For the on-line (SPA 117) course, students are required to submit a video recording of a role-playing situation for each of the course modules. In the video recording students use the target language in order to complete meaningful tasks they will counter in the real world as health care professionals. These task based role playing activities will assess verbal and nonverbal communication skills, mostly the students’ grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary, and speaking capacities learned in each module. I will analyze the effectiveness of contextualized use of the target language for real communicative purposes. I will explore students’ production of the language in more controlled and contextualized settings vs in less controlled and contextualized settings. For example, in Module 1 students are given 1 “situation” for the mini-plot they are required to act out. In Module 3 students are given 2 “situation” for the mini-plot they are required to act out. Was language acquisition jeopardized in a broader and less controlled but more contextualized environment? See attached situations.
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| health-care-spanish-real-life-situations.docx | 14.05 KB |
Comments
This sounds very interesting! I wonder, will you also have students review their videos after the fact and discuss their strengths and areas to grow? In a teaching class I took once, part of our grade was reviewing a microteach with our instructor one-on-one to give and receive feedback on our teaching, you could do something similar here. This seems like an excellent way to give students a great real-world scenario from which to learn and grow.
Love the contextualization of both the "situations" and the students seeing themselves speak in those situations. Will the students also self-crituque or peer critique?
Great idea.
Hi Trino - I just wanted to follow up on this and see how things are going. I hope your implementation of this activity this semester is going well.
After analyzing the results of Module 1 where students only had one situation choice as oppose to Module 3 where students had two situations to choose from, I found there was no difference in the completion or success rate. This leads me to believe that students who are enroll in this class are already interested in the healthcare area and the class itself is already contextualized for them. Further contextualization by providing more situations for the video recording of a role-playing situation does not seem necessary. All students are able to view a rubric of how the video situation is assess and receive feedback with specific breakdown of areas to improve i.e. comprehension-pronunciation, fluency, vocabulary use and word structure and word agreement. I opted to forgo the use of peer critique because the language levels of the students are quire diverse. Some are native speakers and some are novice-level speakers. I wanted to avoid intimidation of the novice-level speakers. I have enjoyed assessing their videos particularly when the students see themselves in their future careers and introduced themselves in the videos as “Doctor Sanchez, Doctor Smith, Nurse Dees,” etc.
Great job, Trino. I'd be curious to see the novice-level speakers play the doctor/nurse and the fluent/native speakers play the patient in a recorded scenario. Do you think that would assit the novice speakers with termonology acquisition quicker?