This presentation reports findings from 2 action research studies (in Japan and Sweden) that introduced scaffolded notetaking instruction in one-way (i.e., lecture) listening. The presentation describes the notetaking instruction, discusses research findings, and uses examples of student work to illustrate changes in notetaking behaviour stimulated by the instruction.
Reading English as a foreign language in Israel is very challenging for deaf children. A major cause of their reading problems is their inadequate syntactic knowledge of English. A recent study has shown that even when all the words in short and simple written sentences were properly recognized, deaf readers in junior high, high school and college found it hard to detect the syntactic relationships between the words and consequently to comprehend them. The rationale of the teaching methodology is based on the three building blocks of a simple clause – the noun phrase (NP), verb phrase (VP) and prepositional phrase (PP). The method raises deaf students’ awareness of these crucial elements, and then turns the knowledge into a skill through multiple and variable practice activities. When the basic sentence constructs are familiar to the learners, the entire syntactic system can be gradually expanded around them. The method starts off with the parsing of simple SVO clauses. Further analysis and synthesis expand them into more complex constructions. The progression of the method is guided by the learners’ communicative needs and by the principles of cognitive complexity, input frequency, and teachability. For example, we introduce simple NPs as a way to point to/ identify specific referents. At the presence of competing referents, their identification can be facilitated by incorporating adjectives or prepositional phrases into the already familiar NP slot. The method is carried out using a variety of visual and interactive means, such as consistent color-coding, visual incorporation, enactment, interactive manipulation of building blocks and others. As a result, students acquire ability to manipulate and expand all the basic elements of a sentence by integrating adjectives and adverbs. Ultimately, they reach the level of complex and subordinate constructions, as well as coherent texts.
