounded theory methodology. We used participant observation for our data collection. We observed the overt teaching interactions among trainees and staff physicians in the critical care units of two university-affiliated hospitals during 74 acute care episodes. Our analysis led to the elaboration of a theoretical model of clinical supervision. A model of interactive clinical supervision is proposed on the basis of three themes: engaging without enactment, sharing care with support, and caring independently with feedback. Each theme regroups different teaching interactions. Engaging in monologues and dialogues about patient care and facilitating hands-off care provision involved progressive levels of trainee involvement without risk for patients. Facilitating hands-on provision of care and providing support-in-action encouraged further trainee involvement with limited risks for patients. Providing feedback-on-action created additional learning opportunities based on trainee independent involvement in clinical activities. Engaging in teaching interactions during acute care episodes allows trainees to exercise progressive autonomy and supervisors to provide adequate clinical oversight. Our model of interactive clinical supervision can inform faculty development initiatives. Learning outcomes resulting from different levels of trainee autonomy should be further explored.

Creating learning momentum through overt teaching interactions during real acute care episodes.

Clinical supervisors fulfill a dual responsibility towards patient care and learning during clinical activities. Assuming such roles in today's clinical environments may be challenging. Acute care environments present unique learning opportunities for medical trainees, as well as specific challenges. The goal of this paper was to better understand the specific contexts in which overt teaching interactions occurred in acute care environments. We conducted a naturalistic observational study based on constructivist grounded theory methodology. Using participant observation, we collected data on the teaching interactions occurring between clinical supervisors and medical trainees during 74 acute care episodes in the critical care unit of two academic centers, in Toronto, Canada. Three themes contributed to a better understanding of the conditions in which overt teaching interactions among trainees and clinical supervisors occurred during acute care episodes: seizing emergent learning opportunities, coming up against challenging conditions, and creating learning momentum. Our findings illustrate how overt learning opportunities emerged from certain clinical situations and how clinical supervisors and trainees could purposefully modify unfavorable learning conditions. None of the acute care episodes encountered in the critical care environment represented ideal conditions for learning. Yet, clinical supervisors and trainees succeeded in engaging in overt teaching interactions during many episodes. The educational value of these overt teaching interactions should be further explored, as well as the impact of interventions aimed at increasing their use in acute care environments.

The Importance of Text Structure Awareness in Promoting Strategic Reading among EFL Readers

Making EFL/ESL students aware of effective and efficient reading strategies that assist in the reading of English texts has been the concern of educators and researchers, and specifically reading instructors for years. Dissatisfaction with the current methods of teaching English and awareness of the positive effect of strategy training has led teachers in Iran to adopt holistic approaches to text processing. Of equal concern is to make students metacognitively aware of strategies and techniques that promote reading comprehension in terms of the macro level characteristics of the text. Text structure knowledge has been recognized as an efficient strategy that enhances reading comprehension. To this end, 85 Iranian EFL learners were provided with instruction on discourse structuring signals (transitional words, frame markers, endophoric markers, code glosses, and punctuation marks) during one semester. The results demonstrated that metacognitive awareness of text structure and overt teaching of textual features facilitate students’ reading comprehension.

“Theory of food” as a neurocognitive adaptation

Human adult cognition emerges over the course of development via the interaction of multiple critical neurocognitive networks. These networks evolved in response to various selection pressures, many of which were modified or intensified by the intellectual, technological, and sociocultural environments that arose in connection with the evolution of genus Homo. Networks related to language and theory of mind clearly play an important role in adult cognition. Given the critical importance of food to both basic survival and cultural interaction, a "theory of food" (analogous to theory of mind) may represent another complex network essential for normal cognition. I propose that theory of food evolved as an internal, cognitive representation of our diets in our minds. Like other complex cognitive abilities, it relies on complex and overlapping dedicated neural networks that develop in childhood under familial and cultural influences. Normative diets are analogous to first languages in that they are acquired without overt teaching; they are also difficult to change or modify once a critical period in development is passed. Theory of food suggests that cognitive activities related to food may be cognitive enhancers, which could have implications for maintaining healthy brain function in aging.

Negotiating a nuanced task-based communicative syllabus of Setswana as an additional language

South Africa promotes multilingualism as one of the means for creating a common national identity in the country but with regard to the teaching of indigenous African languages as additional languages, there is a dearth of teaching material for carrying out this ideal. This article is about negotiating the design of a nuanced communicative Setswana syllabus for learners to whom Setswana is an additional language. The insight gained from data collection obtained through literature review, a questionnaire, and semi-structured individual and group interviews, is used to negotiate the design of the syllabus in question. The syllabus is nuanced by making it involve an overt teaching of grammar and critical language awareness. The study could be used to inform syllabus design for teaching South African indigenous languages as additional languages and to help promote the use of multilingualism South Africa seeks for creating a common national identity. Keywords : syllabus design, teaching methodology, task-based, additional language, Setswana, adult learners, needs analysis

Enhancing the Quality of EAP Writing through Overt Teaching

This paper examines how overt teaching is instrumental in reducing subject-verb agreement (SVA) errors of Malaysian EAP learners which in turn improves the quality of their writing. The researchers used overt teaching of these grammatical items, that is, SVA and investigated how this method has significantly benefitted the learners who were second year university students from different cultural and language backgrounds. Data was collected using a pre-test and a post-test. Even though the learners had spent more than a decade learning the English language since their early education, the data collected in the pre-test showed that they made gross SVA errors in their writing. Treatment in the form of overt teaching of SVA was given to the learners, after which the post-test was administered. The comparison of data of the two tests revealed significant improvements in the learners’ usage of SVA which resulted in improved quality of their writing. The major findings on the learners’ grammatical problems especially in SVA and their response to overt teaching prove that overt teaching enhances the quality of EAP writing produced by students.

Knowlege, Literacies and the teaching of reading English as a foreign language

This paper addresses some key issues cutting across disciplinary fields and influencing EFL reading teaching and research. Reading models have been informed by Information and Knowledge Management paradigms, gradually focusing on different components of prior knowledge and schemata. Lexis has proven to be determinant in cognitive models, as it provides direct access to concepts, stocked as semantic propositions. But schemata are built in the speaker’s mind according to the individual experiences, depicting reading acts as meaning creation on a socio-pragmatic basis. Secondly, the parallel evolution of the Literacy and Reading concepts calls up for multi-literacy approaches, which integrate digital competence into the learning goals, as technologies force changes in information, the way we access it, and on the pedagogical approaches to learning, and to EFL reading. The role of overt teaching, meta-cognitive strategies and individual factors, such as motivation or attitudes, continue being the focus of present and future research.

Quality of teaching in chemical pathology: ability of interns to order and interpret laboratory tests

Background and objective:There has been a steady decline in the overt teaching of many basic and pathology sciences in the medical curriculum worldwide. As interns are the doctors most likely...

An Algorithmic Approach to Error Correction: An Empirical Study

This article reports on the results of a research study that investigated the effectiveness of using an algorithmic approach to error correction to help Hong Kong English‐as‐a‐second‐language (ESL) learners overcome persistent lexico‐grammatical problems. Ten error types were selected for the experiment, and one set of remedial instructional materials was designed for each error type. The materials were implemented with more than 450 students at both secondary and tertiary levels. Pretests, posttests, and delayed posttests were administered to test the effectiveness of the approach, and a plenary review meeting was organized to gather feedback. The results showed that the approach was versatile and effective and that the students showed significant improvements for the items taught. It is argued that form‐focused remedial instruction is effective in enhancing learners' language accuracy in their second language (L2) output.

Cognitive Strategies for Academic Reading and Listening in EFL

Recent research has shown that reading and listening share cognitive strategies for comprehension. Nevertheless, it has been argued that intonation provides a more consistent cue than text structure for the reconstruction of the hierarchy of ideas in lectures. Neither of these connections has been clearly established in studies involving EFL learners. In this study three groups of EFL university students underwent different training programs in reading and listening comprehension for major topics and subtopics of academic discourse. Results indicate: a) that students who learned rhetorical patterns of written expository texts and text mapping strategies demonstrated better comprehension of lectures than students who performed other activities, and b) that overt teaching of phonological features signalling macro-units of discourse has a further facilitating effect on lecture comprehension.

Christopher Winch on the Representational Theory of Language and its Pedagogic Relevance

In his recent paper, Winch (1997) attacks a group of theories he calls cognitivism. These theories agree in holding that ‘the ability to think, both consciously and subconsciously, amounts to an ability to internally manipulate symbolic representations of that which we think about (p.67).The relevance of this attack to education is that ‘Cognitivism’ supplies plausible-looking reasons for thinking that learning can take place without instruction, practice, memorisation or training and its prestige as a theory of learning devalues those activities within education.Its rejection should therefore lead us to re-examine our need for explicit teacher-oriented pedagogies’ (p.78).Cognitivism has led to an emphasis on autonomous learning and a consequent devaluing of the role of overt teaching, ‘the active transmission of knowledge and technique by an authoritative figure’ (p.67).

The Use of Midrash in Maimonides'Guide of the Perplexed: Decoding the Duality of the Text

In the introduction to his philosophical magnum opus, the Guide of thePerplexed, Maimonides provides us with a rationale for the composition of this work as well as instructions for the targeted reader on how to decipher its elusive and enigmatic style. Such devices as contradiction, diffuse and seemingly discordant treatment of subject matter, and deliberate ruses are employed to accommodate both halakhic legal constraints on the overt teaching of physics and metaphysics and the wide intellectual disparity of his potential readers. The sensitive nature of the topics to be explored demands an unorthodox pedagogy that both illuminates and conceals, allowing entrance to the qualified few while excluding those who cannot cope with the intellectual rigors involved. Rabbinic stricture prohibits revealing anything more of the Account of the Chariot (metaphysics) than chapter headings, and therefore Maimonides cautions, “my purpose is that the truths be glimpsed and then again be concealed so as not to oppose that divine purpose which has concealed from the vulgar among the people those truths requisite for His apprehension.”

Toward an integration of behavioural and cognitive psychologies through instructional technology

<span>The schism between operant behavioural and cognitive psychological views is examined with the aim of showing the potentials for their convergence when an instructional perspective is taken. As Lee (1988) points out, part of the problem lies in operant psychologists' use of stimulus-response language when they are really talking about condition-action sequences or means-to-ends. The inaccurate presentation of the operant position by cognitive psychologists is also part of the problem, and for the most part, neither reads the other's literature. With better communication, these problems could be overcome, although underlying philosophies of science might still differ.</span><p>An overtised-operant view of instruction on cognitive processes provides a further basis for closing the schism. Building from the behavioural processes of discrimination learning, chaining, verbal learning, etc., more complex cognitive structures can be described in terms of the more elemental structures from which they are built. Engelmann and Carnine's (1982) theory of instruction provides a key (through overt teaching strategies) in bridging the gap between basic operant principles and higher cognitive structures.</p><p>Operant psychology based interpretations of the changes that occur from being a novice to being an expert also are discussed to demonstrate additional commonalities between behavioural and cognitive positions.</p>

Designing agribusiness capstone courses: Overt and covert teaching strategies

An agribusiness capstone course offers the opportunity to integrate previous courses in finance, marketing, and other functional areas. In addition to the stated (overt) objectives of coursework integration and new material in strategic management, the capstone course allows for building interpersonal and communication skills through a covert agenda. The covert agenda is not explicit in the syllabus, but is an integral part of a well-defined set of learning objectives.

Evaluating effectiveness in teacher education

The conceptualization of teacher education as a socialization process focuses attention on the more covert aspects of professional development, such as self‐esteem and confidence, which are inextricably linked with overt teaching behavior. This suggests a novel approach to evaluation ‐ that of measuring shifts in student teacher professional self‐perception. Such was the approach used to evaluate the effectiveness of a one‐semester course on teaching taken by second‐year students in a three‐year primary teacher education program. The Coulter/Elsworth (1977) semantic differential instrument was used to measure self‐perception and results differentiated for high, middle and low achievers. It proved valuable for monitoring course effectiveness and suggesting directions for course modification so as to strengthen professional self‐competence and meet student concern for relevancy.

The rules of language

We all share some basic information about our native language but we are not conscious of ever having learned or worked out the principles involved. For example, we “know” upon hearing them that certain sound sequences could not be words in our language although we have never been taught the principles that govern English word structure. In addition, we possess information about language which could not plausibly be attributed to learning. This unlearned knowledge as well as the knowledge acquired without overt teaching is attributed to innate mechanisms-the consequence of the genetic endowment that differentiates between humans and other species.

Hospital ward routine--friend or foe?

SUMMARYThe author examines the traditional model of nursing, which is dominated by hierarchy and routine, and concludes that it is an industrial rather than a professional model. It is a model which has developed to cope with the unique problems faced by nurses, but it appears to satisfy the needs of doctors rather than the individual needs of either patients or learners. Drawing on the results of a two‐stage research study of the ward learning environment conducted in wards of two general hospitals, the author suggests that the traditional model of nursing contributes to an automatic job performance and inhibits a spirit of enquiry, particularly during routine work. Changes to a professional model, which restore the patient to the centre of the nursing process, are advocated as a means of linking nursing theory with practice and detecting individual needs which fall outside the routine.In this paper selected findings from a two‐stage research study of the ward learning environment (Fretwell 1978) are discussed. Field work was carried out in two general hospitals and a unit in a third hospital, during 1975 and 1976. Methods and techniques were piloted with staff and learners in a large general hospital.The first stage was a ranking study in which 87 learners completed 327 rating questionnaires in respect of 14 training wards in which they had previously worked. In the second stage, observations were carried out in three pairs of high and low ranked wards from three specialities. Learners were interviewed about 571 observed activities in order to identify teaching and learning occurring under changing circumstances. By combining observations with interviews it was possible to identify covert as well as overt teaching and to ascertain how learners perceived a variety of ward activities.The findings can only be generalized to the wards that were studied but it may be that there is a ‘ring of truth’ in the descriptions that makes them recognizable in other places. Drawing on a search of the literature on nurse education, nursing over many decades, and on medical sociology, it is proposed to consider one or two themes in a wider context.