Week 13: Practicing with Pronunciation

I just spent the morning teaching my fourth graders "How much is this?". We had a good time, and I thought it might be a good idea to get some imediate reflections on it down, even though I didn't record it.

I want to get an output reflection up soon, but all my output lessons will be coming next week. This week is strictly practice - the beginning of new material. But any reflection is better than none, so here we go.

Skip down to "What I Did" for the juicy CI and MIC details!

What We Did (Thoughts on the overall lesson)

We began our lesson with a culture section, where I elicited from students different currencies from the English speaking world. They all got US dollars pretty easily, but it took more work for them to get my native country's British Pounds Sterling. Many of them expected the UK to use Euros (being in Europe), but they now know better!

I did question the value of teaching them about UK currency, as it's not likely they will be needing it any time soon, if ever. However I think I can justify it as adding a personal touch to the classroom, and my students seemed interested to know more about where I'm from. I think we can stick this under a "motivation" label.

We also spent a few minutes talking about where the various symbols need to be written - I've noticed that my fourth graders usually write 8$ rather than $8, and today was no different. We fixed this together and hopefully came away with some cross-cultural knowledge!

The language learning was focused into two main areas. First we did a listening excercise where we looked at numbers (particularly the difference in pronunctiation between, for example, 30 and 13), and a practice speaking excercise where the students tried to guess the price of various items using the target language content "How much is the _____?" and "It's $____".

What I Did (Thoughts on the specifics of my teaching)

I was really happy to get a chance to teach some pronunciation in class today. We focused on how to tell the difference between numbers like 30 and 13 by both overexagerating the stress and writing it on the board: THIR-ty and THIR-TEEN. I modeled both words with a hand gesture (fist pump, anyone?) to emphasize where the stress goes, and encouraged the students to repeat with me. I think they could've done with some more speaking practice, but I skipped over to the listening part first. From the way they completed the listening activity, where they listened to a short dialogue where someone bought an item, the majority managed to identify the words correctly. Great start!

Unfortunately I didn't give them extra time to practice this specific pronunciation issue, but moved onto the practice activity. The first time I explained it I clearly didn't do a good job, as I soon had to stop the activity and explain it again. I believe the difficulty was the word "guess", which was pretty crucial to "guessing" the price. Though I did do comprehension checks and got students to re-explain what to do, I think the problem was that I chose the wrong parts to focus on. They understood, for example, that they had five seconds, but they didn't know what to do during those five seconds. This was clear from how a few groups just sat there without talking!

To clear this up I chose to give them a rough idea of the word "guess" very quickly in Korean - 가격을 마춰봐! This saved some explanation time and allowed us to focus on the target language. I think this was almost a moral choice I had to make on the spot. I wonder now if it was a cop-out on my part or if it was a sensible and useful teaching decision - after all, it allowed me to get the activity started quickly. I guess in this case it was a cop-out, since I had already given the activity a false start, though that's not to say I believe that Korean doesn't have a place in my classroom (as my SLA research presentation on L1 in the classroom displayed). I could've used the wasted time to demonstrate guessing a price - why do I keep forgetting that the best way to explain something is to show it?

One of the better asepcts of today's class was my attempts to get everyone speaking. It may have taken a little time, but I successfully got 16 different students to either ask or answer the target questions to confirm the answers to the listening activity, and during the main practice activity I asked each team to both ask and answer the question. This meant that one team guessed the price of the item, then asked the next team what they thought. Given that there are six teams, it didn't take too long to get around everybody for each item.

That was my ideal, at least. In reality I still find it hard to get everyone involved. I find students turning off and even when I try to motivate them with strategies such as "if everyone in your team doesn't speak you can't win" (not my actual words) they don't like to participate. I guess this must be down to my classroom atmosphere. I need to think of ways to encourage everyone to speak!

A Bonus Problem

One of the other problems I'm struggling to find an answer to recently is a number of students of various ages in different classes who are completely disinteresting in everything I do. I might offer them a game, but they claim it to be boring, or perhaps a song that they don't care about. The other students have a great time, and often if I manage to get these students involved they enjoy it too, but they come to my classes claiming that everything is boring. I don't like to think this is due to my teaching, as we play plenty of games and have lots of fun, there are just these few students... Am I too inconsistent? Did I let them down by not fulfilling my promises? I'm really not sure, but they tend to ruin the atmosphere! What on earth can I do with them?!