This is the third in my series of reflections on whether or not I'm truly promoting communication in all 3 modes in my classroom (click here for my reflection on the interpretive mode and here for my reflection on the interpersonal mode). Last year, I was asked by MaFLA to do a presentation on the presentational mode as we got ready to teach online, hybrid or whatever else happened in between. In the midst of creating this presentation, it dawned upon me that a lot of what I had been doing in my classroom in terms of 'presentational writing' was more just writing practice and not actually presentational. There were plenty of opportunities where we practiced writing and students felt that they were doing a lot of writing in class, but the reality was that we weren't presentationally writing or, should I say, we weren't communicating in the presentational mode. ACTFL has their explanation of what the presentational mode means in their Performance Descriptors for Language Learners. When we take a closer look at this excerpt from the ACTFL Performance Descriptors for Language Learners we see that there are 4 key components of what makes a task truly presentational communication. The first talks about the creation of messages and then gives us reasons why they are writing. This isn't just writing so that we are able to use the past tense to say what we did last week or write a paragraph using the new vocabulary words. There are key functions which provide us with a reason as to why we are writing. In the document they provide us with options like inform, explain, persuade or narrate and these remind me very much of Laura Terrill and Donna Clementi's Key Language Functions. That chart is from a presentation I did and the information comes directly from Clementi and Terrill's book They Keys To Planning for Learning. So when we think about creating tasks where students are writing, are we just having them practice the vocabulary or grammar? Or are we asking them to communicate with a purpose such as describing their favorite vacation they ever took, expressing their feelings about returning to school, giving their opinion about an environmental issue, retelling a story of something funny that happened last week or expressing their dreams for after graduation. Those all have a communicative purpose behind them. The second are that ACTFL mentions is that it is one-way communication. I feel that this is an area where we understand that our writing tasks don't involve the negotiation of meaning of the back/forth communication of an interpersonal exchange. What's interesting is that there is a mention of understanding the culture of the targeted audience which relates nicely to the third point mentioned in the document. There needs to be some kind of knowledge about the audience of the message which implies that there is an audience. While not every presentational writing task is a letter to someone, there should always be some kind of intended audience to whom our students are writing. Even if that is to write to their partner, write to a fictitious person, write something to publish to their blog, etc. This audience allows for true personalization of their message. For so long, I had students writing to me when they did 'presentational' writing tasks. As much as they may or may not like me, I'm not the best person to be writing to. We already know each other and the way you write to a teacher is different than how you would write to a friend, a person you've never met before, a famous person, someone you admire, someone you dislike, etc. I've found that this has been the biggest shift in how I write tasks and I've yielded awesome results from it. I've seen students write such personal messages that are intended for different people and I see them using language that they wouldn't have necessarily used if they had just been writing to me. For example, if they are writing to persuade someone of something, I'll see them talk directly to the person and sometimes invent drama or information about the person they're writing to and it's more fun for them and more fun for me as the person reading. The ultimate goal would be to have students ACTUALLY writing to someone such as an e-pal or a classroom in a different country. I'll admit that this intrigues me but the little details of pulling that off still intimidate me. If this interests you, here is a like to my colleague Rebecca Blouwolff's blog where she goes into more detail about this very concept. The last part just talks about the different mediums which we can use for presentational communication. It doesn't always have to be a paragraph on a lined piece of paper. It can be a published blog that students create, a presentation that students make on Google Slides or PowerPoint, it can be a series of Tweets, etc. There are tons of different creative ways that students can communicate presentationally that go beyond writing a paragraph. A quick note on presentational speaking because that may be something you notice is lacking from this blog post.
When it comes to ranking the different modes of communication, presentational does come last in my book in terms of connection to real-world context. And while writing and speaking are both part of the mode, I think of presentational speaking as something that students won't do very often outside of the context of the classroom. I can think of a few situations when kids would need to stand up and give a presentation or record a video/audio of themselves (one of which being a voicemail and they don't particularly care for those right now haha). So while this blog post is about presentational writing, the concept is easily applicable to presentational speaking. I do some presentational speaking in my classes but I find that writing gets me more milage with my kids' language production.
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