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Task Framework
In designing activities to aid students in adapting oral words into
sight words I hold to the principle that the students should be active by challenging
themselves to construct artifacts. It is through this construction process that students
will have to grapple with learning the orthographic representations of the words in their
oral vocabulary. Thus, the student using Lyric Reader has two major goals: to
reconstruct songs and to create songs.
How these goals are achieved depends on the activities used. The
activity structure shown below uses a Goal Based Learning approach to implement the BRAVO
methodology. The activity framework is designed to aid students in 1) adding the words of
the song to their sight vocabulary, 2) practicing and improving their creative writing
skills, and 3) learning the meaning and use of unfamiliar words while reconstructing and
creating a song. To achieve these goals four activity units have been designed for the
Lyric Reader framework. The activity units and their objectives are:
Pedagogical Goals of the
Listening Unit
The goals of the listening unit is to start the student thinking
about the connections between oral and written language. In addition, this section
provides an opportunity for students who are not familiar with the song to spend time
learning it. This is important because the Lyric Reader system assumes that the student
has a baseline knowledge of the lyrics. Lyric Reader uses this knowledge to scaffold the
student. Thus, if the student does not have the requisite song knowledge then the student
would be at a disadvantage using the system. This is one of the only passive activities in
the system.
Pedagogical Goals of the
Reconstruction Unit
The pedagogical goal of the reconstruction unit is for the student to
use their knowledge of the song lyrics to reconstruct the lyric and in the process add the
words of a song to their sight vocabulary.
Pedagogical Goals of the
Construction Unit
The pedagogical goals of the construction unit is to get the students
to learn new words by exploring words in a dictionary. In addition, the construction task
is designed to allow the student to connect reading and writing.
Pedagogical Goals of the
Performance Unit
The performance task provides an opportunity for the student to show
their work to others. In addition it provides a stage for parents, teachers and other
students to view and comment on the student’s work. This combination of extrinsic
motivation to show their work to others and intrinsic motivation to have others like their
work will combine to motivate the students to work hard at construction a new song.
Number of activities to fulfill
a unit’s pedagogical goals
It is important to note that these units do not map one-to-one to
activities. It is possible to design multiple activities to accomplish the goal of any
category. In particular, the reconstructing category normally needs more than one activity
to successfully accomplish the goal of adding the song’s lyrics to the student’s
sight vocabulary.
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