Thursday 6 February 2014

Curriculum page created

OK, so I've created a "Fethiye WAYK Turkish Curriculum" page over on the official WAYK wiki, which the administrator was kind enough to give me access too. Little did he know...

Once I've got my head back round about how wikis work I'm going to be structuring the information as follows:
  • Vocabulary Master List (V)
  • Craig's Lists (CL)
  • Grammar Master List (G)
  • Fairies' Lists (FL)
  • Rides (R)
  • Ride Chains (RC)
  • Ride Map (RM)
  • Set-ups (S)
This is going to be quite detailed, so you can skip to the bottom line if you like.

I'm going to be basing the Vocabulary Master List on the list of 1,200 most commonly used words in Turkish, to which I will add any other words that we use that aren't on it. This is the only thing that will be anywhere near finished as we start. Each entry will refer to videos of the signs that we will use. To make things simple, I'm going to take videos of myself or Gözde signing several words together, and then the links will be to the point in the video where that word is being signed. The Vocabulary Master List will be a single wiki page, likely a table.

The Grammar Master List will include not only particles, suffixes, and so on, but also "concepts" and specific sentence constructions, basically any "new" element that the setup will be designed to help "click" in players' minds. 

Now with Craig's Lists... I know that I'm deviating slightly from orthodoxy here, but I want to take Craig's Lists beyond a memory/repetition tool that you use only for some words, and even then only when needed to jog the memory, and use this concept to organise and categorise the entire Vocabulary. These CLs will still be designed such that they could be used in-session (actually, I think they may work well for refreshers), but this will be up to the teacher. Much of the time they will simply be words that are introduced and/or used together and/or in the same context, put together in a group that's easier to categorise and track. Each Craig's List will be a separate wiki page, likely a table.

Fairies' Lists are basically Craig's Lists, just applied to the Grammar Master List. Of course, at no point in the session will we be reviewing lists of suffixes. Again, this will be a device more geared to helping us teachers develop sessions.

Rides will each be individual pages, almost like recipes, listing the a Set-up and a Script together with the Craig's Lists and Fairies' Lists used. Ride Chains will be still other pages listing sequences of interconnected Rides. The Ride Map will be a single page organising all Ride Chains into a network that will enable teachers to see the big picture and follow students' progress. Teachers will be able to pick and choose Rides and Ride Chains for each session depending on the class. 

The Set-ups used in Rides will also be documented and tracked on separate pages. I anticipate that coming up with new, TQ Obvious Set-ups will be the toughest challenge we face, especially as we progress to more complex grammar and extended vocabulary.

All of the above elements will have a reference code. Each word will be "V 123" or some such, Craig's Lists will be "CL 1", "CL 2" and so on, with each entry in the list given a number, "1.1, 1.2" etc. The same sort of thing will go for Rides and Ride Chains; variants of Set-ups will also be numbered in this way. This will mean that the Vocabulary Master List, say, will have links after each word to each Craig's List and Ride it appears in. Everything will be cross-referenced as much possible.

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The bottom line: Apart from the Vocabulary Master List and maybe some of the Grammar Master List, everything else will be built up week by week as we go along. Once we've finished, we will have a well-rounded package so we can go up to anyone and say "I can get you from nothing to intermediate in [however many weeks]." Other teachers will be able to simply use the Rides, Craig's Lists and Ride Map out-of-the-box to plan sessions, while using the Vocabulary Master List as a dictionary, particularly to learn the signs. The rest of the behind-the-scenes infrastructure will serve as a template to fellow WAYK practitioners in adapting it to their own languages. Particularly in the area of Set-ups will we be able to swap ideas.

This has been good to get my ideas down in writing, so now I'm going to go off and develop some of it so there's something to look at. Meanwhile, any thoughts, suggestions, corrections and reactions will be most welcome.

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