Technology and tasks for bridging the language-content gap: Teacher-researcher collaboration in a third-year Spanish writing course

Abstract

Whereas lower-division courses tend to focus primarily on learning grammatical patterns and the "four skills," upper-level courses focus mainly on content. This language-content gap is problematic for learners, who often arrive to upper-level courses unprepared for the types of learning that occur there. By providing students a bridge between lower-level and upper-level courses, third-year FL courses carry a heavy responsibility: They must integrate the language-focus familiar to students at the lower-levels while simultaneously preparing them for the types of learning that they will encounter at the upper-levels. It is the aim of this dissertation to reveal the types of tasks that may be useful at this level in order to help learners succeed. Using grounded ethnographic methods, this multiple case study chronicles how a collaborative partnership between an instructor and an applied linguist facilitated the integration of new technology into two sections of a third-year Spanish grammar-andcomposition course. For data analysis, two theoretical frameworks rooted in systemic functional linguistics were used: the Knowledge Framework (Mohan, 1986, 2007, 2011) and APPRAISAL theory (Martin & White, 2005). Specific findings surrounded: (a) the role of technology in thirdyear language learning, (b) the importance of f2f and written feedback, (c) the tasks used as learning tools, and (d) students' language development. Four technology-based themes and four task types were found to be instrumental at this level. Each of these tasks as they occurred during culture, grammar, and writing lessons entailed different ways of using language to construct knowledge. While grammar tasks were especially useful for building up students' knowledge about language forms, culture lessons and writing tasks were instances for the teacher to support 1.1.3 Academic discourse. This section clarifies the term academic discourse and describes several of the key terms or aspects frequently use to define it and differentiate it from everyday language. Academic discourse, also referred to as academic language (Crosson, Matsumura, Correnti & Arlotta-Guerrero, 2012), advanced literacy (Christie, 2002), and Cognitive Academic Language Proficiency, or CALP (Cummins, 2013), relates to the forms and functions of language that are necessary for participating in various schooling contexts. It has been shown that features of academic language, in particular those of persuasive/ argumentative writing, are cognitively demanding and benefit from early classroom instruction (Crowhurst, 1990). From the perspective of systemic functional linguistics (SFL), academic discourse in English can be identified by a set of lexical and grammatical features such as lexical density. Lexical density can be defined as the expression of the number of content words (nouns, adjectives, verbs, and some adverbs) as a total proportion of all words in the text (Eggins, 1994). Academic discourse is often characterized as having much in common with written language in that it is lexica...

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