Personal Blogs

Considering the phases of educational growth and response to academic demands

Studying E845 on ‘Language in Action’ can be an unnerving thing even at my age. I find myself reflecting on very basic issues of learning, teaching and assessment (especially incremental course work assessment - the OU’s TMA system).

The Problem

In E845 a lot of ground has to be covered on the learning journey:

1.  understanding of the possible relationships between theory and practice in applied linguistics;
   
2. he fundamentals of conventional taxonomy of language as spoken and written – phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, pragmatics. 
   
3. The fundamentals of Halliday’s Systemic Functional Analysis method and its later developments into practical applied use; 
   
4. The fundamentals of Critical Discourse Analysis as a means of hybridising the discourses in 1 – 3 inclusively; 
   
5. Ethnography as a disciplinary alternative to 4.
   

So much of the potential in working on a project and perhaps a later Master’s dissertation relies however on completing this journey. However, the module deals with its abundance of material and alternative analytic perspectives by PHASING them, one after the other and testing (summatively) each as it ends. 

This is in micro the job of the educational project of child education seen as an induction through phases of material. The phases are organised by virtue of the level of cognitive readiness assumed to be ready to receive it. In macro (and related strictly to child developmental matters), this explains the role of Bloom’s taxonomy as a means of phasing the tasks that equate with intellectual , cultural and personal development and growth.

In E845, questions raised in (1) about the role of corpora in critical thinking about language only really get addressed practically in the Study Guide in Section 5. Likewise early rabbits set running around the theme of hybridity in (1) – Kramsch, O’Halloran - are interpreted sufficiently only in the ,light of material also in Section 5 – where different uses of the concept are juxtaposed – Coffin and O’Halloran on critical readings of media and Fairclough on Thatcherism respectively.

This is where I am currently in the module – so I don’t yet know how the Ethnography section might further stir the pot. But one discovery stuns me.

I struggled with TMA04 because it demanded, or appeared to do from my working analysis of it, a perspective on the task that was relatively naïve about SFL’s role as a critical tool in linguistics – one that only got made more complex in the section following TMA04. Now, as I re-read the Study Guide, I see that I was supposed to read the early parts of the CDA section of the materials, containing a more complex take on SFL whilst working on TMA04. I didn’t because I thought that would create too many demands at the same time.

Hence TMA04 was experienced by me largely as an expression of my tensions with what I believed to be assumptions of the task given. To me, the task personalised ‘problems’, focussing on the set text writer's ‘problems’ as a writer. Personally I saw the problems in terms of instabilities in the social situation and culture that set the task up for the writer in the first place. Had I read the material in (4) I think I would have been ready to cope with that, I think, and not be as suspicious of what felt to me (at that time) double-standards in the course.

These confusions were expressions I believe now of the contradictory experience brought about by phased learning in conjunction with continuous summative assessment. What I can’t decide is whether these are inevitable to any pedagogic schedule or not. Clearly the idiom about ‘not running before you can walk’ applies here. One needed to see at the outset some of the range of SFL without over-playing its use in rigorous critical social analysis. But I wonder how fair it is to make summative assessment exercises out of such interim understandings.

For me, this illustrates the shortcoming of continuous assessment, especially at Master’s level when the pace and quantity of learning has to be fast. Summative assessment during a period of formative growth is bound to confuse. It enforces a need to linger at the level of interim understandings. Had interim understandings been assessed equally thoroughly but formatively – with feedback systems still there – it is possible that that halting of process of growth would be less jarring on the uneven paces of synaptic growth they probably get represented by in biological terms.

These reflections are in no way an attempt to critique E845 because I realise now it does a difficult job well but it is meant as a critique of the concentration on continuous assessment as a summative measure of achievement. Surely there is a better way? I look back now to the 1970s when no HE, or little involved much summative continuous assessment but concentrated all that on an end-process. That had its problems of course, but I do remember that we all did formative essays – precisely to learn from feedback and not just institutional feedback, that that came from the felt expansion of our repertoire of knowledge and skills often across difficult and resistant thresholds. Much of the most painful learning was feeling my ideas obstructed as I worked on an idea as if it mattered rather than to meet external criteria.

One possible solution is to also set assessment tasks as a role-play in which the perameters of the enquiry are set by a work role or something of that nature. 'Your task is to instruct the Spanish speaker of English here to write a better film-review' perhaps. Something totally unambiguous and not demanding an account of a set-text per se.

Is that anywhere near as possible when so much of continuous assessment is focused on formal matters – and where ‘teachable’ issues like structure, referencing and so on (the stuff of convention) often take precedence in the mind of learners to developing critical thinking? 

If that is so (and I hope it is not) it is because a generation of teachers (like myself) have laid the groundwork for it in our dislike of end-of-term exams and I wonder now if we are exactly right!

In brief – phases in learning can become places to stop (perhaps forever) if the meaning of a ‘phase’ is not stressed as ‘moving on beyond that phase’ rather than ‘proving your attainment in each and every phase by lingering, like an unsatisfied ghost, within it’.

Steve