Week 14 - METH - Subject: Objective - UPDATED

Today's reflection is on using multiple intelligences in class.

The LP was to use the 'cat on a ledge' pictures from SLA to get the student to be creative and also emotional, in theory, by answering questions on what the characters were feeling at each stage of the story. After talking about different intelligences with the student I asked her which she thought she was strongest in - interpersonal and analytical - and explained the benefit of practising others from a language perspective.

Of late my terminal objectives have been somewhat woolly and this was no exception. It was only afterwards that I considered what it was that I'd intended the student to be able to do leaving the class. The answer was a hazy "describe emotional states better" and "creatively describe the steps of a story". 

Now, with the latter, I wasn't expecting any Campbell-esque "She accepts the call the adventure" style exposition, but on the other hand, I didn't have anything set of what I did expect. Was saying "She wants the cat" acceptable for her intermediate-mid level or not? By the end of the class, I got a very basic, simple description of each picture with some "she is scared" level emotional description when prompted. Hardly a roaring success.

In hindsight, if I don't have a fixed objective of what I want the student to achieve, and neither does she because she doesn't know what we'll do in class,  it can only add to the sense of "what was all that about" that we both felt at the end of the class. This has become especially noticeable recently due to the loosely structured classes that I currently have (no textbook, no specific grammar focus etc.) that I do find myself walking into a class with no TO, instead thinking "reading for the first 10 minutes, vocab for the next 10, then discussion till the end" with no firm plan as to what that discussion should achieve. All too often, in the last few weeks, it seems to have no objective other than "the student should practice expressing their idea". Not that this is a bad thing, but without a more specific goal, it seems that both the students and I are finishing the class without a sense of progress.

Now, in today's class, not pushing for more linguistically thrilling answers was influenced by the fact that she'd found out her team had lost a client literally 5 minutes before the class, so was in a foul mood and was getting angry/sympathetic phone calls from colleagues every 10 minutes. So I was being really careful not to push her too much, as I was just happy she was speaking at all. However, as a class, it did bring home to me how often I have left class recently thinking "did I earn the money in that class" and not being able to say 100% yes.

So, the plan is to improve to TO. For example with this class, the student should leave the class being able to accurately relay a simple story using conjunctions, including a description of each character's emotion in each panel, and without scaffolding. Also, I need to communicate this to the student at the beginning of the class, otherwise how will they know why they're doing something either. I've fallen out of some good habits recently and I need to reinstate them just, if anything, for both me and the student to feel like I'm worth what I get paid.

UPDATE: Later the same day I tried the same exercise again but with a more overt TO and explaining to the students what and why we will be practicing it. Although I was clearly still thinking it through ("do they need to know all of them, or, as we'll be practicing others in the future, it's better to get them all out now??") it certainly felt better. 

The students were capable of understanding the concepts (except Kinesthetic), but looking at the video, it got a bit Monologic. I should've written out the main concepts for the class and had the students negotiate the meanings. 

However, I did set expectations (Happy = X) and give examples of more specific vocab and using conjunctions. At their level (upper intermediate), I shouldn't have to say "make long sentences" but, as Korean students, they do generally find the path of least resistance so it was worth reminding them.

So, in conclusion, I need the TLO as described above, but be less Monologic with the explanations of it.

Week 13 - METH - hardcore pron

After last week's focus on pronunciation (amunamurrkun) I decided to bring back pronunciation as a specific focus in class.

Unfortunately the student wouldn't allow filming but I can say that getting the student to mime the movement with their hands (something I'd never done before). The pronunciation focus was L and R which I used the left hand to be the top of the mouth and the right hand to be the tongue. Maybe it was fulfilling my expectations but the student did seem to get a handle on the difference faster than usual. This was especially noticeable having them do the movement and the sound at the same time - occasionally the right hand would struggle in the same way their tongues were. This really brought home to me that the dual coding of the physical action and the pronunciation really makes a difference to how the student can feel something that is only sound. With the exception of P/F , I'd never tried it before but will definitely be incorporating it as standard into future lessons.

Week 12 - ICC - Video & reflection

This activity was adapted from the DeCapua book.

Some good things about the class were there was a lot of Student Talk Time. The students reacted quite well to the material and were able to take the conversation in there own direction in a meaningful way. I feel like they did consider what the stereotypes might reflect about the values and beliefs of that group. The range of group choices on the page meant that even if they had little experience of the world, they could find something to write about in the class. I used some solid MIC techniques and gave some basic feedback and corrections.

Something I would improve on the class in future would be to make a bigger deal over WHY the stereotypes exist and to stress that the groups don't represent a whole nation or city. Also, the lesson could benefit from the students reflecting more on where they get their stereotypes from. In the class, they very briefly glossed over "from the media" as being a bigger influence than their own experience, yet this informed the majority of their opinions. I tended to use a lot of evaluative feedback though, which is a bad habit I still have to curtail somehow. There was a lot of "good, good" and "nice" which is edging towards the Monologic style of the teacher being the most powerful voice in the room.

Week 11 - ICC and Reflection

This was my first attempt to teach this lesson.

The aim of this class was for the students to consider the difference between the INTENT of a sentence and the MEANING that the other person receives.

The preview "Are you sick?" was to establish different contexts and the word stress to try and activate their awareness that those things make a big difference in English. I followed this with a question of foreigners breaking cultural customs to try and activate the schema of social rules.

The preview and presentation were quite successful in their aim of activating and making them aware of relevant communication elements. I'd folded the papers in a specific way so that the three sections of the class. Though, in hindsight, I may not include the sentence explaining the awkward silence. As these two students have about 3.5 years experience of living abroad between them, I would want them to look at the dialogue FIRST and then think about what had happened and why. Without being told that there was a problem, would they be able to understand the situation?

The activity about what each person was thinking after the event was very useful for putting them into the mindset of each person and their view of the world. Plus combining this with getting them to think about how this would be phrased in Korean and how that INTENTION may/may not translate well into English really helped them with ICC understanding.

So far, so good with the class.

What didn't go so well was what should've been the Production. Firstly, I didn't make it clear that they were supposed to speak to each other, not to me. For some reason, I didn't stop and correct this after the student started speaking to me. This was possibly because they were already unhappy about being filmed and I was just relieved that they were speaking at all. Secondly, I hadn't given them any warning that the "what misunderstandings did you experience when you lived abroad" topic was coming up, so they couldn't think of anything quickly enough.

What had been going so well, seemed to fizzle out at the end as we'd covered most of the discussion questions in the explanation. With no End, the class felt like it had no overall point other than "how could Mina have done better in this situation" without linking it in a meaningful way to their own lives.

In hindsight, the Production could've been setting up a similar situation where S1 has to communicate something culturally sensitive (such as co-worker gaining weight, etc) but having to choose their words carefully. S2 is instructed to be extremely sensitive about it. S1 must negotiate their own use and language and ICC by recognising that they can't just say "You've got fatter".

Week 12 - METH - pronunciation reflection

I have to confess that I've let pronunciation slip quite a lot in the last few months, as Harmer says, putting very little focus on it and expecting the students to either notice differences or to naturally adapt their speaking skills over time. I've never really felt that pronunciation drills had any lasting affect, but then recently I've rarely used the mechanical techniques of explaining 'where' the sound is made.

In this section of the class video, I reacted to an unexpected problem with the word "Heroic" in the textbook headline "10 Heroic Lions and One Stupid Boy". I don't know if it was the headline font but she kept putting an L in there - He-Ro-Lic.

In the video, I did what I usually do and broke the word down into syllables. The intention was for her to stop thinking of it as one word, and sound it out slowly until she could speed up comfortably and achieve a good/good enough pronunciation. After a few tries, I added a 'w' into the pronunciation - "He-ro-wic" to try and smooth the transition between 'o' and 'i'.

It was not 100% successful, but having put nearly 2 minutes of the class into one student and one word, I felt that I couldn't really devote any more time to it. I would normally do drills with similar words, but for "heroic" I couldn't think of a similar enough word to compare and contrast with - with and "oi" in it.

My second strategy was also not 100% successful. Because she seemed to have gotten caught in a mis-pronunciation loop, but could say 'hero', my idea was to to get her to say "ic-he-ro" repeatedly with the view that she would actually be saying "ic-he-ro-ic-he-ro-ic" and actually pronouncing the full word. However, the student didn't seem to get this and stopped sounding each syllable, seemingly thinking we were doing some kind of tag-team pronunciation exercise.

On the positive side, there were some decent MIC techniques, and as her mispronunciation loop seemed to be getting too comfortable, I stopped her and 'reset' the pronunciation.

In hindsight, I feel like I should have taken a mechanical approach to explaining it, rather than repeatedly voicing the sounds that she clearly wasn't getting. By showing where and how the "oi" is produced, it could have saved her time and made the class flow. In a future class, I can do some drills where a phantom 'w' is inserted between vowels to ease the transition, for example "to another place" ("To Wa-nu-tha plais").

Meth reflection - week 10

This week will focus on teaching vocab an using some of the nation/Harmer techniques.

I only taught 3 classes this week as teaching slowly progresses to being sugar on the top of a greater income trifle. This left me with my 'conversation' classes.

In one class I tried to teach using the above techniques especially the teaching of collocation elements - spelling and prefixes/suffixes. For example, one word which came up was "decriminalised". I began showing and having him add the elements ("criminal" what's the adjective, what's the negative...). It was reasonably successful from this technical point of view, and the student was capable of negotiating the various points.

One of the challenges of teaching vocabulary within a "conversation" class is that there is never a comfortable point to actually duly CCQ the new vocab as the student is usually keen to get on with the point they were trying to make. In this class I gave some contextual examples of the word in use and got the student to give another example.

The student was typically tenacious and latched onto this idea that decriminalised meant "released without charge" or "settled out of court". I went into more detail about the true meaning but there was little traction and he remained convinced of his earlier inference.

His point continued and the word came up again. I corrected one more time but the conversation continued regardless.

Overall, in the remaining two classes, teaching of vocab went more smoothly and, with my new-found focus on form seemed to go quite well. The paradox comes with teaching vocab form as a "teacher" yet wanting to keep the class as dialogic as possible. It's the subtle gear change of