Poster Presentation

Bringing Science Research into theEnglish Classroom: An Example
Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Brent Wright
Kanazawa Institute of Technology
Martin Wood
Kanazawa Institute of Technology
As English language educators, we are continually looking for ways to bring engaging
content into the classroom. We chose Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for this because thetopic is interesting, current, and easy enough for students of all backgrounds to understand.
This paper will describe how two English instructors and a professor from the Aeronautics
department at their institution collaborated to create a series of activities about UAVs,
which culminated with students giving a short presentation demonstrating what they hadlearned. Giving students the opportunity to talk about current research topics in English
will be beneficial for their future careers in science and engineering fields. In addition, wewill discuss students’ opinions about the topic. Finally, we will suggest ways this process canbe implemented with different topics.

Our goal as English language teachers should be to provide students with theopportunity to use English in a practical way. This is most effectively accomplishedwhen students interact with relevant and engaging English content, and thenproduce meaningful English verbally or in writing. Students have a variety ofinterests and areas of expertise and they will need to be able to talk about thosethings in English.
At our institution, two class periods are set aside each term for teachers
to implement lessons they feel would be useful for students. We took this219

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opportunity to develop a lesson that would serve several important functions.
First, we wanted to introduce a topic that would engage the students. Second,
we wanted to provide students with the opportunity to talk about the content
in a meaningful way. Third, we wanted to show students that English is usefuland necessary not only in the English classroom but, most importantly, for their
future careers. We hoped to achieve these goals with the help of a content area
expert, which in this case was a professor from the Department of Aeronautics atour institution.
We focused on the language learning and teaching concepts of motivation(Lightbown & Spada, 2006), student output (Swain, 1985), and differentiatedinstruction (Tomlinson, 1999) as we developed the materials. Crookes andSchmidt (1991) provide several examples of how teachers can present content ina positive way to students. A teacher’s attitude toward the content, including how
it is presented and whether the teacher seems interested in the content can lead
students to have a high level of interest. If the activities, tasks, and materials arevaried it can increase student interest. When tasks and activities are cooperative,
rather than competitive, students work together towards a common goal, whichleads to confidence that they can accomplish a task in English, as well as themotivation that comes from others being dependent upon them.
Students worked through a series of reading comprehension and listeningactivities. The final output was to have the students produce a poster and present
it to their peers. This is consistent with the Comprehensible Output Hypothesis(Swain, 1985) which states that in order for learners to successfully learn alanguage, they need to produce oral or written output. Swain (2000) expandson this hypothesis to suggest that learners working collaboratively to complete atask in the target language can lead to enhanced language learning.
The basic steps we took in completing this lesson are as follows: i) Choose
an engaging topic, ii) Learn about the topic from an expert at our institution,iii) Develop engaging materials, iv) Implement the lesson and provide theopportunity for meaningful output, and v) Survey students for their impressionsof the activities and for future activity ideas.

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Science Research in the English Classroom, OnCUE Journal, 9(2), pages 219-224

MethodMaterials Creation
Our first task was to learn about UAVs from an expert in the field. We consulted
with a professor from our institution’s Department of Aeronautics to learn more
about UAVs and the research he is conducting. Using what we learned, we wrote
a level appropriate text that deals with several different aspects of UAVs. Second,
we video recorded an interview with the professor about UAVs and his research.
Third, we developed a poster presentation activity that would serve as the output
for students.
Text. Based on our preliminary investigations we decided that the text
should be divided into four parts (History, Current Applications, CurrentChallenges, and What’s Next?). We aimed to make the reading level easy enoughso that most students could grasp the basic idea of the text without a dictionaryand challenging enough that they would need to read certain sections several
times to understand the details. We included several pictures so that students’
understanding of the text would be enhanced with visual support.
Interview. A professor from the Department of Aeronautics agreed tovideo record an interview conducted in English about his UAV research and hisexperience working with English. We emailed several interview questions to theprofessor, and he wrote his responses in English. We then went over his answers
with him to confirm key grammar and pronunciation points. We wanted theresponses to be clear and concise so that students would be able to understandthe content. The interview was conducted and recorded by the authors on aniPad. During the editing process, the interview questions were inserted into thevideo so students could read them before they were asked. The entire interview
was about five minutes in length.
The interview served two purposes. One was to disseminate new information
and reinforce what was covered in the text. The other was to show students oneof their professors speaking English and talking about the necessity of being able
to communicate in English for their future careers.
Comprehension exercises. We wrote a comprehension check worksheet
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Wright & Woodfor both the text and interview and used three different formats: true-false,fill-in-the-blank, and open response. For advanced students who were able tounderstand the content after one reading, the questions served as confirmationof their understanding. For students who did not understand it after one reading,the questions and searching for the answers provided the opportunity for deeperunderstanding.
Poster and script. The final activity was a poster presentation where students
prepared a poster and short presentation to talk about what they learned fromthe text and interview. We created a poster and script template which were bothdifferentiated for students’ interest and English ability in that they could decideon the content for the poster and what text to include for the script. The script
gave the option for students to use a sample sentence structure (with the first halfof the sentence provided) or to write original sentences.

Results and Discussion
Students’ Responses
One week following the activity, we asked students what other topics they would
be interested in learning about. Responses fell into two categories, either a specifictopic in their field of study (for example, applications for semiconductors in theDepartment of Electrical and Electronic Engineering) or general interest topic
outside of their field of study (for example, satellite technologies, for which ourinstitution has no major). These two responses indicate that whatever kind oftopic we choose there will always be some students who will be interested in thetopic and others that may not be. With strategic pre-lesson activities (to generatestudents’ interest) there can be positive outcomes for any topic. If a topic is outsideof a student’s field of study, they might find it interesting to learn something new.
If a topic is already familiar to students, they will already possess the content
knowledge and be able to focus more on how to express that knowledge in higherlevel English.

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Lesson Materials
The general outline of the materials we developed can be applied to other topics
and areas of research. It is beneficial for students to interact with a variety of typesof materials (e.g., scaffolded texts, authentic texts, and videos). It is important
to differentiate the types of comprehension activities to the English level anddifferent interests of the students.
The activity which required the most collaboration was the interview. It took
about 90 minutes of rehearsal and actual filming to come up with a five-minuteinterview. The content was easy enough to understand, but could be improvedfor future activities. We would suggest using higher quality recording equipment
than what is available on an iPad. Video recording on an iPad made the editing
and displaying aspects relatively simple, but the audio quality was not consistent.
If possible, requesting the audio visual department do the filming would result inhigher quality footage. It would also enhance the interview if footage of membersof the Department of Aeronautics actually operating UAVs were included in thevideo.

Conclusion

The purpose of this activity was to present an engaging topic to students basedon research that is currently being conducted at our institution. This gave theinstructors the opportunity to collaborate with a different department andbring current and relevant content into the English language classroom. With
help from the Department of Aeronautics, we were able to create a lesson basedon current research and give students the opportunity to produce meaningful
English output about the topic. In students’ future careers, they will need to beable to talk about their area of expertise in English, both as a means of conveying
knowledge and as a way to continue improving their English.
The activities described in this paper can be easily adapted to other topics.
The key driving force behind the creation of such materials is the motivationof the English language instructor to collaborate with professors from otherdepartments at his or her institution.

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References

Crookes, G., & Schmidt, R. (1991). Motivation: Reopening the research
agenda. Language Learning, 41(4), 469-512.
Lightbown, P., & Spada, N. (2006). How languages are learned. Oxford,England: Oxford University Press.
Swain, M. (1985). Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible
input and comprehensible output in its development. In S. Gass and C.
Madden (Eds.), Input in second language acquisition (pp. 235-253). Rowley,
MA: Newbury House.
Swain, M. (2000). The output hypothesis and beyond: Mediating acquisition
through collaborative dialogue. In J. P. Lantolf (Ed.), Sociocultural theory
and second language learning. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Tomlinson, C. (1999). The differentiated classroom: Responding to the needs ofall learners. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum
Development.

Author bios

Brent Wright is an English language instructor at Kanazawa Institute ofTechnology. Before teaching in Japan, he taught Japanese as a foreign language inthe United States. His research interests include computer assisted language learning,smartphone use in the classroom, and vocabulary acquisition. brentwright.kit@
gmail.com
Martin Wood is an English language instructor at Kanazawa Institute ofTechnology in Japan. He received his PhD in groundwater science from Flinders
University of South Australia in 2011. He is currently interested in motivation andacademic English for science and engineering students. martinwoodkit@gmail.com
Received: November 15, 2014
Accepted: December 6, 2015

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