School: Modern Languages
Unit: MODL20021 Introduction to Language Teaching and Learning
This is an optional second-year unit that has filled an important vocational gap in the languages UG curriculum at Bristol. With many of the students opting to become a language assistant in their compulsory Year Abroad and many also thinking about a career in language teaching, this unit introduces students to fundamental principles of language teaching practice. The curriculum and assessment focused around two themes: the reflective teaching practitioner and the lesson plan. Reflection in teaching and learning is an essential step in teaching and has been found to engage students personally in the discipline, and the lesson plan is the tangible, practical outcome of teaching theory. The lesson plan is also a key element in of the Department for Education’s “Teachers Standards” for teaching where it explicitly states the importance of planning and teaching well-structured lessons and the requirement systematic reflection on the effectiveness of lessons and approaches to teaching . This natural cycle of plan – action – reflection is the foundation of the module assessment and PGCE or QTS training. By successfully completing the unit, our students are therefore prepared for the next step should they opt for this career path.
Class activities/formative assessment
The course comprises a series of seminars, where students engage with basic pedagogical theory in a flipped format and apply the theory to real-life scenarios presented with in class. These exercises directly influence the planning process for their own peer teaching session, where they applied what they have learned by creating a 15-minute beginners’ language lesson in pairs and then teach it to their peers. After the session, both peers and teacher provide feedback to the ‘teachers’ through a classroom observation form. Planning and teaching these sessions together are the formative assessment of the unit. When devising the unit we wanted to make sure that the students would have a safe space in which to try out ideas and be creative, take risks and experience the role of teacher in a classroom as authentically as possible, which means they also needed the room to potential have a lesson not go to plan without any (perceived) detriment to their final unit mark.
The formative assessment is however necessary part of the course as the summative assessment hinges on it. Without taking part in the lesson planning and teaching exercise, students won’t have anything to reflect on. The formative assessment is deeply embedded in the entire course and assessment strategy of the module. This aligns closely with the assessment and feedback principles of the University of Bristol.
Finally, the course includes a series of seminars and exercises to train the students how to write reflective portfolios.
Summative assessment
The summative assessment for this unit is a reflective portfolio based on the teaching session and includes the materials that students have produced for the session as well as an analysis of the feedback given and reflection on how to improve their lesson plan. It is the final step in the “plan – act – reflect” loop. Here students get the chance to critically re-evaluate their own plan and execution. They are asked to identify potential issues in the original plan or the classroom interaction, suggest alternatives and justify their choices. The summative assessment checks their knowledge of language teaching theory as well as their ability to apply it to an authentic scenario, and it also requires them to critically self-evaluate their own actions and choices within the teaching scenario. It goes therefore beyond a simply recall of facts but is designed to enable further growth and a deeper understanding of the realities of the teaching profession.
Feedback
Students receive different types of feedback throughout the unit:
- During the first part of the unit: on homework tasks and discussions in plenary.
- In the weeks before the teaching session: specific sessions to help them prepare their lesson plan, including one with individual consultations with staff from the different languages on offer to give feedback on the group lesson plan for the short teaching sequence.
- During the teaching session: written classroom observation forms from peers and teacher.
- After the teaching session: specific sessions on reflective writing using extracts from the students’ draft assessed portfolio in plenary.
The Impact
From the beginning, the unit has been very popular, even oversubscribed, for its optional size of 24 students. From the teachers’ perspective, the integration of the formative teaching session with the summative reflective report has resulted in very high engagement with the unit, seen in very high levels of attendance and student satisfaction and very low levels of student disengagement, which usually takes the form of exceptional circumstances. There has been no evidence of academic misconduct either, as the summative assessment is based on a personal experience. As the teaching sequence is formative, we have also experienced fewer mental health related issues. Students know it is summative and if it doesn’t go to plan, they can reflect on the reasons in their personal portfolios., If all goes exactly to plan, they can reflect on the excellent work that they have done to create the perfect lesson, instead. And they don’t teach alone, so they can divide the tasks in the sequence to align with strengths. All in all, the assessment design has motivated students to engage with the unit meaningfully and positively.
Year after year, students highlight many positive aspects in their BLUE feedback: the application of theoretical concepts to real-life scenarios, the development of a wide range of transferable skills in the process of planning the lesson and teaching it, how they can apply the notion of the reflective cycle to other disciplines, the collaborative nature of the teaching and the assessment and the positive environment to learn. Many have remarked on the positive collaboration between the teachers, a benefit of a team-taught unit with a small teaching team that has the luxury of occasionally teaching select sessions as a team. Some students mention how this unit has “opened their eyes” to what teachers do and has given them another perspective on their university experience.
The internal moderator and external examiners have also remarked on the wide range of tools and skills that students develop. Finally, many of these students go on and take our final-year unit on theories of language teaching and learning.
We have realised that part of the success in this unit as it stands is its relatively small size: the peer teaching takes around five additional hours on top of scheduled teaching hours for both teachers. As such, scaling this unit up would involve considering this additional workload.
Next Steps
We have developed resources on reflective writing and integrating formative and summative assessment, which we are happy to share if you are interested. We would like to research this unit’s impact on students who have taken it and gone on to become language teachers.
Contact
Please contact Marga Menendez-Lopez, at m.menendez-lopez@bristol.ac.uk or Mandy Q Poetzsch, at mandy.poetzsch@bristol.ac.uk, for any more information about this assessment.
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