英語教育における流暢さと即興力の育成 ── 中学生の話すことにおける意識の一考察 ──

The major goals of this study are to examine junior high school students’ awareness of fluency and impromptu skill in terms of speaking in English as a Foreign Language (hereafter, EFL) and to consider what to do, by way of future research and creation of daily lessons, in order to raise awareness and to develop their practical speaking abilities.　Recent Japanese EFL education (see MEXT 2017a-e) emphasizes that developing learners’ fluency and impromptu skill is particularly important.　This is because traditional Japanese EFL education has focused on acquisition of grammar, drawing learners’ attention to individual forms rather than to meaning.　Problematic outcomes of such an approach are tendencies for learners to comprehend texts/utterances in a heavy bottom-up manner and to refrain from speaking/writing without confirming that what they are about to say/write is grammatically correct.　In this study, 419 junior high school students in 1st to 3rd grades responded to a short paper-and-pencil questionnaire that examined their awareness of fluency and impromptu skill in EFL speaking.　Results of analyses showed a significant difference in awareness of impromptu skill between 1st and 2nd grades and between 1st and 3rd grades, whereas no significant differences were found in awareness of fluency between these three grades.　Moreover, results of analyses showed no correlation between 1st graders’ mid-term/ final exam scores and their awareness of fluency/impromptu skill, but showed a correlation between 2nd graders’ final exam scores and their awareness of fluency and between 2nd graders’ final exam scores and their awareness of impromptu skill.　Based on this and other information obtained in the study, we consider issues for future research and creation of classroom activities that develop fluency and impromptu skill in Japanese EFL education

Review of Young Meaning Makers Teaching Comprehension, Grades K-2

The Common Core Curriculum State Standards for teaching literature and informational texts provide a clear understanding of what students are expected to learn during comprehension instruction. Young Meaning Makers Teaching Comprehension, Grade K-2 (2016), written by D. Ray Reutzel, Sarah K. Clark, Cindy D. Jones, and Sandra L. Gillam is a useful text for understanding theoretical and practical components of text comprehension. The authors provide a framework, language facilitation techniques, model lessons, and assessment types ranging at different levels of comprehension processing. This book empowers educators to create a learning community immersed in conversation surrounding literature in ways that bring texts to life for our students

What Academic Grades Mean to Seventh Grade Students

This study explores how seventh grade students in an urban school district make meaning for their teacher-assigned report card grades. A great deal of research has been done on report card grades from the perspective of teachers and administrators, but few studies have examined what teacher-assigned grades mean to middle school students. This qualitative study attempts to develop an understanding of the meanings attributed to teacher-assigned grades by 56 seventh grade English Language Arts (ELA) students in an urban middle school in Massachusetts. Three major research questions were addressed: 1) How do 56 seventh-grade English Language Arts students in an urban middle school make meaning of their teacher-assigned grades? 2) What do 56 seventh grade ELA students in an urban middle school believe about their control over teacher assigned grades? 3) What evidence, if any, can be found supporting a relationship between attribution for success or failure and the academic performance of these students? A set of students was observed receiving third quarter report cards. Then 56 students responded to a prompt asking them what they thought their report card grade would be and why they thought that. Two focus groups of students were recruited from the 56 students and were asked to respond to vignettes describing various scenarios relating to hypothetical students and grades. Analysis of data revealed patterns of attributions. The most frequent attributions were to work completed or not completed, behavior, and compliance. Students did not attribute grades to mastery of skills and content. Recommendations for future research include more investigation of this topic through the lens of critical social theory to determine the effects of systemic acculturation, power dynamics, effects of hidden curriculum, and individual teacher bias on how students understand or fail to understand the relationship between their mastery of skills and content and their teacher-assigned grades

UMaine Study Examines Dilemma of Weighted Grades

The value assigned to an “A” varies in high schools throughout Maine and nationally, and as college admissions and scholarships based on class rank raise the stakes, administrators are scrambling to devise rigorous, equitable grading systems. About half the nation\u27s school systems assign weighted grades, allowing more points for high grades in Advanced Placement or other accelerated courses than for the same grades in less demanding classes, according to a new study from the University of Maine. But with no state or national standards to guide high schools that weight grades or to clarify their meaning to college admissions officers, school systems are facing potential legal consequences as well as increasing pressure from parents and students

PERFORMANCE GRADES AS MEASURES OF ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT

Prior research exposes some long-held concerns about the grades teachers assign and what those grades mean (e.g., Starch, 1913; Steele, 1911). Despite an increased effort to improve assessment at the classroom level (e.g., Popham, 2009; Stiggins, 2001), many of the same concerns about the meaning of grades mentioned in earlier research continue to persist. Although previous research has examined relationships between students’ grades and standardized assessment scores (e.g., Brennan, Kim, Wenz-Gross & Siperstein, 2001; Ross & Kostuch, 2011), the relationship between grades and what teachers expect students to score on standardized assessments has not been examined. This study links students’ grades to both a teacher-expected EOG/EOC (end-of-grade and end-of-course) achievement level, and an actual EOG/EOC achievement level. Three years of data linking students’ performance grades, standardized assessment scores, and teacher-expected standardized assessment scores were examined. While correlations between students’ performance grades and standardized assessment scores were similar to those found in prior studies with respect to students’ ethnicity and gender, relationships between those two measures of student achievement and the marks reporting teacher-expected standardized assessment scores indicated that teachers underestimated differences between the performance grades they assigned to students and those students’ actual standardized assessment scores

The Elephants Evaluate: Some Notes on the Problem of Grades in Graduate Creative Writing Programs

This article takes up the special strangeness of grading practices in the graduate creative writing workshop, based on the author\u27s research, personal experience, and interviews with the faculty of her doctoral creative writing program. Using a structure of notes, the author attempts to make sense of the way grades are understood by both teacher and student at the post-secondary level. First, she considers why the formal evaluation of creative writing continues to be defined by a system of grades, despite the perceived failure of grades to represent the value of such work, and despite educators\u27 historic and ongoing attempts at reforming the system. And secondly, she explores the many resulting disconnects: between the neat collapse of meaning in a grade and the very pluralistic, collaborative arrival at meaning in a graduate workshop; between the creative writing teacher\u27s tendency for grade inflation and the literary market\u27s stark one percent publication rate; and between the mentor\u27s fraught roles as both a critic/evaluator and friend to the creative writing graduate student

The role of Chinese vocabulary knowledge in composition writing among upper elementary school students

The present study aims to investigate the role of vocabulary knowledge in composition writing among Chinese children. Drawing on Nation’s (2001) vocabulary framework, this study operationalized Chinese vocabulary knowledge from receptive and productive perspectives and in form, meaning, and use domain, respectively. A total of five measures assessing receptive vocabulary knowledge, productive vocabulary knowledge (form, meaning, and use), and composition writing skills were administered to 249 Chinese students in grade 4 (N = 91), grade 5 (N = 90), and grade 6 (N = 68). Hierarchical regression results showed that across upper elementary grades, productive vocabulary knowledge made a significant and substantial contribution to Chinese writing performance after controlling for age and receptive vocabulary knowledge. Inspections on vocabulary knowledge in each individual domain further revealed that knowledge of vocabulary form was the strongest predictor of writing performance at grade 4, while knowledge of vocabulary meaning and use make increasing contributions to composition writing at higher grades. Findings from this study underline the relative importance of productive vocabulary knowledge in form, meaning, and use at different developmental stages and extend writing models to non-alphabetical languages. Pedagogical implications were also drawn from the present study to inform better educational practices on scaffolding beginning writers with specific aspects of vocabulary knowledge

Grades Five and Six Students’ Representation of Meaning in Collaborative Wiki Writing

This paper examined grades 5 and 6 students’ participation in wikis while writing reports on social studies topics. An analysis of eight wikis showed that students represented meanings they had constructed about their topics by engaging in knowledge telling practices (e.g., introducing, stating, or repeating information or an idea and developing previous ideas with examples, statistics or other information) more frequently than they engaged in knowledge transforming processes, such as drawing conclusions, identifying cause-effect relationships, or making inferences or judgements. Our research shows that Bereiter and Scardamalia’s model (1987) is useful to inform the development of tools for assessing students’ demonstration of their understanding of concepts in content area writing

A study of the variety of meanings given to a list of three hundred multi-meaning words by children in grades four, five and six.

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit