Showing Off

In ASE 2 today I had about half the classtime to lecture on prosody. This is a topic the students should have read about, but we're frankly pretty lax in making sure that they do their homework. So I went in with the understanding that this would be the first time most of them had heard of it.

I'd reviewed the material the night before and was pretty confident in my understanding of it; had also come up with a few explanations and examples that I thought were pretty good. We broke the class up into three groups, each group re-reading the section on a certain area of prosody (word stress, thought groups, linking & reduction) and then briefly presenting their findings to the rest of the class.

Each group had a pretty good handle on the material. But what I found was that I was eager to display my knowledge of it, and since I'd spent this time coming up with examples and explanations, I was more interested in giving my prize explanations than I was in eliciting information from them. I was more interested in showing off my knowledge of the subject than in making sure that the students understood it. If they got a good grasp of it, and came up with all the ideas on their own, there would be no place for the explanations that I'd worked so hard to produce.

The desire to show off is, I'm sure, rather natural. And it's great when a student figures something out and is willing to demonstrate that knowledge. But as a teacher my job is to make sure that the students understand-- not to show off my own understanding. It should be taken for granted that I have a good handle on the subject. I'm the teacher, after all. If they fail to make the right connections, and I fail to elicit valuabe information from them, then I have to fall back to presenting the material in my own words. But it should be a last resort.

First Language vs. Target Language

In class today, we had two micro-teaching sessions. One was an introductory lesson in Japanese, the other in German. Both assumed that it was the very first day of class, and that the students had no prior knowledge of the language.

The Japanese instructor conducted the session entirely in Japanese. Not only did he refrain from using English, he behaved as though he didn't even understand the English language. Everything was directed in and through the target language.

At times this was frustrating-- it takes some time to understand what he's saying, and we also don't have a crystal clear understanding of the meaning of his words. For example, if he'd written "Good morning" on the board and then said "Good morning" in Japanese, it would have been clearer and less frustrating.

It wouldn't have been better, though. The frustration is really what helps you learn the language. Once I've been struggling with the sounds, observing the teacher's cues, trying various strategies to come up with a meaning for the word-- then, when it finally dawns on me "oh, he's telling me what his name is!", it sticks. Understanding of the word originated with me.

There's also a cultural advantage to not using the students' native language. It forces them to re-align their way of thinking. If the students think their instructor can't understand their native language, they have to negotiate methods of communicating with the teacher, and will be eager to pick up those words and phrases that aid in communication. My students in Korea were highly motivated to learn how to ask to be excused to go to the bathroom.

I've heard of students being upset when an instructor uses their native language-- they feel patronized. This makes sense, and there were parts of the German lecture where I was a little annoyed with the instructor. Often, when she resorted to English, the information either could have been successfully communicated in German, or else it wasn't essential. If she said it in German and many students missed out on large chunks of it, that wouldn't really have mattered. It was interesting but peripheral.

My high-school French classes (1st and 2nd year) were taught in English. I didn't learn much French, although I got good grades. But that was high school. The point was to get good grades in your language class, not to learn the language. My undergraduate Russian classes were likewise taught in English. For the first and second year, this was fine with me-- it meant I didn't have to work as hard, which was great. But after I'd spent seven months in Moscow, when my (native Russian) teacher in America continued to teach in English, I began to feel insulted and patronized. The other students-- those who hadn't had full-immersion experiences-- kept defaulting back to English, and so the instructor did too.

Teaching a second language in the students' first language permits the students to think of the target language as a code, a mental exercise, or a set of equivalencies. My Korean students had been trained in such a way that, when an English word was written on the board, they would shout out its Korean "equivalent" in unison. It's a horribly misleading idea, to think that every word or piece of grammar in the target language has an equivalent in one's native tongue. And while translation is an interesting exercise with many uses, it's peripheral to the main goal of language study. The goal of language study is to communicate effectively in the target language. Once this is achieved, then good translation becomes feasible.

Teaching in the students' first language keeps the students firmly within the worldview of their native language. If their language has a very different grammar from the target language, it becomes very difficult to teach such important details of the target language. For example, Korean marks verbs neither for subject agreement nor for tense. To explain, in Korean, the concept of tense or of subject-verb agreement is no easy task. But if the students are torn out of their Korean worldview and placed firmly within an anglophone paradigm, they begin to feel the implications of "he walks," "I walk," "he walked," and so forth. It teaches them to understand, rather than to explain, the concept. And once they understand it well, once it's firmly inscribed in their minds, eventually they'll figure out ways of explaining in Korean what exactly is going on.

In more advanced stages of language study, it may be more useful to allow the native language to be used. Once students are learning things like scientific vocabulary, it makes sense to let them look the word up in the dictionary-- every language that has universities probably has a word that means "quadratic equation" in the exact same way that English does. And once a student is adept at communicating in the target language, negotiating the meaning of a vocabulary word isn't such an important part of language development. It's also at this higher level that students may be engaged and interested in bridging between their native tongue and the target language-- translation, for example.

However, as long as the native language can be used as a crutch, it will hinder apprehension of the target language, and make understanding and use of the target language less authentic.

Lesson Plans

Each week in ASE 2 I'm assisting Gordon with a portion of the class. He lets me look at the lesson plan and choose which bits I want to teach. Last week I decided to run an activity, and this week I'm doing something similar-- providing a brief introduction to the activity, letting the students have a go at it, monitoring them and periodically giving feedback, then at the end regrouping and facilitating discussion about the activity.

I've chosen this sort of thing, twice now, because it's easy. I don't have to teach material, don't have to bring any kind of expertise to the class-- I just have to keep things going.

Class time in ASE 2 is difficult to control. This is by design-- the most important goal of the class is for the students to reflect on their own teaching, to support and advise one another. And so we let that go for as long as it will go. The lesson plan, then, isn't much more than a list of suggestions. Huge chunks get thrown out the window each week.

Gordon wrote the plans, and he knows the course content well, so he has a good sense of what bits are essential and what bits can be tossed wholesale in favor of extemporaneous interaction. I don't yet have that feel, that ability to prioritize lesson plans in the same sense. So I think that's why I've chosen to be in charge of the group activities-- they have a clear beginning, middle, and end. They're like little classes inside of the class; they're discrete chunks and thus easily manageable.

Report, Observation #1

UF's Academic Spoken English programe (ASE) provides teacher training for the university's international graduate students. Some courses are pre-service, teaching prospective teaching assistants (TAs) how to effectively teach English-language undergraduate courses, and others are in-service, mentoring current TAs and providing them with a forum where they can share insights and discuss problems related to teaching American students.

While ASE is, strictly speaking, a kind of ESL class, the program's philosophy is that the best way to teach effective English-language communication is simply to teach effective communication. Therefore the program is essentially one of teacher-training, concentrating on those areas where international teachers might find the greatest difficulty.

ASE 1-- an intensive pre-service training course-- is divided into three team-taught components: Language Lab, Video / Feedback, and Lecture. In Language Lab the students, assisted by a professor and by TAs, concentrate on individual areas of weakness-- lots of pronunciation practice. In Video / Feedback, they give presentations which are recorded and then workshopped. It was the final component, Lecture, that I observed.

The lecture component focuses on communication issues, mostly in the context of small-group discussion and opinion-sharing. The goal is to get students comfortable with real-time classroom English. I met with the teacher briefly before class. The lesson plan, which she said was fairly typical, was split into two major sections. The first was a warm-up where students presented news articles, and the second was a small-group discussion activity about an article on a controversial topic, chosen by the teacher. My focus in this observation was student interaction-- how does the teacher encourage and incite participation among all students? Because successful completion of this course implies ability to interact effectively with American undergraduates, peer interaction is an essential component.

All nine students were male. Seven were from east Asia, one from France, and one from Turkey. As they entered the classroom, two Chinese students immediately engaged the teacher, telling an anecdote that related to the previous week's assignment. It was a funny story, and they were eager to communicate its humor. Then one of the students-- the butt of the joke-- continued to talk about the previous class's assignment, which involved finding a newspaper article and presenting it. As he read the paper, he said, he "had trouble breaking it up into thought groups." He was relating real-life experience-- reading the paper-- to course material (the previous week had concentrated on phrasal stress and thought groups).

Other students entered more quietly. One (we'll call him Sean) took out an electronic dictionary. The teacher opened with what was probably a review of a previous exercise, asking Sean "how do I get from your house from here?" When he struggled with this (he said the word "bus" and left it at that), she simplified it to "how do I get from here to the Reitz Union?" and eventually invited the whole class to come up with directions. She did, however, pay special attention to Sean, getting him as much as possible to repeat the directions and keep trying to come up with them on his own. Most student interaction was between the teacher and individual students-- the teacher would mediate their dialogue by repeating a student's comment and asking others for feedback. While the class as a whole quickly came up with clear directions to the Reitz Union, it was unclear whether Sean was any farther along in being able to give instructions independently.

The lesson then transitioned to housekeeping. The teacher assigned topics for the video / feedback component, and asked the students to think of ways that they would present the material. She then reviewed the V / F website, repeating instructions at least once. Few (no?) students took any notes, but one had a question. The teacher asked another student if he could answer. After he did, she affirmed and clarified his response. Once again, student interaction (one student asks a question, another answers) was mediated by the instructor.

Next was a warm-up exercise: the students presented a short summary of the news article they'd selected. When nobody volunteered to start, the teacher picked Sean. He was hesitant, but she encouraged him, repeating the information he gave, clarifying it, and asking follow-up questions. Some students presented their articles simply and concisely, and the teacher quickly passed on to others. With those who had trouble, she spent more time asking questions and clarifying information. With some, however, the teacher asked questions designed not to clarify the article's content but to elicit discussion. For example, one student had an article about gangs in Korea, and instead of talking about the information in the article, the instructor began a conversation about Korean gang culture-- asking whether it was similar more to a mafia or to street gangs, what sort of illegal activity gangs engaged in, how influetial they were. The conversation wasn't very successful: the Korean students (Sean among them) seemed to have difficulty understanding the purpose of the questions.

When a student had especial difficulty answering a specific question, the instructor would try asking it a few different ways, but would eventually back off, sometimes going on to another student without resolving the communication gap. This discussion was also mediated by the instructor ("George says X. Edward, what do you think?"), with one notable exception. One student presented an article on Gov. Schwarzenegger's veto of the California gay marriage bill, and the teacher opened the issue up to the class for discussion. One student defended the veto, and another jumped in immediately saying "I disagree!" and articulating an argument for his position. The two had a brief debate, made lively by the fact that each was fairly concerned about accurately describing his viewpoint. The student in favor of gay marriage stated his argument with great clarity; his opponent had more difficulty finding the vocabulary to describe his position. The instructor filled in gaps to such a degree that, while this student readily assented to what she said ("Yes, that's right") I'm not confident that any of us were able to determine to what extent the teacher's summary of his argument was the same as his actual argument.

In preparation for a discussion time, the students were given a brief list of vocabulary that would appear in their discussion reading. The teacher asked the class to guess the meaning of each word. About three participated readily, while the others passively observed and took notes.

After reading the article, the students broke into groups for discussion. Each began conversation readily, but the content differed from group to group. In one group, the three members were actively debating the article (it was a brief piece about a court case; they had to decide how they would rule if they were the judge); but in another group the students were clarifying the article's actual contents amongst themselves. It seemed that in some groups, one student would dominate the discussion while another might remain mostly silent.

The teacher observed one group, then spent the bulk of her time facilitating discussion with a second group-- clarifying, asking questions, trying to generate opinions. One student-- Sean-- seemed to change his position based on her argument. Though her purpose in making the argument was to give him a chance to refute it, he took the easy way out by simply agreeing with her. She ran out of time before getting a chance to observe the third group.

A few days after observing, I met briefly with the teacher to discuss what I'd seen. We talked mostly about classroom management-- how to interact effectively with all the students, and how to keep them active and engaged. She said that she made a point to pay attention to the struggling students, and to give them plenty off opportunity to speak and discuss. If any student brought up a topic that had good potential for discussion, she'd offer it up to the whole class, but in addition to this she made sure that the weak students were pushed.

Each class has a different dynamic, she said, and she wouldn't bring up a controversial topic like gay marriage unless she got a vibe that they'd be able to handle it well. This class, from what she'd already picked up, was interested in debating such things, although one or two students had a tendency to dominate. There's a point, she said, when you gently ask a particularly talkative student to give another person a chance to speak.

Sometimes a teacher manages time poorly, and isn't able to give equal attention to all the students. For example, the instructor was unable to meet with the third discussion group. However, in the next class the students did a follow-up discussion, and that time round she made sure to give the third group plenty of attention.

Then there are difficult students, like Sean, who are reluctant to speak and pay more attention to their electronic dictionaries than to what's going on in class. The teacher said that she tries a different strategy every time. For example, in the class I observed, she tried to engage him in debate by arguing against his position-- but he merely switched sides and assented with her. Earlier, she said she had tried defending a position he took, hoping to get him interested enough to come up with more ideas on his own. She knows that he wants to open a bar in Korea, so she tried to relate the topic of Korean mafia to how it might affect his bar. So far, no strategy has been effective. Soon, she's thinking about telling him that he can't bring the electronic dictionary to class anymore. There are also one-on-one evaluations coming up shortly, and that will give her an opportunity to emphasize to Sean that if he wants to pass the course, he'll need to be more involved in class.

It is valuable for students in a communicative ESL classroom to engage in unmediated interaction. After all, such spontaneous interaction is the goal of the course. It's impossible, however, to expect that students will do this unprovoked. In part, their cultural expectation of what a classroom should be will likely involve an instructor-mediated approach. Also, most students-- even very good students-- rarely do more work than they have to. An effective teacher will push the students to interact with her-- this is better than nothing-- and frequently will be able to act as mediator or catalyst in peer-to-peer interaction. Eventually, she should be able to remove herself from the interaction, allowing the students to address one another directly. In the likely event that this breaks down, the instructor must continue to engage students-- especially those weak or reluctant-- in such a way that they have no choice but to participate.

Song on the Radio

As I was driving up to the farm this evening, a song came on public radio about sea turtles. The tune was catchy, the singer's voice was good, but the lyrics were downright polemical. She was singing about how we're damaging the habitat of sea turtles and not caring for the environment and causing harm. The message was important enough, and the words-- though cheesy-- were not untrue. But she did quite the opposite of making me care about sea turtles.

So I started thinking about why a song that says "You should care about sea turtles" made me staunchly indifferent towards sea turtles. I think because it was too blatant, too didactic. Perhaps if I knew something about sea turtle nesting grounds and their plight, and then heard a song that vaguely stirred within me consciousness of my indifference towards the environment, I might suddenly think of sea turtles and be motivated to do something to help them. Or if, when visiting a sea-turtle nesting ground or hearing about them, I recalled such a song.

In other words, if the song pushed me to make my own connection, I would feel it powerfully and be impelled to do something. But if the song just preaches at me, I ignore it.

I think this has implications in teaching. There's plenty that simply has to be taught-- information that the teacher has, that the students need, and it's the teacher's job to make that information, or those skills, available to the students. But that's information. A lot of teaching is about concepts. Yes, 1 + 1 = 2, that's a teachable fact. But the concept of addition is something different entirely. You've got to see addition happening, start getting a feel for it, and eventually try your hand at it.

That's a simplistic example. But with concepts, I think the teacher's role is to facilitate. If the teacher says "you must do Z because X and Y," the student will resist. But if the teacher merely presents X and Y, the student will realize, "oh! I need to do Z."

Time Management

Last Wednesday, Gordon had me direct part of the ASE 2 class. It was an exercise to demonstrate to the students the importance of questions-- that if the students aren't asking questions, they don't understand. And that there's a procedure to answering questions well:

1. Restate the question. Make sure that the question you heard is the question that was asked. Taking the time to be sure you understood the question is faster and more efficient than is answering the wrong question.

2. After giving the answer, verify that the class understands, and that the question has been adequately answered. If not, then change tactics: try explaining the material in a different way. A quick "does that answer your question?" can do a world of good.

I broke the class up into pairs and sat them back-to-back. One person in each pair was given a small piece of paper with a diagram drawn on it. The other partner had a blank sheet of paper. The goal was for the "teacher" to explain to the "student" how to draw the picture, without the aid of visuals.

They struggled mightily with this. One group just couldn't get it. Another I heard doing great-- and the "student" was consistently asking detailed questions of the "teacher," and the teacher was restating each piece of instructions. The third group was communicating just about as carefully as the second group, but there had been a miscommunication at the beginning-- the student drew a right triangle at the center, instead of an iscoseles. So even though the details were accurate, the big picture was so wrong that the two drawings ended up looking totally different from each other.

Then we had them look at the drawings and the originals, and they talked about what strategies had worked, what hadn't-- in general it just reinforced that, in order for information to be conveyed accurately, the student has to ask constant questions and the teacher has to repeat the information several ways. Partners switched, were given a different drawing to teach, and with a better understanding of what was going on, the second round of drawings were considerably better. Two teams switched from geometrical description (a forty-five degree angle at the midpoint, etc) to geographical ("draw a line going east from the top of the triangle").

The lesson was a success-- it was a fun and very concrete reinforcement of what we'd been trying to teach them, namely that communication is always a two-way process.

But I managed the time badly. Gordon's very flexible in that class-- the most important thing, he believes, is that the students share their experiences and ideas and get help from one another. Since they're actually teaching undergraduates, the most valuable thing they can get out of the class is concrete feedback on difficulties that are arising in their classes. We often scrap huge parts of the lesson plans, because there are other things more valuable to the students.

However, this is not an excuse for inefficiency. If I'd cut the drawing-part of the exercise a bit shorter, we'd have had more time to discuss communication. It's not necessary that they actually finish a drawing-- just that they go at it long enough to see what communication strategies are effective. One group, both times, finished their drawing well before the others and spent several minutes just waiting. This isn't ideal. However, they were all very into the exercise-- it's fun!-- and reluctant to stop before finishing. I was also reluctant to interrupt communication.

The way I got them to wrap things up was to approach each group separately with a one-minute warning. I would watch each pair, wait until they reached a pause, and then interject with my warning. Likewise, when I told them to finish, I approached each group individually.

I think it would have been more effective to announce all at once. To say at the start, "You have ten minutes to do this. I will warn you when there's just a minute left." And then give a one-minute warning to everyone at the same time, regardless of whether I was interrupting an important bit of communication. Likewise, to cut them all off abruptly would have been preferable. The purpose was not the completion of the exercise, but rather the information to be gleaned from it.

Questions for T1

How willing, typically, are the students to interact w/ one another?

50/50. Some are consistently eager, others reluctant. There's one student in particular who just won't talk much.

How do you determine which students to spend time on, which to dismiss quickly? Is it based on the issue (one has more potential for discussion), or on the students’ needs?

Both. There are some students who are weaker, and so I make sure to get them to talk as much as I can. One or two will say two words and that's it, unless I work to extract more information from them. But if any student introduces a topic that I think the others will find interesting, I try to get the whole class involved in a discussion on it.

Re. gay marriage—do students handle controversial discussions well?

Yes. You have to test each group, and this one seems pretty okay with controversial topics.

For vocab, about three students were giving all the answers. Is this OK? Or does it just take too much time/ effort to even it out more?

Sure. The important thing here is just for everyone to get the definition. I don't really care how much they interact in this part of the lesson.

What do you do when one student dominates discussion?

I'll try to give each student plenty of time to speak, but if one is really taking up most of the discussion, I'll say something like "let's give so&so a chance to speak, now." As gently as possible.

You went to only two of three grps—could you tell that grp 3 was doing fine? Or was it just that there wasn’t enough time?

I ran out of time. But in the next class, we did a follow-up exercise, and I made sure to give the third group plenty of attention.

In an opinion-gap exercise, how do you elicit discussion & make students discuss a situation from different angles, without imposing an opinion on them? ie how can you encourage students not to agree with your opinion but to come up with ways to refute it?

I just have to keep trying something different. Different strategies work for different students, and for this one student I just haven't found something that works. He'll do whatever it takes to say as little as possible. One thing I've noticed is that he brings a little electronic dictionary to class and spends a lot of time using that. Next time I might take the dictionary away from him and force him to interact instead. We'll also be having one-on-one evaluations shortly, and in the evaluation I'll emphasize that if he wants to pass the course, he's going to have to get more involved in the class.

Notes on Observation 1

Notes on ASE 1

1st half—T1

9 students, all male. 7 Asian, 1 French, 1 Turkish.

“When I read the paper, I had trouble breaking up thought-groups.”—the student is connecting real-life experience to course material.

T has good rapport w/ Ss—they tell anecdotes, joke, she jokes with them.

Starts out w/ review—“how do I get from your house to here?”—makes him be specific: “give me a landmark.” At first it’s just one student, but as he struggles she invites the rest of the class to help out.

Transition to Housekeeping:
Assigning V/F topics (what is love? What is friendship?) T asks Ss “How will I do this?” elicits answers from them.

Rev.s V/F website, uses A/V, gives instructions then repeats them, few (no?) students taking notes, but one has Q. Tà “Kwangnam, can you answer that?” after other S answers, T confirms answer.

Warm-up: Summary of news article

When nobody volunteers, T picks someone. He’s hesitant, she repeats his information, clarifies, asks follow-up Qs. (article is about a “miracle cat” during the hurricane) “Why is it a miracle cat?”

Transition to next student: “OK. Who’s next?”

One student has article about gangs, she asks about gangs in Korea—instead of talking about article, convo digresses to Korean gangs.

S has difficulty answering Q, T tries a few diff ways but finally backs off, goes on to next S without resolving or greatly clarifying difficulty.

Q for T1—how do you determine which students to spend time on, which to dismiss quickly? Is it based on the issue (one has more potential for discussion), or on the student’s needs?

Writes diff. word (“veto”) on board.

One student’s article is on gay marriage. Q for T1—was there any fear of broaching a controversial topic, any worry that it would digress into a fight? Have you ever had a situation where Ss have gotten into nasty disagreements?

Transition: “OK, so let’s talk about some idioms. Can you guess what ‘tightwad’ means?” gives some chances, then explains. Ss’ guesses are way off, but T affirms their courage—“that’s a very logical answer.” “No, but that’s a clever guess.”

About three students are giving all the answers for vocab. Is this OK? Or is it not ideal, but too much time/ effort needed to get them to back off and make other students try?

Uses board for vocab.

Discussion: transitions “OK when you’ve finished [reading an article] I want you to get into grps of 3 & discuss what you think.” (brief article about a court case; the Ss have to decide how they would rule if they were the judge)

One group immediately starts talking actively; others she has to prompt or even re-explain the scenario.

What do you do when one S dominates discussion?

T only goes to 2 of the 3 grps—“we’re running out of time.”—could you tell that the 3rd grp was doing fine on their own? 1st grp you listened briefly, then moved on to 2nd grp where you spent a lot of time carefully going over the situation with them.

In an opinion-gap exercise, how does the teacher elicit discussion, and make the students look at a situation from different angles, without imposing an opinion on them? ie, how can you encourage students not to agree with your opinion but to come up with ways to refute it?

Wrapping up:

Uses blackboard to assign hwk.
Hwk—reading, and highlighting difficult words in the news article.

Q—how do you decide on the hwk? Is it evaluated? What percentage of Ss do the hwk?

2nd half—T2

17 students; 15 Asian, including three females.

Sits on desk, starts w/ joke. “you can never underestimate the power of being a smartass.”
S—“what’s a smartass?”
T—“there ya go, ya gotta ask Qs.” Tells anecdote about being a smartass.

Activity based on native language—sound contrasts that, depending on native lang., may be difficult. “Difficult sound contrasts for [Korean] speakers.”
Explains minimal pairs, uses humor. “Germans are good at talking about zis and zat.”

“The sound files are coming. Unfortunately, so is Christmas. [pause] That’s American humor.”

Uses lots of idioms.

Transition—“OK that’s what that’s for. That’s reference. What I really to do is…”

At this point T involves me in exercise. Ss break into groups of four, and each grp pairs with a native speaker who helps them with sound reduction. ie “He’s busy” = “hizbizi.” I say the sentence aloud, Ss repeat and practice the reductions.

T is in same room as me, on other side of the room. With his grp, he occasionally uses the board to explain things, or write down the changes of sound.

No official conclusion to class. When each grp is finished, it disperses.

Observation 1

I observed a class last Friday. It was in Academic Spoken English, geared toward international graduate students who want to get teaching assignments. This course, ASE 1, helps prepare them for a spoken exam which they must pass in order to get a TA-ship. There are clear economic motivations, then, for doing well in this course.

ASE 1 has three components-- lecture, Language Lab, and Video/ Feedback. Each component has a different instructor. I observed an hour of lecture followed by an hour of Language Lab.

My emphasis, in this observation, was on student interaction. The goal of the course is for the students to interact competently with their own students, so the ways in which they interact with one another and with the teacher are very important.

The lecture component had nine students, all male. Seven were east Asian, one French, and one Turkish. As they entered the classroom, two Chinese students immediately engaged the teacher, telling an anecdote that related to the previous week's assignment. It was a funny story, and they were eager to get the humor across to her. Then one of the students-- the butt of the joke-- continued to talk about the previous week's assignment, which involved finding a newspaper article and presenting it. As he read the paper, he said, he "had trouble breaking it up into thought groups." He was relating real-life experience-- reading a newspaper-- with course material-- phrasal structure and thought groups.

Interaction, however, was primarily between teacher and student, not peer-to-peer.

The teacher opened with what was probably a review of a previous exercise, asking one student ["John"] "how do I get to your house from here?" When he struggled with this, she simplified it to "how do I get from here to the Reitz Union?" and invited the whole class to come up with directions. She did, however, pay special attention to John, getting him as much as possible to repeat the directions and to keep trying to come up with them on his own. Most student interaction was between the teacher and the students; the students rarely addressed each other in formulating their directions.

The class then transitioned to housekeeping. The teacher assigned topics for the video/ feedback component, and asked the students to think of ways that they would present the material. She then reviewed the V/F website, repeating instructions at least once. Few (no?) students took any notes, but one had a question. The teacher asked another student if he could answer the question. After he did, she affirmed and clarified his answer.

Next was a warm-up exercise: the students presented a short summary of the news article they'd selected. When nobody volunteered, the student picked John. He was hesitant, but she encouraged him, repeating the information he gave, clarifying it, and asking follow-up questions.

Some students presented their information simply and concisely, and the teacher quickly passed on to other students. With those who had trouble, she spent more time asking questions and clarifying information. With some, however, the teacher asked questions designed to elicit discussion. For example, one student had an article about gangs in Korea, and instead of talking about the information in the article, the teacher began a conversation about Korean gangs-- asking whether they were similar more to a mafia or to street gangs, what sort of illegal activity they engaged in, how influential they were. The conversation wasn't very successful: the Korean students had difficulty, I think, figuring out the direction of the teacher's questions.

When a student had especial difficulty answering a specific question, the teacher would try a few different wasy but if the difficulty persisted she'd eventually back off, going on to another student without resolving the communication gap.

One student's article was on gay marriage. Rather than going in to the details of the article (Schwarzenneger vetoing the bill), the teacher opened up the classroom for discussion: "what do you think of gay marriage?" This generated a bit of interaction among students-- one clearly took a side for and another against. One of these students had a short argument which he was able to state clearly and simply ("I disagree. I think that X. . .") The other student had more difficulty articulating his position, and the teacher filled in the gaps to such a degree that, while the student readily assented to what she said ("Yes, that's right"), I'm not confident that anyone was able to determine whether the teacher's summary of his argument was the same as his actual argument.

In preparation for a discussion time, the students were given a brief list of vocabulary that would appear in their discussion readings. The teacher asked the students to guess the meaning of each word-- about three participated readly, and the others passively observed and took notes.

After the students read the article, they broke into groups for discussion. Each group began conversation readily, though the content of the discussions were different. In one group, the three members were debating the article (it was a brief piece about a court case, and they had to decide how they would rule if they were the judge); but in another group, the students were clarifying the article's actual contents. It seemed that in some groups, one student would dominate the discussion while another might remain mostly silent.

The teacher briefly observed one group, then spent the bulk of her time facilitating discussion with a second group-- clarifying, asking questions, trying to generate opinions. One student with weaker language skills seemed to change his position based on her argument-- though her purpose in making the argument was to give him a chance to refute, not agree with her. The third group, she never observed.

The original purpose

of the long post I just put up, was to say that what had started out as simple chitchat "how did you spend your weekend?" ended up as an exercise. Often, we'd go throug the "what did you do last weekend?" as pretty much a rote activity, with the emphasis on getting the student to produce a comprehensible and grammatically reasonable answer, then going on to the next student. Their English was often so week that I'd give up on trying to communicate new content, and work instead on getting them to parrot a form-- so that at least they could say something.

So I did lose focus on that. There were days when we'd run through the weekend as a warm-up activity, but did it as quickly and as ritually as possible, as something to transition into another topic. Days when I might have answered "I came a Buddhist" as "I became a Buddhist. Repeat after me. Became. Very good. Now Sally, what did you do . . . ?"

Warming up

Last week, we talked a bit about a teacher's conversation with individual students, looking at a dialogue where the teacher was asking each student about their vacation, clearly interested in eliciting a short, grammatically correct response, and then moving on to the next student. We wondered if it was appropriate for the teacher to interrupt and correct ("not I came a Buddhist, but I became a Buddhist. Repeat after me: I became a Buddhist").

It depends on the purpose of the exercise. If the purpose is simply to warm the students up, to get them talking and get them interested, then it's a mistake to interrupt a (rather interesting) story with a small correction. In my experience, however, many students, especially Asians, want their speech continually checked for error. They'll pause mid-sentence and wait for a response from me, affirmation or correction.

Is this something to be exploited? This is to say, I know the student is willing to have every error corrected, so I'll jump all over her speech? Or should it be discouraged?-- if a student is too concerned about producing nothing but perfectly correct English, it may take her a long time to say anything at all.

Dr. LoCastro asked if we had any experience in such a situation, and I was reminded of an exercise I did very often with my Korean students. "What did you do last weekend?" or "What will you do this weekend?" It began out of sheer curiosity-- some kids had come early to class and I wanted to chat with them, so I asked them about their weekend. It surprised me that they simply couldn't answer the question, didn't know the word "weekend." So I negotiated with pictures and expressions and vocabulary they did have, as well as my limited Korean, to get them to the point where they understood at least that I was asking them what they did at some point in time prior to today.

My goal in the beginning had been just to establish rapport with the children, to find out something about them. But it revealed a rather serious gap in their knowledge of English; this despite the fact that some students had a pretty large vocabulary. However, their vocabulary was largely a system of equivalencies. They would look at the word "tissue" written on the blackboard and shout the Korean word "hyuji." They were far less comfortable, however, recognizing the spoken word "tissue" or incorporating it into conversation.

The innocent question about weekends evolved into a series of small lessons which would be repeated and elaborated upon periodically: days of the week, the concept of past/ present/ future, "was/ am/ will be." The students tended to know verbs with the "-ing" suffix already attached. With more advanced classes I would sometimes try to get them to try out eliminating the -ing in favor of "I walked, I walk, I will walk," but in general this was just too much work. Instead I built on what they'd been taught to get them to say "I was going, I am going, I will be going." Not natural English, but functional-- and the primary goal was not to teach them grammar, but to get them to speak, and to feel like they were able to speak. Even if their English sounded very strange, getting them to say anything at all was a bonus.

"What did you do last weekend?" would also be a pronunciation exercise. The school I worked at was very concerned with pronunciation and encouraged me to do pronunciation drills often. Their primary goal seemed to be to get the students to spit out English phrases that sounded, to their Korean parents, to be well-formed and fluent. To this end they would memorize storybooks and then "read" them aloud at great speed. With interesting results, that might have sounded like fluent English to someone who speaks hardly a word of English, but pure gibberish to the Anglophone.

Being forced to produce authentic language, rather than recite a text, was frustrating for them and seemed purposeless-- the middle school entrance exams don't chat with children. But they're kids and like to talk about what interests them. So I'd ask "Bob, what did you do this weekend?" (they all had English "nicknames," some of them very eccentric) and Bob would say excitedly, in a thick Korean accent, "Warcraft!" Then I would respond, "Oh, you played Warcraft. You played computer games. Can you say that? I played computer games." Once I'd elicited that full phrase out of Bob, I'd move on to the next student who would, invariably, say "I played computer games" and then wait for me to move on down the line. Depending on time constraints, I'd ask the kids who they'd played against, whether they'd won, whether it was fun (and why or why not).

Occasionally, after five or six Warcraft freaks in a row I'd indicate that all anyone ever does around here is play computer games, didn't anybody do anything else? On a good day, this would crack the students up and they'd start searching their vocabulary for other things: "I played going to the halmoni [grandmother] house!" which provided opportunity to teach "went to" as an alternative to "going to," and to help them get the idea of what the word "played" means.

On a bad day, they simply wouldn't understand what I was talking about, and we'd go back to "I played computer games." It was sometimes difficult to tell whether certain kids understood that they were telling me how they'd spent their Sunday afternoon, or whether they thought they were simply stating a hobby. When there was time, going more deeply into it ("did you play computer games on Saturday or Sunday? Who did you play with?" etc) would reveal this, and would help them to get a more precise idea of the meaning of the words they produced.

Most of my kids hadn't been taught tenses yes, or any verb conjugation other than is/ am/ are -ing. Korean doesn't have a tense system in the way English does, so I didn't try to go too heavy on this. It was enough if they understood that if they were talking about plans they'd say "will be -ing" or if about something already accomplished they said "was -ing." I wasn't so concerned that they be able to explain why this was the case.

I was given pretty free range in that classroom-- very little material, no textbooks, little instruction as to what was expected of me. Which was frustrating, but also an opportunity to teach what I felt was important, to develop a communicative classroom. The administration consistently warned me against teaching conversation, insisting that our institute was primarily concerned with pronunciation, but for my own sanity I found it necessary to teach the kids, before anything else, to be able to communicate with me. If they don't understand me when I tell them to sit down, or if they're unable to ask to use the restroom, it's pretty much impossible to have any sort of education going on.

Teaching Journal

This blog is an online storehouse of Dr. Lo Castro's TSL 6371 teaching journal assignment. Two or three times weekly, I'll post on how the readings or exercises in class affect my thoughts about teaching, or how they relate to my experiences as a teacher . It's a public blog, although it may not be that interesting.