Contents introduction chapter I. Personalized Learning: Language teaching strategies. Tips for language

CHAPTER II.
Role of personalization in learning and speaking.
2.1. Personalized learning
Over the past couple years, the collection and use of student data has become increasingly controversial. The potential for data-driven learning analytics to improve student learning competes with concerns about safeguarding student privacy. As of January 2016, 188 student data privacy bills had been introduced nationwide. Yet, while the use of student data has been a focus of discussion and critique, the promise of personalized learning remains mostly unchallenged.
Key questions explored in this primer include: what, exactly the rhetoric surrounding personalized learning is promising, and why? Can an analysis show whether this technology is delivering what it promises? And what other concerns, absent from the discourse, do we need to be most attendant to when the educational sphere imports a framework of data collection from the world of start-ups and tech giants? This primer presents a typology of personalized learning systems that draws from media coverage, research, interviews, and informal discussions.
What is Personalized Learning?
Descriptions of personalized learning encompass such a broad range of possibilities—from customized interfaces to adaptive tutors, from student-centered classrooms to learning management systems—that expectations run high for their potential to revolutionize learning. Less clear from these descriptions are what personalized learning systems actually offer and whether they improve the learning experiences and outcomes for students. In this section, the boundaries of personalized learning–what it is and what it isn’t—are explored.

It is no wonder that personalized learning is a popular buzzword symbolizing the potential for data use in education. Its definitional reach is broad, borrowing terms, like ‘student-centered instruction’ or ‘instruction tailored to individual student needs’ that traditionally describe strong teaching practice, to include under its ever-expanding umbrella. Technology-enabled personalized learning describes varying degrees of tailoring or customization of a learning experience through apps and/or platforms. And yet, there are no established standards for describing or evaluating the extent to which a learning experience is personalized, and often the difference between responsiveness and adaptiveness is not accounted for in product descriptions. Independent evaluations of the level of personalization or its efficacy in improving learning outcomes are rare.

The promise of personalized learning is often bundled within competency-based education and/or Common Core, making it difficult to separate the performance of one from the other, or truly distinguish personalized learning from associated assessments or teaching of competencies. At the same time, the controversies surrounding Common Core and competency-based education also tend to shape impressions of personalized learning.

There is tremendous ambiguity surrounding the possible definitions of personalized learning. With this in mind, the above typology of technologically-enabled personalized learning systems provides a clearer spectrum of possibilities described by personalized learning as a product. Technologyenabled personalized learning can range from simple customization of a learning interface to a system that adapts content delivery depending upon user performance. These systems can be grouped into five categories that increase in responsiveness:

• Customized learning interface: Invites student to personalize learning experience by selecting colors and avatars, or uses interest, age or geographic indicators to tailor the interface.

o For example, in Cloud Math, students may select between a cloud, sun, balloon or
soccer ball as their avatar as they move through math-based games.
o Modifying an interface to reflect personal tastes has been shown to increase student interest, but falls short of the tailored learning experience promised by personalized learning.

• Learning management: Platforms that automate a range of classroom management tasks,

for example Blackboard, Class Dojo, Canvas, and Schoology.
o For teachers, this can include managing attendance, grades, and assignment
records, and maintaining communication with parents.
o In higher education, learning management platforms range from enabling students to select courses that suit schedules and instructional needs to providing all supplemental support for a given course, including readings, assignments, grades, and contact with teachers and peers.
o Rather than tailoring particular content based on student competencies, these systems serve more of a tracking and organizing role.

• Data-driven learning: A majority of platforms described as ‘adaptive’ fall into this category of efficient management systems that provide materials appropriate to a students’ proficiency level. Generally, students complete proficiency assessments to determine instructional needs. These assessments (referred to as ‘adaptive’ or ‘personalized’) are a cornerstone of technologically-enabled personalized learning, with advocates asserting that personalized testing can pinpoint recommendations for individualized instructional focus.

• Adaptive learning: Data-driven learning that potentially moves beyond a pre-determined decision tree and uses machine learning to adapt to a students’ behaviors and competency.

o While not verified by independent research or evaluation, SmartSparrow and Knewton claim to provide adaptive platforms.

• Intelligent tutor: Instead of providing answers and modular guidance, inspires questions,

interacts conversationally and has enough options to move beyond a limited decision tree.
o Uses facial recognition to respond to emotions such as frustration or interest, feels more social than automated.
o Extends past the realm of assistant and becomes a proactive learning guide.
o This level is more promise than reality, but the Cognitive Tutor from Carnegie Learning and AutoTutor seem promising prototypes.

2.2. Personalized Speaking

People spend a huge chunk of their everyday conversation time talking about themselves and the people they know, so the most natural thing in the world is for us to invite our students to do the same.

What our students bring to the learning environment is our richest resource. But if the lives they lead are to be at the centre of the courses we teach, are we guaranteed that students will talk freely and be interested in what their fellow classmates tell them? The answer is no. So what are some of the main challenges we face when doing personalised speaking activities and how can these challenges be met?

Two main challenges

Meeting these challenges
Teacher modelling
Visualisation
Setting peer listening tasks
Sharing classmates’ real-life experiences
Example activity
Conclusion
Two main challenges

Firstly, students might lack confidence in their ability to tell an anecdote, describe their feelings or confidently give their views in their mother tongue, let alone in English: 'I don’t know what to say or how to say it.'

Secondly, classes are made up of students who are thrown together by circumstance. They do not choose their classmates and they would not all mix socially if they met outside the class: 'I don’t have much in common with that student so why should I listen to her?'

Meeting these challenges

In the classroom our challenge is to create a world in which it feels comfortable and at the same time stimulating for students to talk about themselves and really listen to each other. One way to achieve this is by making use of some simple techniques, which help to bring students’ outside worlds alive in the classroom. The following four techniques are illustrated in the activity ‘Show me your shoes’ as described below.

Teacher modelling

This involves the students observing their teacher doing an achievable task that they themselves are about to do. Focusing on the teacher reassures students about what is expected of them and gives them ideas about the kind of content to include. There is an important distinction to be made between substitution drilling and modelling. We are not asking students to try and repeat back what we have said. We are instead providing students with a framework. Teacher modelling gives students confidence and is often more effective than abstract instruction-giving, which can more easily lead to uncertainty and inadequate task fulfillment.

Visualisation

The term visualisation suggests focusing on visual images in the mind’s eye. However, it can describe imagined auditory, olfactory, tactile and emotional experiences as well. Visualising a moment, scene or event whether real or imagined is an extremely effective and powerful way into extended personal speaking. The time spent on visualisation can lead to more thought-through and stimulating content from students during the subsequent speaking phase of an activity.

Setting peer listening tasks

It is inhibiting for students speaking in pairs and groups when their classmates appear to show little interest in what they say. Instead of genuinely listening, classmates might be planning their own speaking turn, referring to the dictionary, thinking about something unrelated to the lesson or perhaps even just pretending to listen. In the distracting environment of the classroom, it is easy not to listen actively. While setting up a speaking activity, it is important for teachers to set simple and interesting peer listening tasks which focus students on what their partners say. This might be as simple as remembering and reporting part of what they hear, deciding how much is true or giving their partner advice. When students are genuinely engaged in conversation in the classroom, there is a real sense of energy and purpose.

Sharing classmates’ real-life experiences

Drama techniques can make the difference between simply hearing about another student’s life and having a real sense of sharing in that student’s life experience. Kinaesthetic involvement on the part of both speaker and listener through mime and gesture helps bring the exchange alive, as does imagining being in another place or physically referring to things which are not actually present.

Example activity

Show me your shoes
Level: Elementary to Advanced / All ages

Teacher modelling

Elicit and pre-teach types of footwear (shoes, boots, sandals, trainers, slippers etc) and parts of footwear (laces, heel, sole etc).
Remove your shoes and put them at the side of the room. Describe truthfully one of your other pairs of shoes (or other footwear) while you mime holding and wearing them.
Let a student mime touching them or even trying them on for a moment.
Use the prompt questions below to bring your description to life.
Finally, invite students to guess if your description is true.
Visualisation
If possible, ask students to remove their shoes and put them away.
Tell them:
'You’re going to describe one of your pairs of shoes or other footwear to someone who doesn’t know about them. If you don’t have a pair in mind, imagine a pair but remember that you need to make your description believable. Which ones are you going to describe?'
Check that every student knows the name of their type of footwear.
Ask students to close their eyes and to imagine their answers to these prompt questions as you slowly and clearly ask them:
What kind of shoes have you brought here today?
What size are they?
What do they look like?
What about colour, shade, shape, style?
What are they made of?
What do they feel like to wear?
When do you wear them? Why?
How do they make you feel?
What sounds do they make?
Have they got their own smell?
How did you get them?
How old are they?
What sort of condition are they in?
What do other people say about them?
What do you like best about them?
Is there any kind of problem with them?
Is there an interesting story you can tell

Peer listening and sharing real life experiences

Students open their eyes and mime wearing their shoes.
Say:
'Stand with a student who doesn’t know if these shoes are real or not. Your partner is going to listen and decide if your shoes are real. Show them your shoes and describe them. You don’t have to include the answers to all the questions I asked – just tell them what you want to. Let your partner try on your shoes. When you’ve both finished, ask each other questions for more information. Don’t say if your description is true or not. OK? You’ve got 5 minutes.'

As each pair finishes ask them to hold or wear their partner’s shoes and quickly show them to another student who has finished.

Form a standing circle. Invite each student to say whose shoes they’re holding and find out if they’re real, e.g.'I’ve got Juan’s blue trainers he wears for jogging and I think they’re real.' Juan: 'I haven’t really got any trainers.'

The most important result of regularly using such techniques in the language classroom is an increase in reciprocal self-disclosure. In other words students tell each other about their thoughts, feelings and experiences in greater depth and detail. The more one tells, the more the other tells, so leading to deep interpersonal sharing. It follows that students involve themselves more in each other’s lives, so the classroom becomes a social meeting place as well as a learning environment. In turn there is a positive impact on group cohesion and dynamics.