Towards Systematic and Sustained Formative Assessment of Causal Explanations in Oral Interactions

The questions and answers in the above exchanges are common occurrences in classroom discourse: requests by the teacher for causal explanations and efforts by the students to give them. To succeed in school, students need to be able to explain causally, and teachers need to be able to assess these explanations. Students’ causal explanations allow teachers to check understandings of how and why; thus, examining the development of this type of discourse has the potential to provide a framework for formative assessment that can promote learning. Researchers and educators working from a systemic functional linguistic perspective have provided a body of work on causal discourse in science, offering an excellent starting point for examining the development of causal explanations in that subject area. Much of the work that has been undertaken has generally focused on texts written by expert writers (e.g., Mohan et al., 2002 ; Veel, 1997), such as textbooks and encyclopedias

Integrating Language, Content, Technology, and Skills Development through Project-based Language Learning: Blending Frameworks for Successful Unit Planning

In this article, the authors first summarize the literature on project-based language learning (PBLL), a sound approach to second language teaching, addressing its various benefits such as providing opportunities to develop language authentically in real-world contexts, building decision-making and problem-solving skills, and developing content knowledge. In acknowledging reports that have also suggested that students can struggle to see how language is being developed through PBLL, the authors then argue that by looking at a project as a social practice, educators can demonstrate how language, content, and 21st century skills can be taught as an integrated whole through PBLL. They describe two existing frameworks, Mohan’s (1986) knowledge framework and Beckett and Slater’s (2005) Project Framework, and illustrate how these can be combined to create unit plans that explicitly integrate language, content, skills, and technology. To illustrate the blending of the two frameworks, the authors present a unit plan that targets the content area of applying for American graduate schools. This unit plan offers eleven lessons that include teaching sequences, tasks, and learning objectives for the content, language, academic skills, and technological understandings that the unit comprises. The authors also detail how the combination of the frameworks led to the creation of the various lessons so that this process can be used as a model for creating future relevant unit plans