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.

Video

2005-11-28T13:53:00.000-08:00

I was taped last Wednesday, teaching part of the ASE 2 lecture for the day, on "group discussion." I watched the video right after class.

It was the first time I've seen myself teach. Every week in ASE 1 the students see themselves on video, and often freak out. "I didn't know I sounded like that." "Is that what I really look like?" Because of this, I was a little nervous about watching myself on tape.

The surprising thing is that I was impressed: I liked my voice, and I liked my presence, in generaly. Did notice a few nervous tics, and a habit to lean forward with my hands on the chair, when I could have been moving more.

Class was structured so that I first introduced a brief discussion: the students broke into groups and had to discuss a topic chosen from a variety written on the blackboard. We then talked for a few minutes about what ideas about discussion had come up in the course of the short discussion, using that to transition into a talk about what makes up a successful discussion, as well as the benefits of using discussion as a teaching technique. Finally, they took half an hour to actually have a discussion, moderated by one of the students; Gordon and I sat back to watch.

My goal was basically to present a few ideas on useful skills and behaviors both for moderators and participants in a discussion, and I wanted it to be as interactive as possible, ideally eliciting most or all of the ideas from the class. In a sense, it was similar to the PowerPoint presentation from the previous week-- I had an outline in mind, and my job was to elicit that outline from the students. Not having PowerPoint, however, did give me more flexibility.

I decided to write down ideas on the board, as students mentioned them. There were two reasons for this: 1) for me to make sure all important issues had been covered 2) as a reference for the students during their moderated discussion. Writing the issues & skills down also encouraged participation, I hoped-- by writing down what they said, I showed the students that their words mattered. They were creating the material, in a sense.

I'm a visual learner and need this reference. A thing can be explained to me a thousand times, but I won't get it until I have a brief outline of it written down. I realized, upon watching the video, that perhaps noting down the issues the students brought up was more important for me than it was for them. This tactic tied me to one spot, and it made it harder to listen to the students: they were less willing to speak while I wrote, despite my assurances that I was still listening. It's also awkward, though not impossible, to maintain eye contact while writing on the blackboard. Writing their ideas also created an implicit hierarchy: it was obvious that if I didn't write something down, then no matter how important I said it was, I didn't consider it very relevant.

It was a pretty interactive lecture: I asked questions, but they provided the content. They had good things to say, and my only job was to synthesize and organize what they were saying, and to keep them on task. Not very tough. Next time I teach a similar lesson, I'd like to think about different ways of presenting the material. The blackboard was definitely better than PowerPoint-- it gave me more flexibility and the students more control-- but it has its drawbacks as well.

Some other ways of keeping track of a lecture:
- nothing. Talk, ask questions, take my own notes and summarize/ repeat information based on those notes. It's the students' responsibility, as the discussion progresses, to take their own notes based not on any written material but on what we talk about, and what I emphasize.
- handouts. Write up an outline of the presentation, print out a copy for each student, and distribute the copies. The students can take additional notes on the handouts.
- nothing, but make my notes accessible on the Internet after class.
- assign each student to keep track of a different aspect of the presentation. Give them 5 - 10 min towards the end of class to "compare notes": to re-hash, in their own words, what in the lecture was important, and how best to remember it.
- handouts of details: provide handouts, not of the outline of the presentation, but of quotes, examples, photographs, and the like. The handouts are not designed to replace or even augment the notes, but rather to serve as visual aids that the teacher can reference and give illustrations from.
- PowerPoint on a similar model: not the skeleton of the lecture, but rather maps/ pictures/ charts to go along with the lecture.

Power Point

2005-11-16T07:35:00.000-08:00

I've never been a fan of Power Point presentations; as an undergraduate in English I never had a professor make use of the program. A number of my video/ feedback students in ASE 1 are giving almost all of their presentations in Power Point. In general, I'm unimpressed. It's too easy to put a bunch of text up on the board and then just read it. Some students have made use of the program to put up visual aids; some of these have been successful. But there are dozens of other ways of using visual aids without plugging them into expensive slideshow software.

Today Gordon had me deliver a short talk on the effective use of Power Point in a lecture. He provided me with a very good, well-organized PowerPoint slideshow which was a useful tool for what I think was a pretty good lecture. However, it was still very limiting.

There was a great deal of interaction with the students, but that interaction was pretty much limited to prompting them to say whatever was next on the slideshow. I was eliciting information-- not any relevant information, but rather the precise information that had already been prepared, in the exact order it had been prepared in. One of the students, in our earlier discussion about PowerPoint, had compared the program to a movie. It's already scripted, nothing about it is flexible, the student's job is simply to sit back and watch the show. There's no room for variation, no room for response to questions.

The best thing about the PowerPoint slideshow is that it had a structure and an outline. My talk today was one of the best things I've taught, mostly because it was well-planned and organized (and I'm not the one who put it together). Once I had the outline and the structure, though, the actual slideshow wasn't that much of a boon. I could have written my outline on the blackboard just as easily, with the advantage of being able to adapt the outline to what was elicited from the students.

I'm torn. On the one hand, I don't like PowerPoint and don't ever want to use it. I believe I could have given a better, more flexible talk, without being tied to the slideshow. On the other hand, my students are using PowerPoint in their lectures and will be expected to use it hin future academic presentations. It's my responsibility to help them use it well.

Lesson Plans

2005-11-14T18:31:00.000-08:00

These are lesson plans for the first week of an ASE 1 class. As I’ve never taught ASE 1 and am not familiar with its exact syllabus and requirement, the actual plans may be somewhat different. This is a starting point.

Students: graduate students at the University of Florida; advanced English speakers with a variety of L1s. They will all have scored similarly on the SPEAK test, but may have diverse levels of proficiency. An important part of the first few lessons will be determining where the students are & what their needs are.

Goals: score of 50 or higher on the SPEAK test. Ss are in this class because of low SPEAK scores, so T needs to recognize that they will participate more readily if they see how the class will address their goals of better test performance. T needs to emphasize that effective English communication = high test score. T's goals are for students to be able to communicate effectively in American academia. As most Ss will be TAs, this encompasses all areas of effective spoken English.

The classroom should have a computer with Internet access connected to an overhead projector.

Objectives for the week:
- Ss & T will have shared understanding of the motivations & objectives for the course
- Ss, by gaining basic fluency in the IPA, will acquire tools for independent pronunciation work
- Ss will be acquainted w/ one another, & comfortable & relaxed interacting w/ one another.
- Ss will be encouraged to bring up issues related to their English communication skills

Day 1: Course Goals

Objectives:
- Ss & T begin negotiating objectives of class
- Ss get acquainted & comfortable
- T acquires ethnographic data on Ss, as well as general idea of their strengths & weaknesses

Chit-chat (10 min)
- T introduces self to Ss as they enter, makes small talk and endeavors to get Ss chatting. This establishes a relaxed classroom atmosphere and lowers the affective filter by showing Ss that T is interested in them as people. It should also give T a sense of what the classroom dynamic will be like
Roll call (5 min)
- T intro's roll call as a way for the students to remember one another's names. T ensures that name pronunciation is accurate, makes sure that Ss are being called by their preferred names. T asks each S to briefly introduce self-- national origin, field of study. T takes note of ethnographic data, as well as getting a general sense of S confidence & ability.
Discussion (10 min)
- T asks Ss to think about their goals for the class, and briefly intro's T's goals for the course: effective academic English communication. T prompts Ss to consider what is involved in effective communication
Coffee Break (10 min)
- Before breaking, T encourages Ss to consider their goals for the course. Ss are then released to spend a few minutes getting coffee or tea and chatting with one another. The hope is that they will get better acquainted with one another in a relaxed atmosphere, so as to be comfortable interacting in the future. This is also a chance for the T to observe S interaction so as to better understand their individual strengths & weaknesses.
Discussion (10 min)
- Ss discuss their goals for the course. T ensures that each S gets a chance to speak, and encourages reticent Ss to elaborate on their ideas. Some Ss may simply be shy or frightened, and it will take a few more classes for them to open up, so T should be careful not to push too hard. However, Ss should be made aware that T is interested in everybody's input-- nobody can hide out in the back.
- T writes S goals on the board, asks other Ss for input on each goal
- time permitting, T talks about own goals for the class (and why)

for next class:
T looks over the variety of L1s in the class in order to get a sense of what cultural and pronunciation issues to expect.

Day 2: IPA

Objectives: Students will have a sense of the relationship of pronunciation to other aspects of spoken English, and will have a basic understanding of what the IPA is and how phonetic transcription can aid them in independent pronunciation work.

Materials: IPA chart for English

Chit-chat, coffee & issues (10 min)
- class begins informally, Ss have chance to get coffee or tea, T gets them to talk about how the semester is going, what classes are like, what issues/ problems they anticipate or are already confronting. Anything that cannot be addressed immediately should be taken note of, to be addressed in future classes and used in future plans. T wraps up with roll-call, again emphasizing its purpose in helping Ss learn one another's names. T should continue starting classes with roll-call until observing all Ss comfortable with all names.
Discussion (15 min)
- T prompts S's to generate list of skills involved in academic communication, then fills out important areas they've missed:
- asking & fielding Q's
- cultural differences
- pronunciation
- enunciation
- fluent speech
- vocabulary
- grammar
- emphasize that effective communication is possible without perfect pronunciation
Introducing IPA (25 min)
-T discusses discrepancies b/w written & spoken English. When an S has difficulty pronouncing a word, there are 2 problems @ work.
1. knowing how word ought to be pronounced
2. pronouncing word correctly.
Because English spelling is deceptive, a pronunciation problem-- even for native speakers!-- can often be the result of the reader not knowing correct pronunciation. Can we figure out how to pronounce a word just by reading it?
-examples of deceptive spelling: tip, tiger, creation, through, tough, bough, bought . Ask students to come up with disambiguating ways to spell these words. Hopefully there will be some disagreement, and the difficulty of a phonetically reliable spelling will be apparent. Ask Ss how these issues are resolved in the orthography of their L1s.
-intro idea of IPA-- standardized phonetic transcription, so that problem #1 becomes a non-issue and problem #2 may be addressed directly.
- write out the above words phonetically
- hand out IPA chart, give URL of interactive IPA online
- highlight segments relevant to American English. Some Ss may have learned a different dialect/ accent of English, or may believe that other dialects (British English, for example) are superior. Emphasize that diversity of dialects is desirable, and that American English (even Southern English) is not inferior. American (Southern?) English will be most often used in this class, because that's what we speak here!
-homework-- look over IPA chart, listen to segments relevant to American English online.

Day 3: Syllabus & IPA

Objectives: Students should have good understanding of the course syllabus and of course resources available online. They should have a basic familiarity with the IPA.

Materials:
syllabus
IPA flashcards
handouts of mouth diagram
handouts of Alligator article about homelessness in Gainesville.

Issues, coffee, chit-chat (10 min)
-continue roll-call if needed
segue into syllabus discussion (10 min)
- discuss projects, goals, make sure Ss know URL of ASE1 site . Intro them to resources there. (why wait until Day 3? - to make sure that class population is stabilized; we've got all the Ss that we'll have for the rest of the semester) Let Ss know what on syllabus is flexible; encourage them to reflect on issues or concerns they may have with it, let them know they're welcome to approach T at any time in person, phone, or email w/ issues.
IPA (25 min)
- intro problematic pairs & segments
- flashcards. @ first, T shows flashcard to group, prompts Ss to guess what the sound is, affirms correct answer & has them repeat in chorus. Depending on how well they seem to grasp this, T should intro b/w 5 & 15 flash cards, starting w/ the most problematic segments (vowels?) Encourage Ss to come up with words that contain these sounds.
- distribute flashcards to Ss and have them quiz each other
- emphasize that purpose here is literacy in IPA-- NOT perfect pronunciation. correct pronunciation can be developed later in the language lab. here we're simply learning to recognize segmental differences. Ss should be able to see a word written out phonetically & all interpret it the same way-- whether they can reproduce it accurately is of secondary importance.
- if they seem ready for it, hand out mouth diagram and bring up interactive mouth diagram on computer , talk briefly about places of articulation, frics vs. stops, voiced vs. unvoiced. Make sure Ss understand they're not expected to know all this perfectly-- the goal is to give them a very basic familiarity with the terminology and the idea of this way of looking at speech. If it seems helpful, this should be enough to allow them to work/ consider more on their own time.
Homework (5 min)
- hand out copies of Alligator articles. Ask students to look at headlines, photos & captions, but not to worry too much about the text. At home, spend a little time thinking about what they've seen of homelessness / poverty here in Gainesville. Do students know how Americans address these issues? How are they addressed in home country?

Day 4: Wrap-up & Discussion

Objectives: Conclude students' introduction to the IPA. Heighten students' awareness of local issues and of local media (Alligator). Observe how comfortable students are with group discussion-- gather data on what will need to be worked on in future lessons.

Materials:
additional copies of Alligator articles
mouth diagram (if not covered last time)

Coffee, chit-chat, issues (10 min)

Follow-up from day 3 (5 - 20 min)
- if we got through diagram of mouth on day 3, then briefly review this, concentrating not on accurate terminology but rather on ability to distinguish what makes s different from th, for example, or f vs. p, or t vs. d. Re-emphasize that what matters is not knowing the terminology, nor even (at this point) accurately reproducing the sounds-- but rather identifying segments and understanding what makes them unique.
- if we were unable to finish everything on day 3, then go over everything that was left unfinished. Take as much time as is needed.
- with flashcards, introduce the rest of the IPA, emphasizing symbols that are not part of standard English orthography.
Group discussion (15 - 30 min)
- purpose of 1st discussion is mostly to see how they handle it. Who's willing to speak up? Who's shy? What issues need to be addressed in order for all students to participate freely? T will use this info to prepare future lessons.
- make sure students still have copies of the Alligator article. If not, hand out duplicates.
- give students a chance to bring up issues. If they don't, prompt them:
- what do you know about poverty here in Gainesville?
- are homeless people responsible for their situation?
- should you give money to panhandlers?
- are homeless people mostly the same race as the rest of Americans?
- do you think that race plays a role in poverty?
- would you see an article like this in a local newspaper in your home country?
- how are poverty and homelessness addressed in your home country?
conclusion (5 min)
- get feedback on discussion topic. What would Ss like to discuss in the future?
- bring up IPA again: this is a resource, not a requirement. If it helps Ss get beyond issues with English spelling, great; if they can do fine without it, no problem. They can deal w/ pronunciation in greater depth in Language Lab; hopefully getting them thinking about segmental diffs & the shape of the mouth will make this LL time more effective.

Combined observation report

2005-11-07T13:56:00.000-08:00

UF's Academic Spoken English program (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. All three of my observations were of this lecture component of one of the ASE 2 classes. The first observation occurred early in the semester, giving me a sense of where the class was at the beginning. I did my last two observations back-to-back in the second half of the semester, in order to see what progress had been made. Observing consecutive classes gave me a picture of the continuity from one class to the other.
The lecture component has little in common with a traditional “lecture” course, but gets its name because it is the only portion of ASE 2 that is teacher-fronted in any regular sense. Lecture focuses on communication issues, mostly in the context of small-group discussion, debate and opinion-sharing. The goal is to get students comfortable with real-time academic English. For the first observation, 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 elicit 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, I’m not sure 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 influential 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 special 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-- 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 was thinking about telling him that he can't bring the electronic dictionary to class anymore. One-on-one evaluations were coming up shortly, and that would 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.
During my first observation, time management seemed to be an issue. The teacher had to negotiate how to give attention and feedback to each student, when a few of them demanded more than others. For my second observation, I decided to focus on the strategies she used to maximize student interaction without cutting into the time spent on other students. I was also interested to see what progress had been made in classroom interaction.
As students entered the classroom, they chatted amongst themselves and with the teacher. Those who had been talkative in my previous visit remained talkative, but this time the other students were talking and laughing as well. They seemed to have a very friendly, natural relationship with the teacher; there were few inhibitions. The class came more or less to order when a student asked the teacher about the topic for the following week's presentation. She turned the question back over to the class, and asked if they could agree on a topic. They negotiated eagerly but failed to reach a conclusion, so after about a minute the teacher ended the discussion by telling them that the topic was open. Once again, I observed the entire class participating.
The class then concluded the previous day's activity, in which the students had played different roles in a mock trial: it was time for the judge to give the verdict. The student appointed to be the "judge" was nervous, saying "I don't know judge's style," so the teacher gave him a phrase: "I rule in favor of X," as well as briefly explaining the words "defendant" and "plaintiff." As students continued having problems with word choice or vocabulary gaps, the teacher would offer suggestions.
The transition into the main activity was brief: "You guys like acting. Let's do a little acting." The instructor passed out slips of paper, each which defined a character and described how that character would act in the role-play, and then wrote the names of the characters on the board, explaining who was assigned to whom. This caused momentary confusion, as of the nine students only eight seemed to know what their roles were. So the teacher had to backtrack and have each student say, in turn, what his role was until the confused participant was identified.
Several other things slowed the instructor down. For example, when she asked for volunteers, nobody offered, so after badgering them for a few seconds ("you guys sleepy today?") the teacher gave them two minutes to prepare for the role-play. As they prepared, several students asked basic vocabulary questions that pertained to their roles. There were so many of these questions that I wondered whether it would have been worthwhile to do a little vocab prep beforehand.
The role-plays were all amusing scenarios-- a reluctant kid at a doctor's office, someone trying to persuade a friend to join a whale-watching cult, an obnoxious waiter, and a paranoiac warning a passerby that the local bank had been overtaken by aliens. The fact that they were really funny situations helped to loosen the students up, being allowed to say absurd things probably made them more willing to experiment with their language. The teacher took notes as they did their dialogues, and intervened when they worked themselves into a corner.In the roleplay where a believer-- who I'll call Bert-- was trying to convince a skeptic to join a whale-watching cult, the student who played the skeptic acquiesced very easily. The teacher intervened more than once ("Do you really believe in telepathy with whales? Isn't there anything you want to say?"), and the "skeptic" attempted to argue, but when it was apparent that this would be a prolonged conversation, the teacher cut them off: "OK, Bert, you win!"
The banking roleplay involved a student, "Sean," who in my previous observation had been very reticent. While he was still one of the more quiet students, he participated readily, coming up with quirky responses to keep the dialogue going. He did have some vocabulary gaps, but because he was talkative it was possible to determine what areas he needed work on-- before, he'd been so silent that it would be pure guesswork just to decide what was appropriate to teach him. As the roleplay drew to a close, his partner-- who was warning not to invest in a certain bank because it had been taken over by aliens-- seemed to dominate. But when the teacher pushed Sean a little ("You're not going to take his advice, are you?"), he got back into the argument and successfully negotiated an escape from the situation.
The teacher concluded the roleplays by speaking about them for a few minutes, pointing out what they had illustrated: "What do you do if you're in an awkward situation and you want to get out without being rude?" Because there was little time left, she wasn't really able to get the class into a prolonged discussion about the usefulness of the exercises in the real world-- but hopefully enough was said that they'll think about it on their own time.
Time management was still a problem here. It's tough-- when you want to get students talking, you don't want to have to cut them off. But it's equally important that each gets a chance to have his say, and that time remains for the teacher to wrap up. Often a few moments of teacher-fronted class time will frame the entire period in a way where students are able to reflect upon whatever activity their time has been occupied with. None of the role-plays reached a clear conclusion; it seemed that the students would have been willing simply to not stop talking. So the instructor had to find appropriate places, where they had progressed far enough to get something out of it, but not so long as to steal time from others.
After the teacher left, the students stayed in the classroom for the next component of their class, Language Lab. As they were waiting for their instructor, Bert drew a few others to the blackboard and wrote out a logic puzzle. It was a series of dots, and the goal is to connect them all with four straight lines. I was impressed at his ability to explain the concept, and successfully negotiate questions: another student wanted to know if it was OK to draw diagonals, and although neither of them knew the word diagonal, they quickly communicate the concept and reached the appropriate answer (diagonals are fine). This was a small example of what I'd been wondering about earlier, whether the class could reach the point where students would interact without instructor mediation.
As a trainee in ASE, I’ve been regularly observing classes and team-teaching certain components. Having gained this experience since my last conference with this teacher, I felt comfortable making a few comments that are more in line with Freeman’s model of the “alternatives approach.” Nevertheless, I still see myself primarily as an apprentice and so my comments largely took the familiar non-directive approach. As I continue to develop experience in ASE, I may eventually be in a position where I can confidently and wisely act as a supervisor, but this will occur no time soon.
The teacher commented on the improvement in class participation, saying that while she’s seen students like Sean getting gradually better, there was a noticeable leap right after the midterm evaluations. Two weeks earlier, she’d had a chance to meet one-on-one with each student, and she made a point to encourage Sean to be more assertive in class. She believes this reassured him, because while he’s unconfident about his English skills, he now knows that she recognizes this and wants his participation nonetheless.
Time management actually wasn’t something she was too worried about. This class was on a Friday, and was intended to be loosely structured and fun. Nevertheless it was important to give adequate time to each student. The teacher said that sometimes she sets strict time limits, announcing the students that they have ten minutes, for example, to prepare before an activity, and then warning them during the activity about how much time they have remaining. When there’s a lot to cover in a day this is necessary, but on a Friday doing something that’s essentially review and reinforcement, she was willing to be more lax.
I commented that the role-plays, while being terribly fun, had a purpose (from the teacher’s point of view) that the students probably didn’t get. They needed to practice the negotiation involved in extracting themselves from difficult situations, but in the role-plays most of them were happy to continue with the dialogue for as long as they could. They didn’t really work on this, the teacher agreed, and this is the second time that she’s brought the topic up. Next time she plans to introduce the purpose before-hand, and to remind the students during the role-plays that they should be talking with exit strategies in mind.
I was also able to observe the following lesson, on Monday afternoon, with an eye on speaking. While the Friday class had been a loosely organized activity, Monday’s consisted almost entirely of housekeeping. The teacher told me that she had to introduce the final project and convince the students to start thinking about it, as well as prepping them for a short debate in the next day’s class. They’ve been doing a lot of debates in class, and the teacher said that initially she’d planned for the end-of-semester project to be something different. Traditionally, however, the two ASE 2 classes do a final project together, holding a debate against one another. Because of this external constraint, the rest of the semester will continue to focus very heavily on debate, so the students should have very good debate skills by the end. While they’ve had a lot of practice, the teacher assured me that there are still some areas they’re weak on, particularly organization and use of key language. I recalled that in the previous class a student assigned to be “judge” had expressed concern that he didn’t have a good grasp of the sort of language traditionally used in court decisions.
Class began more formally than it had the day before, with the teacher introducing the end-of-semester debate and asking for topic suggestions. When the students were reluctant to volunteer ideas, she offered one: should professionals be allowed in the Olympic games? This wasn't very productive: she could elicit student reactions only with a lot of tooth-pulling. Eventually she gave up, and made it a homework assignment for the next class, with each student required to bring one debate idea. As she gave this assignment, the teacher noticed several students writing furiously, finishing a homework due that day. She got them to stop by extending the deadline for an additional day.
With an eye on the clock, the teacher quickly moved on with instructions for the debate. As she passed out an instruction packet, she pointed out a typo and explained the format. She then reminded the students of their weaknesses: organization and key language. The last few pages of the handouts had lists of key phrases useful in debate. In order to draw their attention to it, she had them repeat each phrase after her in chorus. While this probably didn't do much to teach them the phrases, I suspect it reinforced their awareness of those pages as a resource.
The teacher then moved on to the final task of the class-time: preparing the students for the next day's activity, in which they'd have to argue a position. She began passing out slips of paper describing the position they would have to argue.
At this point, the student who had arrived late asked his neighbor what had happened at the beginning of class. His neighbor discreetly and quietly explained the homework assignment, as another student pointed out anerror on the debate packet: it had been recycled from the previous semester, so all the dates were wrong. The teacher apologized and discussed due dates with them. I was impressed at the complexity of her students' questions as they confirmed the dates for the project.
The students were then given five minutes to read their assignments and begin thinking out arguments in support of them. Some objected to the positions they'd been assigned, jokingly attempting to trade papers. The teacher firmly forbade this, but laughed as she said "no, no no no no no no," keeping the tone of the interaction light-hearted.
The teacher had warned the class that she would have to leave early, so after half an hour she wrapped up and left. As she walked out the door, Bert suggested that they remain to discuss possibly debate topics. To my surprise, they all readily agreed. So Bert went up to the blackboard and began writing down his colleagues' brainstorms. When one suggested gay marriage, the others quickly shot it down, as well as anything else political: "No more abortion or gay marriage! Let's talk about something positive!" Bert affirmed this, saying "Let's try to find something very small, where it doesn't matter too much whether you're against or for." He cited cheese import laws as an example, and the others quickly began coming up with ideas ranging from the UF international student fee and traffic light orientation, to whether ASE 2 was a worthwhile course. This continued until the end of the hour, when Bert announced in a mock-authoritarian voice that class was done. The other students chuckled and applauded, several telling him sincerely that he had done a great job.
"Thanks," he laughed. "I want to be a teacher."
The class I observed earlier in the semester definitely wouldn't have discussed and debated anything together without pressure from the teacher. But now they can. Part of this may simply be due to the fact that they're more comfortable around one another, but a lot of it is from what their instructor has done. By consistently pushing the reluctant students to speak, and by individually communicating that their participation really is important, she's brought them to the point where they can actually manage without her. It was particularly interesting being an observer because occasionally the students would draw on me as a resource. The first time Bert called on me to explain a vocab word, I was startled, but warmed to it pretty quickly. While I didn't interrupt the discussion, I figured it would be prudent to answer questions put to me and provide feedback when asked for it. Overall, however, they would have done fine without me. Several students made various speaking errors, or revealed gaps in their vocabulary, but more often than not the rest of the class filled the gaps in or corrected the errors-- for any given problem, it seemed that at least one student had the answer, and was willing to share.

Observation 3 (notes)

2005-11-07T13:36:00.000-08:00

-- intro project, key phrases

Negotiating topic for debate
-- want to debate Olympics? professionals allowed?
"but why do we want to watch the Olympics?"
-- here they pick heart-warming stories

S-- "sports is beautiful. competing is beautiful."

T-- why would you want to have professionals?
"if you know nobody..."

T-- "why do you watch?"
-- do you think it might be an interesting topic to debate?
-- think about it overnight-- tomorrow each must have an idea
-- don't worry about the data now; I'll collect it tomorrow

T passes out "official packet for the main event"
-- points out typo in packet and has them correct it
explains outline
"you'll be here, they'll be there..."
"& we're gonna win this, right?"
points out weaknesses
-- organization, key language
-- points out language on last page

1 S slips in late

T "repeat after me-- 'consider these points,' " etc
has them go through in chorus

all examples are re. abortion debate
S "what's pro-choice?"

S-- "even though" @ end of sentence?
T clarifies "even though X," vs "X, though."

passes out topics to argue, gives them 5 min to write down arguments
-- one S explains hwk to late S

S confused b/c packet date & time inaccurate
T apologizes-- "last week of classes"
"can everyone come 9th period that day?"
Ss negotiate when 9th period is
T "how soon can you find out?"

"OK so you should have @ least 1 argument written already?"
2 Ss try to exchange topics, T "oh nonononono," all laughing
T-- "if you do have kids, will you want them to smoke?"
S reveals that wife is pregnant, baby due next wk

"OK I'm gonna stop you. Keep the material, & tomorrow we'll argue & make sure you're using the language."

"think about debate topic"

Ss negotiate-- we have 1/2 hr, let's talk about the debate topic right now!
S starts writing ideas on the board
-- "we have 1/2 an hr!"
-- "i don't know!" "let's pick an area"
- they all agree, no politics
- food? "it's an idea, @ least it starts s/th"

"what did we see in the GRE?"
"debate whether this course is helpful?"

-- "s/th about UF?"
-joke-- good school or not?
- policy-- int'l student fee?

-- tipping? - or other thing where home country differs from FL

- "let's look for s/th where it's easy to find arguments"
- "gay marriage?"
- "no that's politics"

- "try to find s/th very small, where it doesn't matter too much whether you're against or for"

- traffic light example
- in England, orange both ways

- "think about small stuff like that -- HIV was too difficult"
- types of sausages
- cheese pasteurized?
- "light stuff that's funny"
- "let's talk about s/th positive"

"Class is done"
students clap
- "I want to be a teacher"

Questions, obs. 2

2005-11-07T08:01:00.000-08:00

Class participation seems much better-- what happened?

gradual improvement, but midterm evals helped a lot: reassurance-- T understands & acknowledges S's fears.

How did time management go?

pretty loose; gauge the mood of the class & go with it

Seemed to be many vocab problems: had you thought about introducing vocab beforehand?

role-plays were hilarious. Your purpose was probably to get them to think about negotiating difficult situations-- do you think they got this?

No, they didn't at all. T will keep hammering this in.

Had you thought about explicitly describing the purpose of the activity before-hand?

Might be a good idea.

There wasn't much time to wrap up at the end-- would less role-playing, more discussion have been better? or would it have been better not to cut some of the longer ones off?

go with mood, get them to talk

Report, Observation #2

2005-11-05T13:44:00.000-08:00

My second observation was of the same ASE 1 class that I observed earlier in the semester. It seemed useful, for this observation, to focus on time management.

The bulk of class time was to be spent on a series of role-plays; in addition the class had to conclude an activity from the previous day.

I remember from my previous observation that time-management had been a problem the teacher was concerned about and working on. That day, she had broken the class into small groups each working on their own activity, and then went from group to group in order to clarify and elicit interaction. One group, however, had demanded the bulk of her attention and she’d been unable to work at all with another group because of this. It's a problem she was well aware of; nevertheless there were just certain students that took a lot of time. She'd talked about planning to converse one-on-one with these students and see if she could find ways to encourage them to be participate more readily in class.

As students entered the classroom, they chatted happily amongst themselves and with the teacher. Those who had been talkative in my previous visit remained talkative, but this time the other students were talking and laughing as well. They seemed to have a very friendly, natural relationship with the teacher; there were few inhibitions.

The class came more or less to order when a student asked the teacher about the topic for the following week's presentation. She turned the question back over to the class, and asked if they could agree on a topic. They negotiated eagerly but failed to reach a conclusion, so after about a minute the teacher ended the discussion by telling them that the topic was open.

The class then concluded the previous day's activity, in which the students had played different roles in a mock trial: it was time for the judge to give the verdict. The student appointed to be the "judge" was nervous, saying "I don't know judge's style," so the teacher gave him a phrase: "I rule in favor of X," as well as briefly explaining the words "defendent" and "plaintiff." As students continued having problems with word choice or vocabulary gaps, the teacher would offer suggestions-- but rarely feed a single phrase. The students seemed comfortable with one another and with the teacher, so she had enough presence and influence to keep things moving, to get them to act.

The transition into the main activity was brief: "You guys like acting. Let's do a little acting." She passed out slips of paper, each which defined a character and described how that character would act in the role-play, and then wrote the names of the characters on the board, explaining who was assigned to who. This caused momentary confusion, as of the nine students only eight volunteered what their roles were. So the teacher had to backtrack and have each student say, in turn, what his role was until the confused participant was identified.

When she asked for volunteers, nobody offered, so after badgering them for a few seconds ("you guys sleepy today?") the teacher gave them two minutes to prepare for the role-play.

The role-plays were all amusing scenarios-- a reluctant kid at a doctor's office, someone trying to persuade a friend to join a whale-watching cult, an obnoxious waiter, and a paranoiac warning a passerby that the local bank had been overtaken by aliens.

The fact that they were really funny situations helped to loosen the students up, and the fact that they were allowed to say absurd things probably made them more willing to experiment with their language. The teacher took notes as they did their dialogues, and intervened when they worked themselves into a corner. On occasion, a student wouldn't completely understand his role, and would ask for clarification on vocabulary. In fact, there were so many vocabulary questions that I wondered whether it wouldn't have been better to have spent two or three minutes beforehand going over some of the more difficult words.

In the second roleplay, where a believer was trying to convince a skeptic to join a whale-watching cult, the student who played the skeptic acquiesced very easily. The teacher intervened more than once ("Do you really believe in telepathy with whales? Isn't there anything you want to say?"), and the "skeptic" attempted to argue, but when it was apparent that this would be a prolonged conversation, the teacher cut them off: "OK, [believer], you win!"
The banking roleplay involved a student, "Sean," who in my previous observation had been very reticent. While he was still one of the more quiet students, he participated readily, coming up with quirky responses to keep the dialogue going. He did have some vocabulary gaps, but because he was talkative it was possible to determine what areas he needed work on-- before, he'd been so silent that it would be pure guesswork just to decide what was appropriate to teach him. As the roleplay drew to a close, his partner-- who was warning not to invest by a certain bank because it had been taken over by aliens-- seemed to dominate. But when the teacher pushed Sean a little ("You're not going to take his advice, are you?"), he got back into the argument and succesfully negotiated an escape from the situation.

After the roleplays, the teacher spoke about them for a few minutes, pointing out what they had illustrated: "What do you do if you're in an awkward situation and you want to get out without being rude?" Because there was little time left, she wasn't really able to get the class into a prolonged discussion about the usefulness of the exercises in the real world-- but hopefully enough was said that they'll think about it on their own time.

After the teacher left, the students stayed in the classroom for the next component of their class, Language Lab. As they were waiting for their instructor, one student drew a few others to the blackboard and wrote out a logic puzzle. It was a series of dots, and the goal is to connect them all with four straight lines. I was impressed at how easily he was able to explain the concept, and succesfully negotiate questions: another student wanted to know if it was OK to draw diagonals, and although neither of them knew the word diagonal, they quickly negotiated the concept and reached the appropriate answer (diagonals are fine).

Observation 2 (notes)

2005-11-04T12:46:00.000-08:00

talking about court case that must have begun last time.

negotiating next week's presentation topic. "not food; we did enough food."

T-- "topic is open."
--"Are you ready?"

2 students presenting court case
--uncertain-- "I don't know judge's style"
T describes "defendant" & "plaintiff"
S's having difficulty with word-choice, T offers suggestions
good interaction-- students comfortable w/ each other

transition-- "let's do a little acting"
-very comfortable w/ students-- they're comfortable talking spontaneously

"Somebody's not here"
-- had to get ea. student to say his role to determine who was missing

"You guys sleepy today?"- banter

nobody volunteers, so she gives them 2 mins to prep.
-- students ask vocab Qs-- should she have done some vocab prep @ beginning?
interrupted roleplay to explain vocab "reincarnation"
2nd S (skeptic) isn't really doing his part-- not being skeptical-- T encouraging him to resist, but he doesn't. finall, T-- "you win, Dmitri"

2nd roleplay-- waiter-- T takes notes
--T discusses w/ S's afterwards-- "what's wrong w/ saying 'what do you want?'" -- explains pragmatics, setting
--why not have roleplays in open space, instead of @ desks?

4th-- T has to push student in the roleplay-- but he's better than he was!
--students very creative.
-- clarify-- "are you going to take his advice?"

"so what do you do if..."
"you don't want to be rude"

Greek

2005-11-03T15:41:00.000-08:00

I'm taking a Greek class offered by my church. I don't expect to actually learn Greek through the class, but figured it would be good to get a little exposure to the language and maybe pick up the alphabet. The teacher is native Greek; a retired chemistry professor.

Having some experience teaching, and now being in teacher-training both through my job and through this TESL class, I'm finding myself actually annoyed by the course at church: it's not being taught the way I would teach it.

Not that I mind terribly. The class is very diverse in terms of background, language experience, and knowledge of Greek. And attendance from week to week is pretty spotty. So even the best teacher wouldn't really be able to make much progress. But what I'm realizing is that if I knew less about pedagogy, I'd probably actually be a better student-- concentrating on what's being taught rather than the way it's being taught.

But it makes me think about how students will affect a class. If each student has a very different level of experience with the subject matter, it may be very difficult to teach any of them effectively. If one or two are basically experts, a good teacher can co-opt them into helping the other students, and hopefully mastering the concepts by teaching them. But if a few students are at a very advanced level, their's the potential for, well for rebellion. For advanced students to get impatient, to interrupt, to dominate classroom discussion.

Ideally, you put those students in a more advanced class and the problem is solved. But teachers generally don't get to hand-select their students. You play with the cards dealt to you.

"getting" it

2005-11-03T14:10:00.000-08:00

In Phonology class we've been covering the most bewildering topics at a rapid pace. A recent concept, one that was incredibly hard to grasp, was the idea of abstract underlying phonemes: phonemes that exist in the mental lexicon and affect other phonological processes, but then get deleted before they can appear in the surface representation of any utterance.

The professor found an excellent way to introduce the concept of underlying phonemes, though, and I'm confident the only reason that I have some vague grasp now of what they are is because of how she introduced them. She had us look at data from French, a language that most of us have some acquaintance with. There's an underlying word-initial consonant that occurs occasionally in French, interfering with other phonological rules that apply to the determiners "le," "la," and "les." But the consonant, where it occurs, never occurs in the surface representations: its existence can be determined only by its affect on the sounds surrounding it.

This underlying abstract consonant is represented in French orthography as "h" (although "h" is also written in some words where there is no underlying consonant). Having a little background in French, it wasn't too hard for me to guess why some words were behaving differently than other words-- I knew that they were written with this silent "h."

Because I already, in a sense, knew that the "h" was in some sense there, it wasn't too hard to reach the hypothesis that it exists not only in the orthography but also in the mental lexicon. Even though I'd never considered the possibility of something like an abstract underlying phoneme before in my life, my group was basically able to hypothesize that one existed here.

That was great teaching. If the professor had simply started class with, "today I'm going to teach you about underlying abstract phonemes," I think I would have zoned out immediately. It's a really difficult concept to grasp. But by providing a class assignment in a familiar language, she basically tricked us into coming up with the concept of underlying abstraction all on our own. From there we were able to move on to less familiar examples like Andalucian Spanish, and then in the homework assignment, Lardil.

Because I'd been introduced to the concept in a familiar environment (French), I was able to approach the homework with underlying abstraction in mind and then actually use it to develop sophisticated hypotheses for a very tangled set of data.

There were too things the professor did that I'd like to be able to replicate in my own teaching:

1) when introducing a difficult concept, find something the students are familiar with

2) trick the students into figuring it out on their own-- or into realizing that they already know it, just have never expressed it in those terms before.

I imagine that if I were teaching Russian to anglophones, this is how I would introduce the concept of a case system: get the students to reflect on the difference between I and me, we and us and so forth; get them to come up with hypotheses as to what environments cause I to morph into me. Before too long I'd hope that they'd work out, on their own, a basic definition of the accusative case, which would allow me to go on and say "Good, OK, this thing that you've come up with is called the accusative case. And in Russian, it applies not only to pronouns but to all nouns," and use that as a springboard to a more sophisticated discussion of the concept of nominal inflection.

More tough for English teaching. One of the greatest challenges that English teachers face is the fact that our cultural backgrounds are far different from those of our students. This makes it very difficult for us to come up with examples that they're familiar with: we don't know what they're familiar with. But when we do find something, we need to seize and use it.

The second technique is easier: trick the students into figuring it out by themselves. I did this all the time teaching children, modeling the various uses of certain words, and watching them mimick, hypothesize, experiment, and revise their hypotheses based on my reactions. It really didn't take small children too long to figure out when to use you and when to use she, for example, even though Korean doesn't really use pronouns in the way English does. They couldn't tell me a grammatical rule to explain the difference between second- and third-person pronouns, but they had figured out how to use them correctly.

I'll continue to reflect on ways to teach difficult concepts by making them relevant, and by getting the students to work them out on their own.

Interaction, take two

2005-11-03T13:51:00.000-08:00

Our micro-teach today went rather well. I think the class enjoyed the activity.

The point, of course, was for the drawing exercise to be difficult; for nobody to do it perfectly. It spoke well, I think, that the only group who did it perfectly-- well, they cheated.

I think, when speaking with the "teachers" and "students" at the beginning, I should have emphasized more that making mistakes was really the purpose of the activity. Because I did feel bad, later on, making groups who had come up with pretty inaccurate drawings stand up in front of the class and explain their mistakes. But once again, the point of the activity was to create breakdowns in communication so that they could be analyzed. This should have been emphasized more.

It was also apparent that my instructions weren't explicit enough-- neither the "teacher" nor the "student" should have seen one another's paper, but one "teacher" kept glancing over at her "student"'s paper. And I certainly don't believe she was intentionally cheating.

The concluding discussion was very open-ended. We would have done well to stop it earlier, and give the class more time to explicitly talk about our teaching strategies, our strengths and weaknesses. The class got lots of feedback on the activity that they did, but my teaching-partner and I got very little feedback on our role in conducting the class.

Cooperation

2005-11-03T12:55:00.000-08:00

We and I did our micro-teach today. I'm glad we did it together, if for purely selfish reasons: it's nice to have more time. But it made me think about the advantages and difficulties related to team-teaching.

Cooperation is hard. It has obvious benefits: for example, by pooling our time we both had 40 minutes to work with instead of just 20. And it allows for a more favorable teacher/ student ratio; the students get more attention from the teachers. From the students' point of view, multiple sources of feedback are better than just one.

But I'm not good at cooperating. I like being in control. Even when we were planning the activity, I already had an idea of how I wanted it to go. My partner had some really good ideas, and often after she'd offered an alternative, the ideal plan in my head would switch to conform to her suggestion. But when I disagreed with any suggestion of hers, I wanted to be able to simply reject it outright-- and when you're working in a team, you simply have to concede things that you'd rather not.

This came up again in the group discussion at the end of class: I knew where I wanted the discussion to go, and found myself resisting my partner's attempts to steer it in a different direction. Rather than either sit back and let her lead, or else encourage the direction she was taking the conversation, I found myself once or twice trying to regain control and steer it elsewhere.

It's definitely something I need to work on. As a white male, I'm frankly used to getting my way. I also need to be sensitive to the fact that, depending on cultural background, people in a team with me will acquiesce too easily; I need to find ways to really encourage and give fair weight to their ideas, and to be ready to spend a good part of class-time as the assistant, while my partner controls the direction of the class.

Obviously this depends. In ASE, for example, many of the team-taught classes have some kind of hierarchy: there's a teacher, and there are several assistants. While a good teacher will give the assistants plenty of freedom and allow them to have input in the way the class is managed, that teacher is still in charge: responsible to make sure class goes well, and to blame when it doesn't.

Perhaps it's good to have this hierarchy. If, for example, we had agreed ahead of time that my partner was in charge and I was the assistant, I would have been more willing to agree with ideas that I didn't like: the buck stops with her. By default, I think it turned out to be basically the reverse: when I didn't feel like she was teaching the way I thought appropriate, I kind of wrested control from her, and she ended up with more of an assistant's role. If that hierarchy had been agreed upon ahead of time, I suppose it would have been OK. But as is, I simply didn't treat her as my equal. And this is bad.

Classroom interaction

2005-10-24T10:56:00.000-07:00

Next week I'll be giving a micro-teach focusing on "classroom interaction." This topic is a little more vague than, say, "vocabulary" or "listening." Nearly every presentation so far has been interactive. So I'll need to come up with something of substance that can be taught in a way that stimulates students to interact with one another.

Independent of anything else, I'd been thinking of teaching an introductory Russian lesson, just because it would be fun to teach Russian. But this probably isn't ideal, as introductory lessons are necessarily teacher-fronted. What I need is something that, once I set it up, will keep going without my intervention.

Interactive strategies that have been used thus far:
-Pairwork. Having acquired new vocabulary, the students practice a short scripted dialogue in groups of two or three.
-Games. Students use newly-acquired vocabulary to find other students similar to them in some way, or to elicit information from other students.
-Chorus. Having taught new vocabulary, the teacher elicits all the students to respond in unison, or one at a time.
-Rotating partners. In an information-gap activity, each student interviews several others in order to get a sense of the information they're missing. Then several students pool their information to come up with a common story.

I really liked the rotating-partner activity; I found it a very effective way to stimulate interaction. Half of the class (the "witnesses") had seen a short video clip, and the other half (the "reporters") had only heard the sound effects. Each witness, however, could give an account only of part of the clip, so each reporter had to interview several of us in order to get a sense of what actually happened. The reporters then talked amongst themselves in order to develop a clear description of the events.

Once this situation was set up by the teacher, she had to do relatively little to keep it going, to keep students interacting.

I would like to achieve a similar outcome: provoke the students to collaborate with one another, then back off to watch it play yet.

I don't yet have an idea of how I will do this, or even what sort of class I'll be pretending to teach.

Since I work in ASE, it might be useful to simulate an ASE class. The session could then be content-focused: introduce a topic, and get students to discuss it. Every week in ASE 2 the students spend a good 20 - 40 minutes just talking about their classes that week. While the teacher provides advice and occasionally brings up a point or a question, most of that time is simply student interaction-- they give one another feedback, and often very good feedback. The classroom interaction is free and easy.

But of course in ASE 2 they all have something to talk about-- and their spoken English is really very good. It will be more difficult for me to motivate the TESL class to have a free, interactive conversation.

But maybe I could.

Perhaps in my micro-teach, I could simply bring up some challenges that teachers face. Grading, or asking effective questions, for example. I could have the students read a brief excerpt from Communicate, then discuss its contents amongst themselves, then come together for a quick discussion of the issue.

Not only would this simulate a realistic ASE 2 situation, but I think the TESL students would actually benefit from it, since ASE 2 is also a teacher-training class.

Evaluating

2005-10-21T11:17:00.000-07:00

I have never assigned a grade. While I'm mostly glad about this-- evaluating, ranking, judging students seems like no fun at all-- at times I've wished that I did have the authority to affect a student's grade. Simply because this would make me more respected/ feared.

I'm team-teaching a Video/ Feedback session, which itself is only one component of an intensive three-part pre-service teacher training course. The whole course is pass/ fail-- at the end of the semester, students are either adequately prepared to be TAs, or else they aren't. And it's the primary instructor who assigns the grade; while feedback from me may influence the instructor's decision, I don't actually evaluate my students.

One student just isn't doing well. He's not putting much effort into the class; he's not taking it seriously. Consequently, his presentation style is very weak. I'm trying to figure out how to put the fear of God into him so that he'll start taking V/ F seriously. His feefdback partner is also my best student: her presentations are always original, creative and well-prepared. She's managed to introduce some very complicated ideas in an accessible manner, and will be a strong teacher.

I worry that she will be de-motivated by the fact that her presentation partner is putting so little effort into the class. Already last week she didn't prepare for the feedback session, and I wonder if this was because she knows the other guy never prepares.

I really hesitate to pit the two against each other. There's a lot he could learn from her-- but while they're both in the same room, I mustn't treat them differently or express preference for one over the other. Nevertheless there's the simple fact that one of them is doing just about everything wrong, and the other has many things spot-on.

Role Play

2005-10-19T08:03:00.000-07:00

Interspersed with our discussions in ASE 2 we've begun to do role-plays. We'll debate some aspects of an issue, and then have two students come up front and act it out. This is mostly in the context of interaction with students: how to confront cheating, how to negotiate make-up work, how to put off interaction until a more appropriate time, and the like.

I've been finding this surprisingly useful. By acting a situation out-- especially by playing the part of the student-- I'm alerted to aspects of it that I would otherwise not have noticed. Effective communication; how to speak the same "language" as the student. How to not give the student what they want but nevertheless have them leave satisfied with the interaction-- not because they got what they wanted, but because they understand my policies and rationale.

Being an effective teacher requires competence. If a student confronts me about a grade, and I've assigned that grade fairly and have reasoned it out well, then I can confidently look back over the test with the student and explain how I arrived at my decision. Or, if it turns out that I have made an error in grading-- but my grading policy itself is transparent and well-reasoned-- the error will be easy to find and easy to fix fairly and unambiguously. Either way, whether the grade ought to be changed or not, the student and I will arrive at the same conclusion: because I know what I'm doing.

If I've not thought out my grading policy well, if I've been careless or subjective in assigning grades, then there's much greater chance for the interaction to break down. I might go on the defensive, feeling like my authority as a teacher has been challenge and believing it more important not to lose face than to address the issue honestly and fairly. The best way to deal with sticky issues, in other words, is to prevent them altogether.

Thought it would be easy...

2005-10-05T07:40:00.000-07:00

I had a brief assignment in ASE 2 today: to get students to reflect on a short section in their textbook, about the difference between direct and indirect expressions. It was really basic-- read & discuss in groups, then pull together to run through an exercise or two. Bland.

There's a particularly good student in the class-- call him Herman. He's an experienced teacher, his command of English is excellent and comes from a culture similar to that of the United States. He's a great asset to the course, but one of the challenges in teaching it is to make it worth his while. He knows a lot of the stuff already, and frankly he's a better teacher than I'll ever be.

So, as I was mechanically going through the exercise, asking for feedback, Herman suggested that the issue of "indirect" vs. "direct" statements isn't nearly as important as simply being a good teacher. Some teachers are blunt. Others beat around the bush. Just depends on your style.

His comment questioned the validity of doing the exercise at all. And for him, the exercise really was meaningless: it was targeted at other students. I was faced, suddenly, with the problem of having my authority challenged.

1) I essentially agreed with Herman. The time wasn't being spent very valuably, these mechanical exercises weren't doing anybody much good.

2) I realized it was my fault. Some of the Asian students in particular really do need to think about the way they construct their statements, as well as their tone of voice, because these accidental traits are things that many American students find confrontational. This is to say, the exercise had a good purpose, but I'd failed to draw out and emphasize that purpose.

3) I really had no interest in making Herman think that the exercise was important to him. My goal was mostly just to finish the task and move on. But, I felt this need to re-establish control and authority.

4) It's really bad to be forced to defend a position that you don't particularly agree with, or one that you haven't thought out in detail.

5) "You must listen to me because I'm the teacher" is unconvincing and weak.

So, what should I have done?

1) reflect more on the exercise. I thought I knew why speech directness was important, but it turns out that I didn't.

2) briefly present it to the class before plunging into the exercise. "This is about speech directness. While it's only one component of positive communication, it is nevertheless something to think about. What are different ways we might get the same information across? Why might we employ different strategies?"

3) refrain from turning it into a methodology. Indirectness vs. directness is not simply a matter of "when A do B." It's not a formula for creating perfect communication. Rather, it's something to consider.

4) place it in context. Acknowledge the importance of other factors.

5) If I had done all these things, I probably wouldn't have had a student challenge the importance of the exercise. Nevertheless, I would have had a good sense of why I believe it matters, and would have been able to make an effective case, rather than taking Herman's criticism personally.

Things did turn out very well. Herman was aware that he'd made me uncomfortable, and he apologized. I'm really glad he did this. Even though I was in the wrong, so to speak, his apology created the chance for interaction that wasn't based on our previous debate. We were now discussing not the content of our earlier interaction, but rather its context.

I'll have to think more on how I might have restored a positive relationship, had he not apologized.

I told Herman not to feel bad about making me uncomfortable. I told him that while I do feel the exercise has value, he's not the one who really needs it, and so I can see why he finds it a waste of time. Rather than try to re-establish my authority, I reminded him that I'm an apprentice, and that he's an experienced teacher. "I'm in training here. Give me feedback!"

This was, I believe, a good way to approach it. He's a better teacher than I am. And if I try to hide that fact and assert my superiority, not only will I fail but I'll create a good deal of tension. Having acknowledged his expertise, I hope to take advantage of it. And hopefully some of these mechanical exercises will become more meaningful if he sees them as a chance for him to evaluate me as a trainee.

"So you want me to push you?" he asked as we were walking out the door.

"Yes!" I replied. "Some day I'm going to have bad students confronting me, and I want to be prepared."

"I know," he said. "You'll get students who don't care how you feel, and the little fuckers will do anything to make it difficult for you."

Showing Off

2005-09-28T07:38:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-22T11:41:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-20T13:50:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-19T01:59:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-18T18:26:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-18T12:11:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-12T11:02:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-12T10:53:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-12T10:05:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-09T14:23:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-09T13:48:00.000-07:00

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

2005-09-09T13:38:00.000-07:00

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.