Tasmanian Association of Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages

2023 Forums

Term 1

Emily Morgan– Joint Construction and Guided Instruction: Benefits for Tertiary English Language Learners

The Teaching/Learning Cycle and the Gradual Release of Responsibility teaching model have both been used regularly in primary classrooms with young learners, and their effects have been studied. While not all researchers support the use of these teaching models, the general consensus is that they provide a strong scaffold for teaching a wide variety of subjects, most particularly English. These teaching models have not yet been widely studied in the contexts of older learners or English as a foreign language. In my PhD research, I used the Gradual Release of Responsibility model to teach Japanese university students different English writing genres. In this talk, I will focus on my observations of the Joint Construction/Guided Instruction stage.

In this stage, students work as a whole class with the facilitation of the teacher to jointly construct texts or fragments of texts. This stage occurs after direct instruction and before pair or group work, as an intermediary opportunity to pool knowledge and consolidate understanding of the concepts before the teacher steps further away. One of the problems identified early on was students’ unwillingness to contribute, which at first seemed insurmountable. Ultimately, though, through persistence and adaptation, I found that the activities offered strong benefits to students and teacher, making it worth persevering with.

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