Organization

It's almost three weeks (out of 4) in, now, and I've basically decided that the way I've organized the course hasn't really worked as I hoped it would. Here's why:

1. I think that the idea of discourse didn't allow the students the freedom and creativity they wanted to make the Wiki their own. This resulted in students working on projects that had little to do with what their classmates were doing.
2. Neither did discourse study give the students a form of language study that they found useful.

However, simply ditching any form of organization and allowing a curriculum to "emerge"... well, nothing very structured has emerged, and nor can it be relied upon.

So how to organize things? The criteria, I think, need to be that:

1. There is some form of language study which includes both vocabulary and grammar components, or teaches what Scott Thornbury has called "text attack strategies" - i.e. skills for learning about the way texts are constructed, and which thus build autonomy
2. Students need to be working on similar projects at the same time

The more I think about this, the more I feel that discourse is the way to go... but that it meeds to be implemented more strictly. So I've been thinking over the last few days that I need to design "modules" on different types of text - but more along the lines that the students have expressed interest in:

- film dialogues
- radio shows
- interviews
- biographies

In the back of my mind, though, is the fact that a decision made by me is one taken away from the students. Often I've found that I've suggested things, the students have rejected them; and then the students have worked their way back to the same ideas themselves, and then produced great work. What is missed with that model is the chance to work on the language.

To put this whole things more simply, then: there has been a tension between freedom and flexibility on one hand, and organization on the other. The loss of one has been to the gain of the other. By organizing things and following that order strictly, the students learn more language. Yet the lack of freedom reduces motivation.

Now, some students feel unhappy that there has been too little formal study. Is it reasonable to take away some of the freedom to address that dissatisfaction?