Teaching Journal

Should Americans accommodate people who don't speak English?

2007-09-10T19:51:00.001-07:00

Introduction:

1. US speech communities.

- 82% English native language

- 176 indigenous languages (Navajo, Samoan, Eskimo)

- total 337 languages (ex. 1 million Tagalog speakers)

2. Spanish

- 18 million native speakers in US

- ½ of these can't speak English well

- some native to Puerto Rico, New Mexico, etc

- most immigrants (legal & illegal)

3. English re. other languages

- most indigenous languages have official status somewhere (Navajo)

- historic communities (Pennsylvania Dutch, Cajuns, Puerto Rico)

- otherwise, controversial

- Should English be the official national language?

- Should gov't accommodate citizens who don't speak English?

- residents/ visitors?

- what accommodation is acceptable, what's unreasonable?

Discussion questions:

1. Do you have spouses, children or relatives living with you who don't speak English? What's their experience here like?

2. Should the US government provide free ESL classes?

3. Should public schools offer bilingual education? (bilingual education—children learn school subjects in their native language while also learning English)

4. Should legal immigrants have more language accommodation than illegal immigrants?

5. Should parents have the right to an interpreter when they meet with their children's teachers?

6. Should US citizens who don't speak English be able to vote in their native language?

7. Should every non-English language be treated equally? Do some deserve special status?

Teaching Grammar

2007-05-22T18:28:00.000-07:00

This semester I'm teaching grammar over in the English Language Institute. It's causing me to reassess my methodology and understanding of teaching ESL.

There's a great danger of having a cavalier attitude towards one's work. "I know how to do this" is a foolish and dangerous attitude. I need to keep coming back to, "How should I try this? What resources should I investigate? How do I discover the results of this method? How do I discover what the students need?"

With grammar especially there's a wide gap between what a person knows, passively, about the language, and how a person uses the language. I've been teaching over in Academic Spoken English for so long that I regard English grammar as something superfluous-- "ah, it's what they teach you over in ESL courses, it's not my business here." But now I am "over in ESL courses," and it is my business.

I'm not yet accustomed to thinking of English grammar as a program. The particulars of the grammar-- and where and how they differ from the grammars of my students' languages-- feel like a jumble of miscellania. Thankfully, I don't have to design a curriculum from scratch. But it's feeling as though I do.

If I can get a global picture of the English grammar as an ESL student experiences it, perhaps I'll have a better understanding of where in that picture my students are. And I'll be better able to guide them, step by step, towards where they should be next.

This is also my first time teaching a class that has grades; where each student's progress needs to be consistently enumerated. Not easy stuff, compared to the pass/ fail paradigm I'm accustomed to. At any point in the semester, it's my responsibility to have a clear idea of how well a student can handle this or that grammatical form. I've never been trained in assessment nor do I have experience in assessment. This is a challenge and I'm not sure how to face it.

Right now, I feel like I'm groping along blindly. The students tell me the course is too "easy." They want a tougher textbook. In their spontaneous speech I'm not hearing the grammatical forms that they say are "easy." But, understanding of rules is not the same as acquisition. One of my students suggested (not in these words) that my goal is not their acquisition of forms-- that's the Speaking & Listening teacher's responsibility. My goal, he argued, is for them to have a passive understanding of the forms. And these forms they already understand.

In addition to-- and prior to-- writing up lesson plans, I need to reflect on where my students are, where I want them, and how to guide them to that place. Daily lesson plans should be a minor part of my global understanding of the course.

But right now, just getting the plans done on time-- I feel like I'm gasping for air just to keep on top of that.

Quotative

2007-04-27T09:40:00.000-07:00

Languages handle quoted speech in different ways.

Spoken English quotes indirectly:
(1) Alice said that she was sleepy.
(2) Alice said she was sleepy.

It's understood here that what Alice actually said was, "I'm sleepy." But in Standard Spoken English, we use the indirect quotative almost exclusively.

Standard Written English indicates direct quotation not through grammar but through punctuation:
(3) Alice said, "I'm sleepy."
(4) "I'm sleepy," said Alice.

Notice that if (3) were spoken, it would be indistinguishable from

(5) Alice said I'm sleepy.

which means that the speaker, not Alice, is sleepy. And (4) is not found in natural spoken English-- when spoken, it's usually in a formal situation such as reading or reciting written text aloud.

In spoken English we can also indicate quotation through body language; notably the use of "air quotes"

(6) Alice said [air quotes] I'm sleepy.

This sentence means that Alice is sleepy.

Other languages use direct quotation in spoken language quite easily. Notably in Aymara the direct quotative is obligatory and indirect quotation entirely absent:

(7) Iki.w purit siwa.
sleep.personal knowledge arrived she said.
' "I'm sleepy," she said.'

siwa (from the verb sana 'to say') is obligatory in any context where you're discussing what somebody else has said. In fact, in Aymara you wouldn't even say "she has a headache" but rather, "I have a headache, she said." This sounds odd and forced in English but in Aymara it is quite standard.

Standard Spoken English lacks a direct quotative. But many nonstandard forms of spoken English have at least two quotative verbs:

to be like
to go

(8) Alice was like, I'm sleepy.
(9) Alice is like, I'm sleepy.
(10) Alice goes, I'm sleepy.

In all three of these sentences, it is Alice not the speaker who is sleepy. Oddly, while to be like can be conjugated past or present (but retains a past meaning either way), to go can normally be conjugated only in the present.

(11) *Alice went, I'm sleepy.

doesn't sound right to most native speakers. However, many native speakers do accept a past conjugation if the quoted response is one of surprise or disbelief:

(12) Alice was like, I'm sleepy. And Mary went, no way.

There's a third English direct quotative accepted by some native speakers:

to be all

(13) Alice was all, I'm sleepy.

Native speakers generally agree that to be all indicates doubt or suspicion on the part of the speaker. In sentence 13, the speaker probably thinks that Alice is pretending to be sleepy in order to get out of responsibility:

(14) So it's Alice's turn to help out, but she's all, I'm sleepy.

Ethiopian Idol as an acquisition aid

2007-04-09T10:25:00.000-07:00

Being a language student has helped me tremendously as I reflect on what I'm learning about language instruction.

Today in Amharic class we spent two hours watching Ethiopian Idol. It's pretty easy to recognize when an instructor is too busy to devote much time to a real lesson plan-- nevertheless, the exercise was quite helpful. A show like Ethiopian Idol, as opposed to say an interview or news broadcast, has value because most interactions are brief and are highly contextualized. The frequent closeups of singers' faces also aid students in observing how the mouth forms Amharic sounds.

I understood less than ten percent of the content of the language that we watched. Nevertheless the amount of meaningful input was high-- recognizing grammar (conjugations, etc) as it naturally occurs, and observing the use of discourse markers. More experience with the language in a naturalistic context will help me when I'm trying to produce Amharic-- I have a better sense of pragmatic norms and discourse norms, and a bit more of a grammatical instinct. It's hard to remember to produce grammar that doesn't have a strong influence on one's native language. Watching Ethiopian Idol makes the task easier.

I think it's an awful TV show, though.

Getting a job in Korea

2007-03-05T12:58:00.000-08:00

I've had several folks ask me about my time in Korea as they're considering a job. Each time, I spend a good long time writing an essay about the ins & outs of getting a good Korea-teaching job. Figure I might as well turn that into a formal essay and stick in up on the web. This essay will have three parts: Teaching in Korea, My Time in Korea, and Looking for a Job.

Teaching in Korea

Koreans want their children to learn English. More specifically, they want their children to earn high scores on English proficiency tests. Most specifically, they want their children to be in a class taught by a white person.

Yes, white. I'll talk more about racism later.

Korea is chock-full of hagwons-- private, individually-run "academies" where parents send their children to after-school classes. There are hagwons for every subject imaginable: taekwondo, piano, computers, math, Chinese orthography and-- of course-- English. Some hagwons focus specifically on English; others (as mine did) offer classes in a range of subjects including English. There are hagwons targeted specifically for adults, for high-school or middle-schoolers and, most popularly, for elementary age children.

If you get a job teaching English in Korea, unless you have some kind of TEFL certification, I can pretty much guarantee it'll be at a hagwon. When Koreans speaking English use the word "academy," incidentally, they mean hagwon.

Some hagwons are great, others are shady. There's very little government regulation, so you're on your own in making sure you get a job at a reputable place. There are ways to do this, as I'll discuss later.

My Time in Korea

I enjoyed my time in Korea quite a bit and would definitely recommend it. I paid off more than $5,000 in student loans and put a few thousand dollars aside in savings-- and this without even being conscientious about saving money. My salary for the year was roughly $18,000 (two million won) but that's with free housing and meals provided at work. I could easily have saved a lot more if I'd been frugal.

It was not a very difficult or challenging job-- very little time outside class was devoted to planning lessons, so I had quite a bit of free time to explore the country and enjoy myself. They don't expect you to know much about teaching, they just expect you to know English.

I was several months out of college; had been hoping for a job in Japan and nothing was coming through (mostly because I didn't know what avenues to take). In July, a friend suggested that I extend my job search to Korea. I figured, hey why not, checked out the postings on Dave's ESL Cafe and sent my resume to a handful of recruiters.

Within 24 hours a recruiter called and offered me a job. I was thrilled, signed the contract and faxed it, and was in Korea within a week.

In retrospect, I should have been a lot more cautious, but I got lucky and landed a job that I enjoyed immensely. I was in Suwon, just south of Seoul, and my apartment was quite literally across the street from a big old mountain perfect for hiking. Also short bus distance from a 19th century walled city that is simply spectacular. It took about half an hour to get to Seoul on the express bus, and so I would go up there on weekends to hang out. I loved living close to but not in Seoul.

I taught at a small, brand-new hagwon for elementary school students. The boss spoke no English, but the manager's English was quite good. They had never worked with an American before and were generally as clueless about me as I was about them, but they were very conscientious & caring and things worked out pretty well.

However, the contract wasn't followed to the letter. For one, it specified that I'd have my own one-bedroom apartment. Instead, I had a room in a two-bedroom apartment which I shared with my manager. His family lived in another city so he'd go see them on the weekends, and he was such a workaholic that I actually didn't see him all that often. The situation worked out pretty well, and I can't say I'm unhappy that I didn't get my own 1BR, but still-- it wasn't according to the contract.

Also, the contract promised health insurance. Every time I asked my boss about it (via the manager), my manager said that the boss was working on it. It eventually became apparent that they never intended to insure me; didn't understand why it was important. In retrospect, this is unacceptable and I should have kept demanding. However, whenever I was ill they took me to the doctor, paid for my appointments and for my medicines, and took good care of me. I'm confident that they would have taken responsibility for whatever health problems I did have... nevertheless, the contract stipulated that I would be insured and I wasn't actually insured. I wouldn't do this again.

The job was quite easy-- disappointingly easy, to be honest. It became quickly apparent that my main purpose was to attract students by attracting their parents. Knowing that their kids would be taught, in part, by an American made the parents more ready to send their kids to our school. I was given no training, very little structure, and basically a free hand to do whatever on earth I wanted to during classes. This was frustrating but also fun-- I got to develop my own curriculum and experiment however I saw fit. Some of my friends taught in much more structured programs where they had an exact curriculum to stick to; others had a similar lack of structure.

Interested as I am in second language acquisition I would have liked to have been in a program that was more structured and expected more of me. But I really can't complain about the job-- the kids were so so so so so much FUN!-- and the work was easy.

I'll say again, the kids were GREAT. I love working with elementary-age children, and it was such a blast to interact with them and such a thrill when I observed them making connections, figuring out how to use English in innovative ways, and generally have fun communicating in English. That alone made it worthwhile. Korean schoolchildren are notoriously overworked-- school all day and then after-school classes until the evening; THEN they've got homework both for school and for after-school classes-- so I tried to make classtime a chance for them to relax a little bit... but relax in English.

The contract offered me 10 days' vacation to be taken at my leisure; it turned out that there was no back-up for what to do with my classes while I was on vacation... the boss tried to make me take my vacation all in a chunk at the very end of my job-- in other words, just finish my job two weeks early. But I DID fight with that one, and ended up taking the vacation in little chunks-- basically take off a Monday to turn a weekend into a long weekend so that I could travel; that sort of thing. That gave me the chance to explore Korea quite a bit... a beautiful country, as I'm sure you recall.

Finding a Job

I'll tell you a bit about how to go about finding a job, but first there are a few caveats.

First, as I've mentioned, is racism. A lot of Koreans assume that all "real" Americans are white, and it'll be harder for non-white American to find a job than it was for me to do so. Of course the more reputable schools are aware that skin color has nothing to do with language ability, so your race will mostly eliminate jobs that would've been sketchy anyhow. It will also make your life in Korea a *little* more difficult than mine was-- there's a lot of migrant labor from India and Bangladesh and they sometimes get treated badly. If you can keep a thick skin I don't think the racism you encounter will make your life unpleasant-- and it'll do a lot of Koreans good to have that direct realization that a person can be American without being white. But be aware.

Second, the hagwon (private English-language school) business in Korea is almost totally unregulated. There are great jobs out there and there are sketchy jobs out there. There are ways, though, to ensure that you're being hired by an honest employer.

First, there's a lot of demand for English teachers. You can afford to be picky, and you can afford to turn down half-a-dozen offers before accepting the one that feels right.

Second, a lot of applications will ask for a photograph. This is fairly standard and shouldn't surprise you. If a hagwon doesn't ask for a photograph, you can be pretty certain it's on the up&up and that it's hiring on the basis of competence rather than appearance. But if they do ask for a photograph, don't be surprised, and don't assume that it's automatically a shady job.

Third, see the contract before making a commitment. Read the contract carefully, and make notes. Look specifically at
- kind of housing provided
- work week
- salary, or paid by the hour?
- overtime compensation
- required overtime?
- what are the hours? how far in advance will you be notified of scheduling? (usually, hagwons operate on a monthly basis and the schedule changes somewhat each month)
- how is the health insurance set up?
- vacation? Is it set or flexible?

Fourth, talk to another employee on the telephone before making a commitment. I took a risk and took a job at a hagwon that had never hired a foreigner before-- I was lucky, it was a great job. But in retrospect I would never again take a job without talking to another foreign employee there first.

Questions you want to ask:
1) Are you calling from work? Is anybody else listening to this conversation?
Believe it or not, a lot of employers will monitor an employee's conversation with an applicant. From an American perspective Koreans seem just generally nosy, so this doesn't automatically mean that the boss is being sketchy. It simply might never have occurred to him that you'd want to speak about the job in private. If the employee tells you that the conversation is being monitored, then take their phone number and ask when would be a good time to call them at home. You'll have to spend a few dollars on the phone card, but it's worth it.

2) How closely does your employer stick to the contract?
Contracts are still a new idea in Korean culture. They draw up contracts when hiring foreigners because they know we won't take a job without a contract. But many employers don't understand the contract as anything very important, and instead operate on a more traditional Korean patronage system-- the boss tells you what to do, you do what the boss says, and in turn the boss takes very good care of you. This isn't actually all that bad when you have a considerate boss. But it's very different from what we expect and frankly any company hiring Americans needs to stick exactly to the contract and needs to understand that this is the way you have to deal with Americans.

3) Go through the points of the contract and ask specifically-- "Did your contract say you'd be provided with a one-bedroom apartment?" "Were you provided with a one-bedroom apartment?" "Describe the apartment." "Is your vacation flexible as it says in the contract, or were you told when you could & couldn't take your vacation?" "Do you actually have health insurance?" and so on and so forth.

4) And finally, of course, ask if they like the job.

I hope this doesn't sound too paranoid-- as I've said, I had a wonderful time and most of my friends in Korea did as well. There are lots of great jobs out there, but I've heard a few horror stories as well. These are things you can do to ensure that you'll get one of the many good jobs.

I found my job through Dave's ESL Cafe <http://www.eslcafe.com/>, specifically the postings on the Korean Job Board < http://www.eslcafe.com/jobs/korea/>. This is the most widely-used Korean job posting that I know of. If you use it-- and it's as good a place to start as any-- just browse through the job ads that have been put up in the past several weeks and email your resume/ application to any that look like they might be interesting. Then when you start hearing back from them (and you WILL!) you can start discerning which sound the most promising.

I can pretty much guarantee that you'll be hired by a professional recruiter. Most hagwons in Korea are operated independently and the owner won't necessarily know any English-- he's just the guy who started up the company and hired the teachers. So the owners go through recruiting companies that do all the legwork of recruiting Americans to teach. Most of those job postings you see at Dave's ESL Cafe are posted by recruiters on behalf of individual hagwons.

So, if you want, you can go directly to the recruiter! I'd start with <http://www.peoplerecruit.com/>. I don't have any personal experience with them, but am very very impressed by the mission statement and overall outlook-- they're staffed by folks who used to be ESL teachers in Korea and they do a LOT of work to make sure that they're only representing reputable employers. Regardless, you should take a look at their FAQ section-- they'll give a lot of details on what life as an ESL teacher in Korea is actually like.

As you apply you'll have to discern 1) whether you'd rather be in Seoul or not in Seoul; and 2) if not in Seoul, whether you'd rather be urban or rural. You'll find that work in Seoul is higher-paying but that life is more expensive (even with free lodging). Seoul (and big cities like Busan) has a lot of Western amenities-- the fast food, the shopping malls, and so on. In rural areas you'll be paid less but the cost of living, eating, going out & so on will be much lower. You'll also have to find Korean ways to entertain yourself, as the Western amenities will be more sparse.

Seoul has a number of megachurches that offer English-language services and even small groups. Busan probably has a few, too. I have one friend who lived several hours out of Seoul but took the bus in every single weekend just to go to church. Korea is absolutely jampacked with churches and if you're willing to join a local Korean-language church (which I did and HIGHLY recommend) you'll have tons and tons and tons to choose from, and there's no better way to learn a language than to *worship* in that language. I was a member of St. Paul's Orthodox Church in Incheon, and it was the one place where I could be the only white person and not feel like an outsider.

You'll find it challenging to learn Korean, though-- Koreans generally don't expect foreigners to study their language, and any attempt on your part will be met either by bafflement ("why did you say 'hello' in Korean?") or by over-the-top affirmation ("you said 'hello' in Korean! you're amazing! you can speak the language like a native! good job! hurrah!"). If you're in a big city and willing to spend the time and the money there are a few Korean-language courses you might enroll in. But if you're conscientious about it (and it helps to find another English-speaking friend who also wants to learn), there are plenty of opportunities to study & practice the language; you'll find it incredibly rewarding.

I hope you can gather that I loved working in Korea and really want others to have the same fantastic experience. Do be careful as you discern but don't be daunted. It's a great gig.

learner feedback

2007-02-25T20:17:00.000-08:00

Among other things this semester I'm studying second language acquisition, and I'm attempting to acquire a second language-- Amharic.

It's fascinating to look at my own acquisition of Amharic in light of the theory we've been reading. In particular I'm taken by the interactionist approach.

Basically, the interactionist hypothesis states that interaction promotes language acquisition (duh!) for two reasons:

1) it increases opportunities for learners to receive comprehensible input. If you say something incomprehensible, I'll ask you to clarify and eventually you'll say something I can comprehend, thus facilitating my language acquisition.

2) it increases opportunities for learners to produce modified output. If I say something, and you don't understand it, I'll try again until I say something that makes sense. Then, as you correct my grammar, I'll keep revising my utterances. What's actually happening is that I'm forming hypotheses about how to produce language and then testing my hypotheses on you. Your reaction helps me to reject my false hypotheses and revise them-- eventually (hopefully) I'll hit on a hypothesis that produces grammatical language, and your reaction will confirm my hypothesis.

Of course, interaction isn't the only way learners acquire language, but it's among the most effective. It's one thing to memorize vocabulary and paradigms and quite another to practice using them in communicative language.

The thing with interaction is that you can't do it alone. And it takes a lot of scaffolding. For example, if the teacher asks you a question, you pay attention to every word he says, because you can manipulate those words in your response.

But what's happening, is the instructor's giving a lot of the instruction in English. So I'm not repeatedly exposed to the Amharic forms that I'm then expected to manipulate. It's as simple as this-- if he says, in Amharic, "tell me about your day," then I've got the Amharic word for "day" fresh in my mind and can start talking. But if he says it in English, then I've got to rack my brain "bother, what's the word for 'day' again?"

Yes, I should know the word for "day" by now (it's qen), but it's one thing to have a passive understanding of language and quite another thing to be able to spontaneously produce language. Spontaneous production is an end goal, but a pretty long-term goal-- think of how much easier it is to have a conversation in your native language than to give a speech in your native language. It's just naturally hard for us to produce language outside of an interactive setting. Because language was made for interaction.

Chinese-French

2007-01-31T12:32:00.000-08:00

This semester I'm working with, among others, a Chinese graduate student J who's teaching first-year French.

I was dubious when I heard about it... a Chinese girl teaching French? Are the students going to take her seriously?

Yesterday I did my first classroom observation and was blown away. J's command of French is spectacular, and she has her students drooling at her feet. It helps that she's a pretty Asian woman-- that's got ninety percent of the men eating out of her hand right there, but she's also just a really good teacher. The lecture was highly interactive, and when students didn't know the material she guided them towards figuring it out; and would reward them with an absolutely heart-melting smile.

The class was also very well-organized. She used PowerPoint and promised to make the lecture notes available online-- always a way to score big points with students. More importantly, she made good and efficient use of the slides. They weren't just there for show; they really did operate as the blackboard might operate in my classroom.

Another impressive thing J did was to acknowledge her limitations in English. For example, "How would you say sociable in English? 'Sociable,' or 'outgoing'?" and the students eagerly gave her feedback. It was a smart move for her to concede her students' expertise in the English language, while reinforcing her own proficiency in French. They trust J's French absolutely, as do I. I'm heavily biased against the language, but J speaks it with such authentic authority that from her it sounds almost lovely.

accent

2006-11-01T12:55:00.000-08:00

I'm listening to my student T's interview-- the first thing that struck me is that the interviewee has an obviously Hispanic accent. Initial reaction was negative-- T was supposed to find a native speaker of English! But after only a few seconds I realized, the interviewee is indeed a native speaker, most likely of Miami English.

It disturbs me more than a little that I had such a quick, automatic negative reaction about someone's dialect.

Midterm Interviews

2006-11-01T08:28:00.000-08:00

The midterm assignment for ASE 1 is an interview-- students must find a Gainesville resident and interview them. They record the interview and turn in to me a transcript of the first and last five minutes, as well as a recording of the interview.

So I'm reviewing the assignments now; reading the transcripts, listening to the interviews and to the recorded reactions that I also required. It is really, really fascinating.

First, because the interviewees are interesting and diverse.

Second, because I'm realizing how much my students are learning about Gainesville and Florida culture, through this project.

Third, it's really interesting to read the transcripts and see what phrases, what figures of speech my students understand, and what makes no sense to them. "The shopping is dismal," for example, was interpreted as "The shopping is dizzy mall" (which made as little sense to him as it would to you or me). My student K also could make neither head nor tail of "it redeems itself"-- he transcribed, "every deens is soft" with a big question mark afterwards. English speakers do not speak the way textbooks say we do, and entering into the fray of real live everyday English is, well, an adventure.

I don't think, though, that I want to teach idioms. Idiomatic language changes rapidly, and every speaker has his own idiosyncracies. I might well not totally understand a figure of speech used by another native speaker. The important thing is to be able to catch the nuances of speech, to distinguish when somebody is saying "uh" and when theyr'e saying "a", for example-- to interpret which bits of noise are meaningful and which meaningless. It's good, of course, to be able to speak in idiomatic language. But to memorize idioms and try to figure out when they're appropriate, will always be a losing battle. Translate idioms from your native tongue! Make up idioms on the spot! Listen to people speak, and experiment by repeating versions of the idioms you hear-- see what reactions you get.

Above all, don't be doctrinaire about language. Your teacher in Korea gave you a list of do's and don'ts and punished you when you disobeyed them. And what was the result? After more than a decade of studying English hard, you still can't speak the damn language. Time for a new strategy.

Verbal Illustrations

2006-10-17T08:51:00.000-07:00

For the next two weeks, as you give your presentations G and I will be looking at visual and verbal illustrations. Your topic, as we've previously mentioned, will be about a specific area of research or specialization within your field. This can be a presentation about research that you yourself are doing, but you shouldn't feel limited to your own specific research.

Presenting your research to a non-specialist audience is difficult, isn't it? You've been experts in your fields for years and years-- some of you for decades. It's hard to imagine what it's like to know almost nothing about your topic of specialization. But in order to effectively present information at any level, you must be able to identify with your audience. One great, great way to present complex and new information in an understandable way is to use visual illustrations and-- even more importantly-- verbal illustrations.

Many of you have been using visual illustrations, and suitable visual illustrations should absolutely be used whenever possible. You've mostly been relying on PowerPoint, and to a more limited extent the chalkboard. But there are other kinds of visual illustrations-- props, for example. A student in M's class gave a presentation several weeks ago on how to do a certain kind of paper-folding art, and she actually gave us all paper to fold together.

Presenting information visually as well as through sound is a good way to help your audience understand what you're presenting. This doesn't mean that showing pictures always helps your presentation. Let me emphasize that you're presenting information. So the visual illustration should be an aid in presenting that information to the audience.

In the next set of presentations, I want you to be sure to use at least one visual illustration. More importantly, I want you to make sure that all your visual illustrations are clear presentations of information-- a visual should add something to help clarify your presentation. Your presentation should not rely or depend on the visual, and the visual should not be your presentation, word-for-word. So be cautious, careful, and frugal in your choice of visual illustrations.

A good visual illustration is not an excuse for a poor presentation. And often, a concept is too abstract to be represented visually. So this is when we use verbal illustrations. I'm going to talk about four different kinds of verbal illustration-- examples, analogies, anecdotes, and metaphors. And in each of your presentations, G & I will expect you to use at least one of each kind of verbal illustration.

An example is one representative of a group as a whole. Use information that your audience already knows to help them learn what they do not know. Choose examples that are creative and interesting. For example, last week in M's class a chemistry student gave a presentation on a feature of some molecules called chirality. Because this is a concept unfamiliar to most of us, he gave the example of a mirror image. The mirror image of some objects, like a piece of paper, can be superimposed exactly onto it. But the mirror image of other objects, like a human hand, cannot be superimposed on the original. Molecules that, like a hand, do not have identical mirror images, are called chiral. So he used a concept-- mirror imagess-- that is familiar to all of us, in order to explain chirality, an unfamiliar concept.

There are two types of analogies-- correspondences, and inferences. The first kind of analogy is a correspondence in some respects between things otherwise dissimilar. You want to make an analogy to some other concept that your audience knows. So think about a pattern, relationship, or function that is similar to the concept you are defining. Use analogies especially in situations where the concept is so unfamiliar that you simply cannot think of any ordinary examples of it. Use the words "like" or "as." For example, if you're describing the structure of an atom, you might make an analogy to the solar system. Electrons orbit around a nucleus in the same way that planets orbit around the sun.

The second type of analogy is an inference that if two things are alike in some respects, they must be alike in others. For example, you might say that if higher tuition in California universities meant that fewer international students could study there, then it follows that raising tuition at UF would make life more difficult for international students here.

Another great kind of verbal illustration is an anecdote. An anecdote is a very short account of an interesting or humorous incident. Try using a story or event from your own life to help your audience understand new material. People have an easier time remembering stories, and anecdotes can be very effective attention-getters. Practice telling the anecdote in advance, so that you can tell it without hesitation or looking at your notes. Even if the anecdote is humorous, don't laugh while telling it-- let your audience do the laughing. Earlier in this semester a student in Melanie's class was talking about Hurricane Katrina, and she used a short anecdote about a friend of hers who was living in New Orleans while the hurricane hit. This really helped us to visualize the catastrophe, and understand the point of her talk.

Finally, let's talk about metaphors. A metaphor is a figure of speech in which a term that ordinarily designates an object or idea is used to designate a different object or idea in order to suggest a comparison or analogy. A metaphor is often helpful in creating visual images. One example of an analogy I think you've all heard is the University of Florida marketing campaign that uses the phrase "Gator Nation." They don't actually mean a country full of alligators, but since the university's mascot is a Gator, the Gator Nation is a metaphor for students, researchers, faculty and alumni of UF.

To conclude-- these two coming weeks, as you present an area of your specific research, you should focus on making the presentations clear and understandable by using visual and verbal illustrations. Your visual illustrations must be aids-- not substitutes-- to the presentation, and you must use a minimum of four verbal illustrations-- an example, an analogy, an anecdote, and a metaphor. Don't forget to employ all the skills and techniques we've worked on up to this point-- audience awareness, good organization, and effective questions. I'm confident that your use of good visual and verbal illustrations, in conjunction with the skills you've already mastered, will make this next round of presentations clear, understandable, and interesting.

Co-construction

2006-04-04T20:08:00.000-07:00

Co-construction: An Introduction. By Sally Jacoby and Elinor Ochs

Far as I can tell, co-construction means the joint creation of shit. All kinds of shit, by all kinds of people, in all kinds of ways.

I'm not impressed. But I can see that it will be a useful term to use.

Shaping up an idea for this study that I'm to propose. Am reading a study right now-- will report more on it later-- observing non-native speakers working in group projects with native speakers. To what degree are NNSs regarded as collaborators with equal ability to contribute, and to what degree are they regarded as burdens, who have little to add?

I'm reminded of the microteach I did last semester with B, a woman from Thailand. I dominated it-- I came up with the idea, and as we led the class, when I felt that she wasn't moving discussion along in the right way, I went ahead and moved it along. She acquiesced. Why? 1) I was impatient. 2) We didn't spend enough time in real preparation, clearly outlining one another's roles and clarifying mutual (or separate!) goals for the session. 3) We didn't play to her strengths? She has much more teaching experience than I do; I'm more comfortable with American culture and the English language than she is-- perhaps we divided labor in the wrong way?

But that's a tangent. I'd like to build on this idea of collaboration in a slightly different way-- hierarchical, but with the NNSs as the experts and the NSs as the novices. NNSs as the teachers, mentors, or research partners of NSs. So while the tendency is for NS-NNS interactions to become hierarchical with the NSs as the experts, the institutional design of the interactions I'm looking at will have a reversed hierarchy-- the NNSs are teaching, tutoring, grading or advising the NSs.

So we've got tension-- the hierarchy wants to be NS --> NNS , but it's been institutionalized as NNS --> NS . The NS has to acknowledge the NNS, despite language deficiencies, as the expert in the subject matter. And the NNS has to acknowledge the NS's English expertise in a meaningful and constructive way. So ideally, this is a co-construction and a collaboration

NNS --> NS expertise in subject matter <--> expertise in language
NNS <-- NS

The goal is to succesfully communicate the subject matter so that the student can successfully carry out assigned tasks-- complete the labs, perform well on tests, master the material. The NNS's English ability is incidental, mattering only inasmuch as it facilitates or inhibits successful communication.

Modeling, take two

2006-02-21T13:11:00.000-08:00

I'm still bad at time management. I'll sit there in the conference room and just chat with the poor students.

S modeled a presentation today, and I will on Thursday. This next topic will be something in the presenter's field of study, and they'll have to ask FIVE interactive questions. We'll see how that goes.

Modeling

2006-02-15T14:57:00.000-08:00

S & I have discussed some changes to ASE 1 Video / Feedback. One change this semester is that the students are being given assignments: the first presentation was how to do a process-- cake recipe, for example. Second was about a place they'd visited, and for the third they're telling a fairytale or folk tale from their home country. G & M haven't decided on the fourth yet.

There are some great ways to frame a folktale, and a lot of very fun and interesting storytelling devices that can be used. S & I don't think our students are taking advantage of this, and we're wondering whether the students would be better if one of us modeled a presentation.

If we're to do this, then next week I (or S) would start class by introducing the fourth round of presentations, both the topic and the emphases (next week's will be audience awareness, specifically asking & answering questions, as well as adapting the talk for a non-specialst/ specialist audience). Then I'd give a presentation, modeling the skills that I'd just discussed.

Of course this would be good. It would give the students a sample to work from, would hopefully give them some ideas about visual aids, transition techniques, ways of getting the audience involved, etc. And it would be good for me. I'd have T video me just like she videos the students, and so would have visual/ audio data of myself to be analyzed. But it would also be a hell of a lot of work.

I think it's worth it. But the schedule is pretty tight. Will talk with S again soon (tomorrow, maybe) and if she still thinks it's a good idea, we'll go for it. It'll make me a better teacher.

Purpose

2006-02-15T14:48:00.000-08:00

Met with H, and I still don't have a clear feel for the direction we're going with the English hour. It seems mostly to be spot-checking: I notice an error and work with her on it, or she brings issues to my attention and we deal with them. This is okay, but I want to think that a more driven, goal-oriented approach is possible.

And in the course of the Korean hour, have clarified my purpose somewhat. My homework this week is to learn to complain. "I don't know! I don't understand! This is difficult! I'm tired!" It's easy to get bogged down in grammar; it's easy to get bogged down in phonology. But I'd like to have some prefabricated chunks of language under my belt, so that when we dive back into grammar & phonology, there's a reference point.

Why am I studying Korean? Mostly, because it's there. H wanted help with English but couldn't afford to pay me, so we're doing an exchange. That's the ad hoc reason, sure, but in order to direct my language acquisition I need something sturdier.

And let's face it, pure theory bores me. I don't want to sit my native speaker down and examine syntactic oddities for the sake of a thesis. I want to be able to communicate fluently. Because it's useful, just in principle.

"Because it's useful, just in principle" is a vague motivation. Motivations that have worked: 1) got to pass the class! 2) will sink & drown without it! "Because it's interesting" just ain't strong enough. So if I'm going to make this hour of Korean effective and useful, I need to invest more into it.

More on that later. I'm not sure how.

Prosody

2006-02-15T12:23:00.000-08:00

This week I've started tutoring S, an Egyptian who's been fluent in English for nearly a decade. She has a marked but unobtrusive accent-- a little like a brogue, honestly. Wants to eliminate her accent, or at least develop the ability to switch it on and off, because she's going into pharmacology and some of the older more ornery patients have a hard time understanding her.

Her worries are mostly strict pronunciation: the th/s distinction, and the ability to accurately say drug names. And with the exception of a few simple pronunciation errors (saying 'iron' /airon/ instead of /aiern/ [where 'e' is a schwa], for example) , s/th is the only consistent pronunciation problem.

But there is more, and after just one hour working with her here's how I'll describe it: her prosody isn't native. It's like she's mapping English pronunciation onto an inflexible pattern of stress and intonation. So sounds that shouldn't be emphasized will be emphasized, and important sounds will be de-emphasized. Makes for lovely, lilting speech, but not native-sounding American English. We subordinate prosodic features to semantic meaning: important sounds are louder, last longer, and have higher/lower pitch than less important sounds. Our speech can sound choppy and erratic because we're not mapping sounds onto a prosodic pattern: rather we're mapping a meaning-based prosodic pattern onto our sounds.

I have two 60-second sound files of S speaking-- one of her reading aloud from a technical article, and one of her chatting naturally. I need to spend some time analyzing these, see how well I can figure out exactly what she's doing re. stress & intonation. This is going to be a really tough nut to crack, and I've no idea to what extent I can actually help her. I want to say, "don't worry about it! Your English is fluent, your accent is gorgeous, and everybody loves you!" But for her job she does need to be able to switch off that pretty Coptic lilt at will.

At this point, though, I have no idea how to help her.

Raising Awareness

2006-02-15T12:04:00.000-08:00

Y, the Japanese girl I tutor, has a linguistics exam coming up and wanted to work, more or less, on IPA transcription. Frankly, I never prepare well enough for this session, am never sure in advance what to work on, don't have a clear syllabus in mind you might say. We just work on issues as they crop up.

But last week I identified a vowel shift between the /i/ in 'see' and in 'she.' After the /sh/, she was pulling her tongue back, turning /i/ into a central vowel [wish blogger could do IPA]. After working a little bit on that, I recorded her saying 'see, she, see, she, see...' emailed the recording to her, and gave her homework to record herself making these alternations and listen to note whether there's a vowel shift-- and if so, how the vowel is shifting. That worked really, really well. Today she came in with a very clear understanding that after /sh/ she has a tendency to centralize /i/. We practiced consciously pushing the tongue forward after /sh/, and Y was able to make a clean /i/ every time.

I'm a technophobe, but excited by this idea of using recording equipment to raise awareness of how one is pronouncing. It's one thing to make an utterance and analyze it while it's being made-- that breaks down pretty quickly, because you don't speak the same when you're listening carefully to yourself. But with recording equipment, you can make the utterances first, and reflect accurately on them afterwards.

And today we ended up working mostly on transcription. Frankly I never took an undergrad linguistics course and haven't been trained in IPA transcription, am pretty bad at it. I admitted that right off the bat, and then we went right in to some vowel issues.

I'm fascinated that she can pronounce some vowels quite accurately, but evidently isn't aware that they are/ aren't distinct vowels-- exactly what a native speaker would do. Said the words 'love' and 'raw' perfectly, then was hard pressed to tell me whether their vowels are the same or different. I got her to look at the IPA transcriptions-- the two vowels have all the same features except that the 'love' vowel is unrounded and the 'raw' vowel is rounded. I said all the words and had her watch my lips; she distinguished the rounded/ unrounded vowels perfectly. Then I had her say the words and watch her own lips; despite flawless pronunciation she was unable to distinguish between rounded and unrounded vowels. So I made her exaggerate: 'pucker up and say "love." Can you do it? Now grin widely and say "love." Does that work?" And when she puckered up she could hear the vowel shift and the word sound unnatural.

Y picked up on this very quickly, and just a third of the way into the list of ten words was able to distinguish rounded from unrounded each time.

So I didn't teach her to make any sounds she was previously unable to make, but was able to raise her awareness of what happens, re. the mouth's mechanics, when a vowel is rounded or unrounded. That's a tiny, tiny step. It will definitely aid her in the exam; will this kind of thing help her to pronounce English more accurately?

In a strict sense, no. She could already make the sounds accurately; we were just thinking about how to describe them.

But in a general sense, yes. She's more aware of her mouth's mechanics, more able to accurately reflect "so what did my tongue/ lips just do there? what would happen if I made them do this instead?" This heightened awareness of her own vocal apparatus should definitely help her observe and reproduce native speech.

Second shoot

2006-02-15T09:21:00.000-08:00

Shot my Bangladeshi electrical engineer for the second time yesterday. This time I walked away from the shoot with four pages of notes. How? Brought an ASE assistant along to do the taping for me; I listened in the earpiece and concentrated on observing. I'll still have to watch the tape at least once, and will probably do a bit of transcription. Have been on my toes ever since the shoot and haven't had a chance to reflect on it. Ideally, after a shoot I'll sit down for twenty minutes and write about it, but don't foresee that happening any time soon. Will definitely bring T with me as often as she's willing to come.

R has a command of the material and his pronunciation ain't awful. There are a few issues we'll work on. As is typical of international TAs, he has very high expectations of his students. They should have paid attention during the lecture; they should have done the pre-lab; they should know what's going on. When he introduced the lab he said multiple times, "it's very simple."

Well, simple it ain't. Not to this former English major, at any rate. And the students should be able to do the lab on their own without his help-- but he's paid to be there when they can't do what they ought. I've seen him get frustrated and basically do the work for the students: "No, the wire goes here" as he puts the wire where it goes. The trick, of course, the thing they're paying me to help him find, is to 1) identify the problems. 2) get the student to figure out the answer. Monitor, supervise, guide, but don't get impatient and do the work for the kid. That won't help her a bit.

Korean

2006-02-15T09:10:00.000-08:00

I'm doing language-exchange; teach English for an hour, get Korean help for an hour. The problem is that I'm not doing my homework-- nor do I have clearly defined homework. It's in my control; H is my test subject. Ideally, this is where I work my skills as a budding linguist, where I theorize and hypothesize for hours and then sit her down with a microphone and make her produce speech.

Or, where I break down and buy myself a textbook, spend five to six hours a day going through it, and then in the hour with H check up on the more difficult or ornery problems; get feedback. She's not a trained language teacher, and Koreans are notoriously bad at reflecting on their own language. But she's a native speaker, and that's a valuable asset.

Textbook seems the wisest course of action. It's not the best way to learn a language, but at least it's a map. Follow it and you'll get somewhere. Textbook, flashcards, the deal. Time-consuming, but I do have time if will only order it better. I need to schedule an hour of Korean per day right there into the desktop calendar, and stick to it.

ASE 2 feedback

2006-02-08T09:21:00.000-08:00

Last week I had two shoots, and this week I'm reviewing the tapes and conferencing with the two students.

This is very, very time-consuming. I've had to view each shoot more than once (and that's 40 minutes of tape!) in order to get a sense of the session, and in order to pinpoint specific interactions for analysis. I'd say I've spent between three and four hours on each one, not counting the time it takes to do the shoot, nor the time it takes to conference.

It shouldn't take me this long. Problems?

1. Lack of preparation. Taking twenty to thirty minutes to prepare beforehand should save me hours later. If I show up early to the shoot, I can take my time setting up and chat with the instructor about what he expects from the session. By coming in late, I miss parts of the pre-lab lecture (most important part!) and don't have a clear understanding of what's going on and why.

2. Attentive viewing. I'd been running the video in the background while writing emails or reading. The excuse, of course, is that the video is long and boring. It is. But if I spent forty minutes paying close attention, taking lots of notes, and occasionally rewinding to re-view a specific interation, I might not have to do more than one viewing.

3. Bringing an assistant. Next week, an ASE assistant will accompany me on my shoots, so that I can take notes while she runs the camera. That should save me a considerable amount of time & energy.

4. Equipment check. Before going, I need to be certain to double-check that I have working earphones, so that I can hear the interactions as they occur. That was one of the problems with the first shoot-- the audio recorded fine, but I couldn't hear it while it was happening, so watching the video was really my first time to observe the teacher's interactions.

5. Transcription? For both of these sessions, I've prepared for conferencing by pinpointing about five minutes of interaction and transcribing them word-for-word. This is good for me because it forces me to focus very intensively on just a few moments, and it's good for the instructor because he can look over the transcript with me-- it's harder to discuss video, as it's happening in real-time. But it takes twenty to twenty-five minutes to transcribe five minutes of dialogue-- time-consuming! I'm not prepared to abandon transcription at this point, but eventually I need to come up with a more efficient way of analyzing video.

6. Practice! Let's face it, the more shoots I go on, the more times I analyze tape, the more times I conference, the easier it will be. I'll have a better sense, before-hand, of what I should be looking for.

nervous

2006-01-30T16:15:00.000-08:00

Today in Applied English Grammar I "led discussion" on the topic of "Grammar, grammars and grammaticality" from our textbook. It was challenging.

Only a few days ago I'd bragged to a friend about my ease in front of a classroom, about how I draw energy from performing before a group. But today's presentation was nerve-wracking. Why?

1. Audience. I was giving a presentation in my professor's class, and my presentation was being graded by the professor.

2. Lack of precedent. I was the first; all my colleagues will follow, week after week. I'd not yet seen examples, positive or negative, of how the discussion session might proceed.

3. Time! I'd thought that I would have ten minutes but was given twenty. I didn't have enough material prepared for that much time!

4. Lack of preparation. I knew the material pretty well, but had not rehearsed ways of extracting the information from the students. So it wasn't interactive, wasn't much of a discussion. It was more of a lecture.

There's no clock in the room, so I asked a friend to keep time for me. That helped a lot-- both because I was able to tell how much time I had left, and also because it established rapport with at least one member of the audience. That rapport was for my benefit-- even if the rest of the class was against me, Semra was on my side.

Organization could have been better. I'm always bad with that. Had notes, had an outline, and they certainly helped. I'd find myself straying from the outline depending on the class's response-- if someone in the class brought up an issue that was farther down on my outline, I'd go ahead and address that issue. This is a strength of loosely planned talks, I believe, and encourages interactivity: the style and content of my teaching is directly influenced by the audience. But it also becomes easier to stray along a tangent, or to skip an issue and forget to return to it.

There was no real conclusion. I finished all the points on the outline, went back to discuss grammaticality a little more but could get no reaction or comments from the class, and so even though I could have gone for three more minutes, said "Well, that's all I've got" and sat down.

Of course I won't be doing this again, not this semester, though in future classes I'm sure I'll be asked to do something similar. I'm glad I got it out of the way, and there may well be brownie points for going first-- but as I observe my colleagues give their presentations, I'd like to reflect on what I might have done differently.

difficulty

2006-01-12T08:15:00.000-08:00

'I am anxious' means that anxiety is happening to me. But:

*'I am difficult' does not mean that difficulty is happening to me.

Explain.

accent reduction

2005-12-07T12:58:00.000-08:00

I'm tutoring a Japanese girl in pronunciation. She's an aspiring linguist, conscientious and sharp: thus, we've been working on some very fine distinctions. Today she asked me about the quality of her voice. She said that she thinks that Americans speak more from their chest and their throat. I agree: English is more guttural than Japanese, and English spoken by a Japanese person does strike native speakers as tense, spoken from the front of the mouth.

The problem is that I don't have a precise way to describe this, only vague generalizations. "English is more guttural; English is less tense; English has a lower pitch." It's easy to describe the difference between a dental and an alveolar fricative: for the one, the tongue touches the teeth, for the other it doesn't. Much harder to distinguish between a high-pitched and a guttural voice. "Your voice needs to be more in the back of your throat." But the voice is not an object, like the tongue or the teeth. When I say, "your voice is lower," what am I really saying?

It has something to do with tension. However, my student feels that many English sounds are more tense than Japanese sounds. This is because English requires her to use underdeveloped muscles: working those muscles makes her mouth feel tense. Likewise, Japanese may feel tense to me because I'm using muscles that haven't had much exercise. So to say, "in English, your mouth is less tense than it is in Japanese" may to some degree be true, but it isn't helpful.

It has something to do with pitch: constricting and relaxing the vocal folds. But there's more to it than just this, and besides this is a very relative judgment. An American soprano is going to have a higher-pitched voice than a Japanese baritone.

It has something to do with the tongue, but I can't quite describe what.

Continuation

2005-11-29T12:06:00.000-08:00

I handed in my teaching journal today, but would like to keep this blog up and running. It was really useful to review and look over the entries again, as I was compiling and editing them. It's just useful to keep a record of my reflections: what challenges I've faced, what questions I've had, and how those questions, how my perceptions of those challenges, have changed over time.

Saw a film the other day that talked about what it means to be a "student-athlete" as opposed to an "athlete." In the same spirit, I'm not simply a teacher. I'm a student-teacher. It will be useful, in this space, to reflect not only on my development as an educator, but also as an educatee.

In TESL class today we discussed and reflected upon the observations we'd done this semester. The teacher commented that, in retrospect she can see that some of the teachers that were observed simply are not good teachers. In particular, she complained that a few of the observed teachers didn't follow the lesson plan or the syllabus; they were relaxed and basically winged it.

There is absolutely such a thing as an underprepared teacher, and there is absolutely such a thing as winging it in order to fill out class-time, rather than to progress towards a goal. However, I'm not convinced that a structured lesson plan is always the best way to teach a class.

Lessons do need to be planned. The instructor absolutely needs to have a solid understanding of what the students can do, and what they need to learn. Classroom activities should always be structured with this in mind: we're going somewhere, not just passing time.

It's popular these days to think of information being organized in a non-linear manner. Instead of categorizing information on the internet, we do Google searches. Contemporary linguistics research suggests that, rather than processing information in order to create intelligible sound, we cluster it. And I'm tempted to think of lesson plans in a similar way.

There is definitely a linear progression of time throughout a semester, and from the beginning to the end of a class. And there is a linear structure to much education: first you learn the foundation, then you learn the details. While there's constant negotiation among levels (the "zone of proximal development"), it seems useful to teach first one thing and then the next.

Nevertheless, there needs to be room for spontenaity and flexibility. Let's say that the students need to work on linking & reduction. I can structure a lesson plan that first shows an example of the way native speakers link & reduce sounds, then ask students for examples from their L1s, get them to come up with examples from English, provide some more examples, give some time for practice, and so on...

Or I can brainstorm ways to make them conscious of linking & reduction, materials that will teach the English method of linking & reduction, stress-identification activities, pronunciation practice, fluency practice, and the like. I can prepare these materials, and have them with me all week, and insert them as I find the opportunity. The "topic" of class that week might be something totally unrelated, perhaps something having to do with vocabulary. But I might spend ten minutes on Monday introducting linking & reduction, and then as we work on other things throughout the week, throw in practice on linking and on reduction. If I observe the students becoming very conscious of the way their speech flows, I might interrupt whatever else is going on and spend half an hour working on fluency.

In a real sense, this is a way to intelligently "wing it." Rather than structuring every second of class time, I keep an eye on the students, keep an eye on their needs, and constantly adapt activities to suit their immediate problems, without forgetting long-term goals. While any given day of class might depart wildly from the lesson plan, I would still be teaching effectively.

Issues?

2005-11-28T15:57:00.000-08:00

I've become convinced that time management is the biggest issue facing effective teaching. I don't mean this as a generalization about all pedagogy, but rather as the way I ought to approach teaching, for the time being at least. If I'm to manage class time effectively, I must be well-prepared. I must understand my students' needs and abilities. I must be able to think on my feet, and to adapt the lesson plan according to the students' pace and progress.

A good rule of thumb is to have more planned than can be accomplished in one class period, and then to prioritize. "Today we're going to work on linking and reduction." So I plan to spend some time discussing what "linking & reduction" is, demonstrate it in my own speech, elicit examples from the students, give them some mechanics as well as handouts, and then time for practice. But what if they've all already got it down pretty well? I need to be ready to fine-tune their speech. What if, on the other hand, they can't even get the concept? I need to figure out where the gap is, and spend class time teaching to that. What if some have got it down well, and others are struggling with the concept itself? I need to find a way to diversify class activities so that everyone's doing something meaningful. And always with an eye on the clock. Those fifty minutes need to build on the previous class, and lay the groundwork for the following class. To do this, I can't get bogged down in minutae, but neither can I plan to little and spend ten or more minutes just trying to make the time stretch.

If I have five activities planned, and realize that we'll only get through two, which two are the most important? In order to assess this on the spot, I need to be well-prepared, and constantly conscious of the clock.

Don't want to be overt, though, don't want to cut students off and say "sorry, there's just not enough time." Sometimes there's no choice, but if it's possible to watch every second while maintaining the illusion that everybody is having their say and saying as much as they want to-- that, of course, is ideal.

Discussion

2005-11-28T15:00:00.000-08:00

This coming Wednesday will be the last day of ASE 2, the course that has essentially been my apprenticeship as an instructor in the Academic Spoken English program. I've been reflecting on it over the past few days, especially on how it's shaped my understanding of good teaching.

ASE 2 is a very interactive class, and is in some senses devoid of content. That is to say, its goal is to nurture a skill or set of skills, rather than to impart information. Whether the class does or does not cover any given topic is relatively unimportant: what matters is that the students get consistent feedback on their spoken English and communication skills, and that they have a forum where they can discuss issues with us and with their peers. Our job is to guide and to fill in the gaps. This said, even our "lectures" more closely resemble teacher-guided discussion than they do the one-way imparting of information.

This semester I've come to really value that interactive aspect of teaching; what you might call guiding a student towards self-discovery. The teacher is, in a sense, more like an enthusiastic coach, pushing the students towards their goals, making sure they practice, teaching them skills as the need arises, but not imparting information in a formal way. This is the method we've been modeling for the students who are themselves teachers.

And in a teacher-training course it's probably the best model. You really only learn this sort of thing through practice, so the teacher's job is to multiply the opportunities for practice and to guide the practice.

But other classes have different goals. Even ASE 1 and ASE 3 will be different. There is a right and a wrong way to pronounce certain segments, and learning correct pronunciation does not involve negotiation. To make a "th," you put your tongue between your teeth. No exceptions. And in the sciences, especially introductory level, it will be similar. The students need to know how to take measurements correctly. They need to know how to correctly analyze data. There are clear-cut situations in which a room has one expert and many novices, and it's the expert's job to impart knowledge to the novices.

And this is something I haven't practiced or concentrated on much (at all!) this semester. Maybe that's OK. Academic Spoken English certainly involves far more coaching than it does lecturing, and it's probably safe to say that most ITA's are pretty good at being authorities in their field; their weaknesses relate to interactive communication, so this is the area that needs to be developed. Fair enough. But it's not all there is.