In the realm of language instruction, a distinction has been made between receptive and productive competence. Receptive competence relates to learners’ capacity to comprehend and process language. By contrast, productive competence is associated with the ability to accurately produce language. Developing both productive and receptive competencies is necessary for demonstrating comprehensive knowledge of a language. The notion of receptive and productive competence is certainly not limited to language acquisition. It is also applicable to other areas of academic inquiry. In these contexts, receptive competence is associated with a conceptual understanding of a given topic while productive competence involves the ability to practically apply conceptual understanding of the topic. As an instructor, my primary objective is to foster students’ receptive and productive competence, with much of my energy devoted to bridging the gap between conceptual understanding and practical application. In what follows, I will discuss several strategies I employ to accomplish this objective.
Implementing a scaffolded approach to instruction is one of the principal methods I have found to be most useful for helping students bridge the gap between conceptual understanding and practical application. With nearly ten years of experience teaching courses involving writing assignments, I have learned that it simply does not suffice to give students a writing assignment with the expectation that they produce quality work with minimal intervention. On the contrary, employing a scaffolded approach to guide students through the writing process is crucial for ensuring their success. For example, in my ESL writing courses, I often find it necessary to provide students with scaffolded instruction concerning component sections (e.g., introduction, body paragraphs, etc.) of their writing assignments. This first involves explicitly pointing out genre-based rhetorical and organizational expectations of the section. Following this instruction, I frequently show written models exemplifying accurate implementation of the section’s rhetorical and organizational features. These models are commonly used by the students to flex their ability to pinpoint the features in the context of a particular section. On accomplishing this task, students are then encouraged to practically apply their newly established conceptual knowledge of the section by producing their own work. Finally, this work is subjected to various rounds of peer and instructor feedback, which the students use to improve their writing in subsequent revisions as they work toward a final draft. I have noticed that following these scaffolded instructional procedures has profoundly influenced my ESL students’ capacity to produce quality work. Recognizing this influence, I continuously strive to employ a scaffolded approach in all of my classes, including the Linguistics and general communications classes I teach.
Another strategy I have employed to facilitate students’ transition from receptive to productive topical knowledge is the application of low-stakes formative assessment. This strategy has been particularly useful for courses in which a sizeable portion of the final grade is based on more high-stakes summative assessments. One such course is a Linguistics descriptive grammar course that I have taught for several semesters. The content for this course comprises a substantial amount of information regarding morphological, lexical, and syntactical features. Not only do students taking the course have to formulate a detailed conceptual understanding of these features, but they must also be able to apply their understanding to pinpointing various aspects of the features in context. Their ability to recognize these features in context is the primary focus of their major assessments. Any students who lack the ability to practically apply their conceptual knowledge of the features are likely to receive noticeably lower grades on their final assessments than their peers. To mitigate this issue, I have implemented numerous low-stakes quizzes on the Canvas course site. These quizzes include the same types of tasks the students encounter in their summative assessments. The students are able to take the quizzes as many times as they need to receive full credit. They are then allowed to use their correct responses as a method for preparing for their tests. Students who take advantage of these quizzes consistently exhibit measurably higher scores on their final assessments than those who do not. To me, this has emphasized the usefulness of implementing formative assessment in my courses.
Project-based learning (PBL) techniques represent a third strategy I use to help students take the leap from a receptive to a productive understanding of course content. To illustrate, as an academic writing instructor, I have often been tasked with developing curriculum to facilitate students’ acquisition of research writing skills. In one such instance, I developed curriculum focusing on the topic of media literacy. A principal component of this curriculum involved requiring students to work in groups to investigate their peers’ social media use. To do so, they created an anonymous Qualtrics survey intended to assess the degree to which their peers employed ethical practices when using social media. Following distribution of the survey, they continued to work together to qualitatively analyze survey results. Supported by a series of genre-based lessons on the rhetorical features of research article sections, they then reported their analysis and results in a research paper adhering to the typical research article structure. The completion of this project enhanced the students’ ability to practically apply their conceptual understanding of writing research reports.
During my time as an English composition, ESL, and Linguistics instructor, I have clearly employed a variety of strategies to help students bridge the gap between conceptual understanding and practical application of a given topic. Among others, these strategies include a scaffolded approach to instruction, the implementation of formative assessment, and the use of PBL. Although I have noticed these strategies to be quite effective for ensuring student success, this does not mean I am satisfied to rely on these strategies alone to drive my instruction. I consistently find myself actively seeking new methods to facilitate student success. This is a trait that I intend to maintain as I progress through my instructional career.