When I learned about Classroom Interactions (CI) last weekend, I was rather glad. One of the first reasons I wanted to take a TESOL course was in order to get some formal teacher training; I felt as though I was teaching well but had no way to know. Learning about CI was the first confirmation that I'm on right track. I think a lot of the activities I use in my class involve various CIs, perhaps in part due to my drama background.
I'm a firm believer in using natural interaction to create a sense of the "realness" of English. CI techniques such as individual or choral repetition are necessary in that they provide a good way for students to practice the target language in a controlled setting, but this is far removed from the kind of social interactions students should expect when communicating with native English speakers.
I'm much more interested in CIs where the students have to interact with each other without the teacher's direct input. For this reason I aim to make role-play the ultimate goal of every chapter I teach: I can see no better way of learning for my students than to engage both body and imagination in creating realistic social situations. I find that to create and perform good role-play it's vital to use CIs in most other aspects of my class.
One of my favourites is the answering/asking questions interaction we have labelled "TSST", where the teacher asks a student a question, and after the student answers they proceed to ask a question to another student, and so on. While the TSST method implies that only two students are involved, I often extent this to make a chain of students, only cutting it off when I feel the class is losing focus. In order to engage as many students as possible I have even had multiple chains going at once, though I'm not sure of its effectiveness.
In the warm-up activity I recorded this week rather than use the kind of activity mentioned above I aimed to use a number of CIs in a clearer and simpler manner. I really took my time to make it basic and use the interaction to allow the students to get a good grip on the language. If you're interested to see, have a look at my first video below.
(It helped that many of them had a good recollection of what my co-teacher taught them in the previous lesson two days earlier!)
I used a number of CIs here, but the focus of the activity was on TSST. The first set of target sentences they had learned the previous lesson, so as a review we did lots of repetition and modeling, and we ended with a TSST in which the students copied the modeled language exactly. I then added another new target sentence with which I did the same thing, but ended with a TSST drill in which the students could add a little personalization: I encouraged them to change the colour they used.
With this class I feel the activity worked quite well. There were a couple of issues with students who weren't sure of the language and who perhaps weren't fully engaged (I know that if these particular students had been focused they would probably have answered well), but generally everything seems very clearly laid out. The students should know exactly what they're learning and what to expect.
However, this activity wasn't particularly fun. I normally like to start my classes with an engaging activity to get the students involved, and might save this kind of activity for a "study" phase in which I tell the students they must pay attention to in order to be able to play the game which will be the main activity of the class.
My worry that the activity wouldn't be engaging bore out in my other two fourth grade classes. One class is usually fairly quiet, and trying to get so much individual speaking out of them proved quite difficult. Also, unexpectedly, they weren't very good at focusing; I found students on the other side of the room to the student in focus having their own conversations. This is unusual for this class, and I wonder if it was the activity or my approach that caused this.
The last class I taught this to had a big problem with the activity. This class is infamous in my school for not listening, speaking out of turn and generally being uncontrollable. I tried in vain to do this activity with them, but soon wrapped it up when I saw it wasn't going anywhere. We instead moved onto a ppt activity which I will show in the video below, in which I involved much more choral answering (in groups) and competition. This class seems much easier to teach when I treat them as a whole unit and play off of the... "energy" which causes them to be a "problem" class.
This activity focused a lot more on student production of sentences without the teachers modeling, and hence required a similar increase in error correction. Some of my error correction I felt was quite good, but there were a couple of instances where I got confused about the language point or had difficulty leading the student to the right answer. My excuse would be that I had not prepared the ppt (my co-teacher did this for me since I was busy preparing to give a workshop), but I had already taught the lesson twice and should have done better.
The biggest thing I noticed was that I do a LOT of choral repetition in my classes. I think this stems from the fact that after a student answers individually I often repeat their answer to confirm it is correct, and get the whole class to repeat with me in order to further drill it. I think this also has the benefit of keeping the students focused, which can be a problem in my classes. I wonder if this much drilling is helpful for my students or actually a drawback of some sort.
Overall the rest of this lesson proved a challenge, mainly due to lack of preparation on my part. I mustn't let this become a habit as the STG course gets busier and my school workload increases!
I'm a firm believer in using natural interaction to create a sense of the "realness" of English. CI techniques such as individual or choral repetition are necessary in that they provide a good way for students to practice the target language in a controlled setting, but this is far removed from the kind of social interactions students should expect when communicating with native English speakers.
I'm much more interested in CIs where the students have to interact with each other without the teacher's direct input. For this reason I aim to make role-play the ultimate goal of every chapter I teach: I can see no better way of learning for my students than to engage both body and imagination in creating realistic social situations. I find that to create and perform good role-play it's vital to use CIs in most other aspects of my class.
One of my favourites is the answering/asking questions interaction we have labelled "TSST", where the teacher asks a student a question, and after the student answers they proceed to ask a question to another student, and so on. While the TSST method implies that only two students are involved, I often extent this to make a chain of students, only cutting it off when I feel the class is losing focus. In order to engage as many students as possible I have even had multiple chains going at once, though I'm not sure of its effectiveness.
In the warm-up activity I recorded this week rather than use the kind of activity mentioned above I aimed to use a number of CIs in a clearer and simpler manner. I really took my time to make it basic and use the interaction to allow the students to get a good grip on the language. If you're interested to see, have a look at my first video below.
(It helped that many of them had a good recollection of what my co-teacher taught them in the previous lesson two days earlier!)
I used a number of CIs here, but the focus of the activity was on TSST. The first set of target sentences they had learned the previous lesson, so as a review we did lots of repetition and modeling, and we ended with a TSST in which the students copied the modeled language exactly. I then added another new target sentence with which I did the same thing, but ended with a TSST drill in which the students could add a little personalization: I encouraged them to change the colour they used.
With this class I feel the activity worked quite well. There were a couple of issues with students who weren't sure of the language and who perhaps weren't fully engaged (I know that if these particular students had been focused they would probably have answered well), but generally everything seems very clearly laid out. The students should know exactly what they're learning and what to expect.
However, this activity wasn't particularly fun. I normally like to start my classes with an engaging activity to get the students involved, and might save this kind of activity for a "study" phase in which I tell the students they must pay attention to in order to be able to play the game which will be the main activity of the class.
My worry that the activity wouldn't be engaging bore out in my other two fourth grade classes. One class is usually fairly quiet, and trying to get so much individual speaking out of them proved quite difficult. Also, unexpectedly, they weren't very good at focusing; I found students on the other side of the room to the student in focus having their own conversations. This is unusual for this class, and I wonder if it was the activity or my approach that caused this.
The last class I taught this to had a big problem with the activity. This class is infamous in my school for not listening, speaking out of turn and generally being uncontrollable. I tried in vain to do this activity with them, but soon wrapped it up when I saw it wasn't going anywhere. We instead moved onto a ppt activity which I will show in the video below, in which I involved much more choral answering (in groups) and competition. This class seems much easier to teach when I treat them as a whole unit and play off of the... "energy" which causes them to be a "problem" class.
This activity focused a lot more on student production of sentences without the teachers modeling, and hence required a similar increase in error correction. Some of my error correction I felt was quite good, but there were a couple of instances where I got confused about the language point or had difficulty leading the student to the right answer. My excuse would be that I had not prepared the ppt (my co-teacher did this for me since I was busy preparing to give a workshop), but I had already taught the lesson twice and should have done better.
The biggest thing I noticed was that I do a LOT of choral repetition in my classes. I think this stems from the fact that after a student answers individually I often repeat their answer to confirm it is correct, and get the whole class to repeat with me in order to further drill it. I think this also has the benefit of keeping the students focused, which can be a problem in my classes. I wonder if this much drilling is helpful for my students or actually a drawback of some sort.
Overall the rest of this lesson proved a challenge, mainly due to lack of preparation on my part. I mustn't let this become a habit as the STG course gets busier and my school workload increases!
That's great lesson video! I just go back my memory when I was an elementary kid in Seoul, it is very big change English class at elementary. There were no native English teachers in my elementary era.
ReplyDeleteI think that they can learn English more effectively from native English teachers! I can see some of CI between you and students. As you presented last week "silence", that is the most hard part to be an ESL teacher.