Instructional Design (TOEFL Listening)

The Four Components of  Multiliteracies Pedagogy

The teaching step of observing the students’ note-taking process is supported by the multiliteracies framework’s four components of pedagogy: “situated practice, overt instruction, critical framing, and transformed practice” (New London Group, 1996). Exley (2007) suggested that, “core to [this] transformative approach is the purposeful construction of a community of practicing learners”, and it will be “a cognitive benefit to all the [students] in a pedagogy of linguistic and cultural pluralism” (p. 103). 

Situated Practice: Students bring their prior prepared vocabulary and background knowledge to the learning situation and immerse themselves in the activity by listening to the audio recording.

Overt Instruction: Students developed “metalanguages” to analyze the information in the               recording. They engage in the “knowledge process in which [they] become active conceptualizers, making the tacit explicit and generalizing from the particular” (Cope & Kalantzis, 2009, p. 185). The teacher will provide explicit scaffolding based on the observed performance of the students when they are taking notes. 

Critical Framing: The critical capacity built in this stage includes students critically reflecting on how they “[orchestrate] various strategies” and “[evaluate] strategy use” during the process of note-taking (Anderson, 2002, p. 4). 

Transformed Practice: Students finish their note-taking and determine if their notes help them       answer questions while they take the tests. They will also apply the strategies they use in this transformative learning process to communicate with others in a real life situation in which they must use English to communicate with others. 

Distributed Cognition and Collective Intelligence 

According to Jenkins (2009), collective intelligence is “a community that knows everything, with individuals who know how to tap the community to acquire knowledge on a just-in-time basis” (p. 77). Erstad et al. (2007) indicated that with the integration of multimodal representations that arises from “the digitization of a wide range of media, computer capability and high-bandwidth Internet connection imply that more students can work collaboratively” (p. 186). The advancement of new media and digital tools facilitate the expansion of collective intelligence on a much broader scale. The Popplet concept mapping teaching activity was based on the theoretical foundations of distributed cognition and collective intelligence. New insights emerge from students’ collaborative creation of a concept map, and when they encounter difficulties, they can always turn to the “expertise somewhere within the distributed learning environment” (Jenkins, 2009, p. 68).