Although the title of this post sure looks like a set up for some boring educational acronym, it really describes making learning fun.  More significantly, it describes using fun to teach.  The purpose of the bureaucratic looking title is to please the administrative types that sometimes try to understand why it is often in the best interest of our students to use teaching methods that are actually fun.  I could have called it “Goal Directed Teaching,” or “Learning for a Reason,” or “Why’s Before Whats,” but these other possibilities simply don’t seem to fit as well. 

Achievement oriented instruction is when a teacher provides a goal that requires the student to use a targeted skill to accomplish something.  This is not quite functional teaching, and its almost the opposite of drill.  The goal itself provides the motivation, and for this reason the choice of the goal is critical.  It is perhaps as or more important than any teaching method that may be used.  And this is how achievement oriented instruction most differs from traditional teaching. 

Here are some examples that may best serve to illustrate my overall point:

As you can see, the achievement based teaching column contains more possibilities, and an “etc.”  The only limit to one can go in the final column is the teacher’s imagination.  The more creative and varied the activities, the more salient is the learning.  This should not in any way disparage traditional teaching, however.  Another way to put it is that traditional teaching relies on expectations.  In achievement based teaching the learning is elicited.  The student constructs his own expectations, and uses specific targets to achieve these expectations.  Expectations and elicitations are both critical when teaching.

So when an administrator comes in and sees you playing a game with your kids, if you did this kind of teaching, you could say:  “You caught me on my ABT day.  Some days I do drill, some days I do direct instruction, some days worksheets, and about half of the days I do activities specifically designed to elicit my students’ target skills.  It just so happens that fun motivates.”

In teaching and assessment a foil is simply an incorrect alternative.  Any time a choice is given the foil itself can make or break a response’s accuracy.  As an example, consider this picture:

What is this?

Now, here are four questions designed to determine your knowledge of the picture’s subject.

    1)  What is this?

    2)  Is this uranium, pyroxite, or feldspar?

    3)  Is this plagioclastic-orthonograph feldspar or uranium? 

    4)  Is this a type of fruit or uranium?

Much can be ascertained about one’s uranium knowledge depending upon which questions can or can’t be answered.  We can learn that somebody that can answer the question without foils (labeling, in this case) knows his rocks.  Conversely, when using bad foils nothing may be discovered at all.  Most second graders could answer the fourth question correctly which, of course, tells more about the child’s knowledge of fruit than uranium.  The third question’s foil is almost as bad.  If someone answers “uranium,” how do you know it’s not simply because the foil was so hard to pronounce?  While these examples may be extreme, they illustrate the significance that seemingly simple framing and foils can have on good assessment.

Three main foil factors can increase or decrease a response difficulty independent of a respondent’s knowledge of the target stimulus.

    1)  number of foils

    2)  semantic similarity of foils to target

    3)  syntactic complexity of foils

So, the greater the number, the closer the similarity, and the less complex the syntax, the greater the difficulty.  Increasing difficulty may be a good thing, such as when testing more advanced knowledge of a subject.  Decreasing difficulty can also be desired for lower functioning students. 

For example, when measuring a respondent’s knowledge of labeling vowels, you may show three pictures and ask “Which one is a vowel?”  If you show the letter O and two animals, the respondent requires very little (but still some) actual knowledge of vowels to point to the O.  If you use one similar foil, and one semantically different foil, you learn more.  A student that points to the picture of a tree rather than an O obviously knows less about vowels than a student that at least points to a consonant.  The latter student at least knows that vowels are letters.

One final note about using choices -  their use is also a good way of promoting labeling in teaching.  A child that can’t label can often provide the answer to a choice.  Incremental manipulation of the choices can be good therapy.  One final example:

    Instructor:  “What is the coldest continent?”

    Student:  “I don’t know.”

    Instructor:  “Is it Antarctica, Asia, or Canada?”

    Student:  “Canada.”  (Providing the final answer, even when far from correct, indicates a great deal about the student’s target knowledge.)

    Instructor:  “No.  I’ll give you one more try.  What is the coldest continent?  Is it the United States or Antarctica?”

Hopefully the student will now correctly answer, and in doing so, not only will the instructor have gained assessment information, but the student will have actually labeled the correct answer with cues.  This increases the likelihood of later labeling the answer with fewer cues.  The only way that this can happen is if learning has also happened.

What follows are some very general descriptions of popular language therapies, used primarily with younger children.  Much of this information has been taken from Roseberry-Mckibben and Hegde’s An Advanced Review of Speech-Language Pathology.

Recasting – When an adult repeats what a child says, altering it to make it grammatically correct.  Two types of recasting are  1)  Expansion – simply making the utterance correct; and 2) Extension – making the utterance grammatically correct and adding information.  Some examples are…

• Expansion – Child:  “That ball.”;  Adult:  “That is a ball.”
• Extension – Child:  “That ball.”;  Adult:  “That is a big red bouncy ball.”

Focused Stimulation – The clinician models target structures to stimulate child to produce these specific structures.  This is usually done in a play activity.  For example, the target structures, “off” and “on” may be repeated by the clinician fifty times in a Mr. Potato Head activity in an attempt to elicit the words from the child.  Several target words may be combined in a single activity.

Joint Book Reading – Involves reading high interest stories repeatedly over several sessions.  When children are familiar with the stories, they are expected to fill in target words.  For example, the clinician may say “The woman was _______”, to attempt to elicit -ing verb “driving.”

Self Talk – The clinician describes his or her own activities while playing with the child.

Just as no tool can do one job, no activity or teaching approach can be used to teach all language.  Possessing a wide variety of activities is critical, as is mixing them up.  From an early age we are naturally drawn to novelty (Bloom, 2004; Ratey, 2001).  Research has shown that infants are able to discriminate among speech sounds (Eimas, 1980; Kuhl, 2000), and even appear to surpass adults in their discrimination abilities (Kuhl, 2004).  Our brain appears programmed to seek the novel.  Here again is another opportunity to use that which already exists.   Fortunately for us language is everywhere.  We can use this to our advantage when trying to determine what to do in language teaching.  There are many activities that can be modified to accommodate a wide variety of language structures, including board games, twenty questions, matching activities, turn-taking play activities, charades, bingo, general conversation, etc.   All of these things may be thought of as tools in an arsenal or tricks up one’s sleeve.