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".