A Post-script and an Invitation to a Future

Dear 2012 Fall STGers,

Now that the STG course is finished, it's time to wrap this blog up, too. I'll leave it on the internet as a relic of what has been, but there will no longer be any activity here.

That doens't mean reflective teaching stops with the site, though. I've decided to move my reflections to another address, partly to disassociate it from the particularities of our STG groups and begin a new slate as an ELT professional . My main reason, though, is that I really don't like blogger! I'm much more fond of Wordpress, and so my new page can be found at:

http://tomselt.wordpress.com/

If you're interested to keep reading and up to date with what I'm doing as a teacher (and researcher?) then that's the place to look!

If any of you guys plan to keep up your blogs in some form aswell I'd love to keep following you, and hopefully we can continue to help each other develop professionally. It's been great sharing and reading what you've written so far, and I look forward to reading about what all of you do in the future!

Now just to check out our grades in a couple of hours and attend our graduation ceremony on Thursday. Hope to see you there!

Week 14: The Final STG Blog Post

Here's my last official reflection during my time on the STG course! To make it clear what I'm talking about I'll begin by reposting the questions from Johnston (2003, p143).

4) Reflect for a moment on your career in ELT. What have been the major turning points and decisions in your professional life. How have these related to your personal life? What values have guided you in choosing your career path? What conflicts of values have you experienced, and how have you tried to resolve them?

5) Think about your own teaching situation. Do you consider that you are marginalized in any way? If so, what forms does this marginalization take? What forms of advocacy are or would be useful in your situation?

Let's Get Personal

Some of you may know I've only been teaching for three years. I graduated from a Drama and Theatre degree, and came over to Korea teach and to be with my then girlfriend (now wife, Emjay). I've never regretted that decision.

As with many teachers here, though, I had no teacher training and didn't view the job as lasting more than a year. I did it, in a way, to have a source of income while I worked out how serious my relationship with Emjay was. It turned out to be pretty serious, and it gave me a lot of direction. I found that I loved Korea and teaching, and began to consider teaching as not just a job, but a career.

How I proposed!

This change of mind was also brought about a lot by the excellent co-teachers I had. They were professionals in precisely the way Johnston describes: always changing, trying new things, developing dialogues with their students - the lot. They took me under their wing and showed me what it meant to be a professional teacher, even though I had no formal training. This wasn't just how these two teachers approached me either. I was surprised and embarrassed at how much I was trusted and esteemed by the school in general. My vice-principal asked for private lessons, and I was given a lot of freedom in my classrooms despite being so inexperienced.

I look at this experience in comparison to the horrible stories of marginalization I've heard from other non-Korean English teachers, and am very thankful. I really feel that as a young white British male I've been on the end of only positive discrimination, and have gained greatly from it. I seem to exactly fit the mold of what Koreans want to see in their English teachers.

I doubt that this will continue as I pursue professional development, however. Both my family and professional status have changed enough to ensure that. As both of these develop I have the same choices to make as Johnston did - I've talked frequently with Emjay about what we would do if my work, or even my study, took me to another country.

To support our international family my wife quit her job early this year to pursue her dream of being a translator. This will mean our family isn't tied to any one country - we could both work anywhere in the world. She's doing well, too, but still earns peanuts. That means that for now I earn for the both of us, and needed to take on an extra after school English job. This financial need will only grow as we work on growing our family!

My career could take me anywhere in the world!

Taking on this extra job, which I don't really enjoy, has meant a lot of adjustment for me. Before it I was very comfortable in my job and had more than enough time to prepare my lessons. With these extra classes I find I have little or no time to prepare, and have to make the most of every minute in my working day. It has meant that the overall quality of my classes has decreased (especially the after school ones I don't really want to be doing), and this has caused a moral dilemma. I really want to give my students the best classes possible, but my current working situation doesn't allow for it.

I could perhaps work on this in the evening, but my professional development on the STG course means I'm busy most evenings with homework, and I place importance on investiong the rest in my personal relationships, particularly with my wife. This course has also meant that I now truly feel like I could call myself a professional teacher, with great implications for my future. I've been inspired to work hard at self-development and the development of the teaching field in general.

It has also, however, opened up my eyes to many of the shortcomings of the Korean English education systems. I wasn't inspired to leave education as Rafal, the Polish teacher Johnston mentioned was though. Quite the opposite. I can't say for sure if I will go for it, but part of me would love to be a part of reforming Korean education, be it increasing the quality of Native teachers in Korean schools through developing some half-decent internal teacher training programs, or working as an advocate for Korean teachers of English and calling for less Native speakers in schools.

By considering this kind of career path I'm effectively opening myself up to many forms of potential marginalization - many people might rightly question my right to judge and comment on the system of a country not my own. Even if I don't work on the Korean system I have ideas for how I could develop my career, and none of them involve staying in my current job. I want out, and I want to push myself and whichever field I find myself working in as far as I can. I'm bound to meet some opposition on the way!

But I don't think I would see many of these things as marginalization as Johnston does. I don't think, for example, that Johnston's example of ESL teachers being viewed as unprofessional is a form of marginalization. It is, after all, based on some truth - just three years ago I too was an amateur doing a job I wasn't trained to do, and I too thought any native speaker could do it. To me this merely seems a natural progression of popular thought about a young field filled with unskilled workers which is on it's way to being recognized as a worthy professional career path.

Perhaps I'm just an optimist, but I try to see such "marginalizations" as opportunities. I don't deny that many examples of marginalization are very real and very difficult to deal with, but many times they mark areas which have room for development - they are places I, and all teachers, can be at work in, advocating good teaching, fairness and equality, and the practice of personal and corporate reflection and research.

I'm excited at the many opportunities the field of Second Language Teaching holds for my future!

Week 14: Writing With 3rd Graders

Given that we were headed up to a weekend all about Output, and specifically writing, I decided to have a go at a writing lesson so that I could analyse whether what I did was truly an output activity or not.

I was teaching my 3rd graders about the weather ("How's the weather?", "It's sunny" was our given TLC), and asked them to give me a weather report like the beautiful Korean ladies on TV. These ladies read from teleprompters, and so the students had to write the script they would be reading for their reports.

If you have the inclination to watch my video, the writing section begins at 27:20!

What I Did

This was the first chance for my students to produce some writing for this chapter. Up until this lesson everything had been speaking, listening and reading. For this reason I wanted to spend some time producing some kind of written output, and the activity I prepared reflected what I thought I knew.

I began the class by reviewing what we had already learned and by adding some new vocabulary trough repetition and actions. We even played a game where the students simply followed my instructions and we had fun performing the wrong weather in the wrong season (snow in summer?!). This got their bodies and minds warmed up and ready to talk and write about weather. A schema activation exercise, if you will.

When it was time to get to the writing we spent a lot of time building the context. First I had to get them to recognize the genre (a weather report), and create a weather map to write about. I chose to do this because I considered giving my students the option to choose the weather themselves as key to an output activity. However, this took a looong time! We spent about ten minutes gluing the map into their books and writing a title (my co-teacher had ignored my request to print this all on a separate worksheet to save time). We also had to send time teaching students where some of the big cities of Korea were on the map, which I hadn't anticipated needing to do. After that they spent another five minutes drawing weather symbols. All of this I considered necessary to engage the students and make the activity feel more real. It took a lot of time though!

When we finally got to the writing the students were required to write four sentences about their map based on the sentences written on the board, telling us the weather in each of the four cities. I tried to allow flexibility in this so that the higher students weren't bound by the rules, but had to allow a structure to allow my lower students something to build upon. (My lower students actually need practice with handwriting and phonics, but there is neither time nor opportunity for this. We compromise by giving very basic writing tasks during class time, though in reality this is far from ideal.) This meant that the class were actually doing a fill-in-the-blank activity, and adding whichever language matched the map they had made.

What I Should Have Done

I am now aware that this writing activity couldn't be classed as an Output activity. The students were given clear structures to use, and were guided down a narrow channel without much chance to get things wrong. The focus was accuracy, not production.

In order to create a real output activity I would have had to simply hand my students a map and tell them to write a weather report. I could've given them some examples or guidance before we started and during the activity, but the focus needs to be much more on the mere production of the TLC language without structured guidance.

The activity I provided was a "Practice" activity, and I think that this is what they needed. My students weren't at the point where they could have produced the language without clear guidelines, as this was the first time they had tried writing it. My mistake wasn't the choice of activity, but the label I put on it.

My question, given this, is if my third grade students are truly capable of an output activity the way I have been taught this week. My students found enough difficulty with the more structured activity above, and I worry that they'd just not know what to write given a truly output focused task. Maybe this depends a lot on what I set them to do. Maybe I just need to jump in the deep end and see what happens. But I'm really nervous about doing it.

At least I know now what I could and should be doing to fully teach my students. That's an accomplishment and encouragement in itself!

Week 14: ICC Microteaching Reflection

I've tried to mix both Methodology and ICC ideas into the following reflection, which first looks at what my aim was, and then to what extent I achieved that aim. The achievement aspect will be split further into the ICC and Methodology aspects of the lesson, both including aspects which could have been better and those I was more or less satisfied with.

My Aim - What I Was Trying To Do

I designed my micro-teaching on the basis of the misunderstanding of the words "see you later", which further opened up into the differences in peoples' concepts of time. This misunderstanding displays the importance of context on any language interaction, and thus fits neatly into both McConachy's SPEAKING framework and Schollon's "Grammar of Context".

These models illustrate well what a specific utterance might mean, for example, given any particular Setting, the differences in Participants' cultures, the Ends that each participant intends, and the Norms they bring into the situation. I planned to use this to serve up some intercultural understanding for the presentation side of the lesson, with this then opening up into resolving conflicts between people who see an event differently, a key element of the video I used in this lesson.

My Teaching - ICC

My main worry about this lesson was that the cultural aspect would be too shallow or non-existent, however I was pleased to see that my "students" interacted well with it. The video proved simple enough for them to follow what was going on, and they could identify the language which caused the problem. Not only this, but the content allowed for both discussion and explanation of culture which was largely manageable within their language proficiency.

This was demonstrated in the discussion about the video, which I felt was conducted largely productively. It could be said that I seemed to take a strong lead and guide the students too firmly, but given their age and level I think this was justified. The questions took small, clear steps forward through the video and the problem, and the students seemed to all have a good idea of what the problem was - a misunderstanding over time.

I then skipped over watching the video again so that I could teach more, and made an effective transition into talking about conflict resolution. This worked quite well, but by skipping the video I forgot to include another cultural aspect of the microteaching: asking the students about their ideas of time, and introducing how some other cultures view time. For example, I might've talked about the stereotypical view that Africans tend to be very late to events by mentioning a South African friend I have in Seoul. I would have tried to break these stereotypes by then asking the students for their opinions and experiences of people and time, and helping them to note that they themselves don't all fit into the stereotype I introduced in the preview stage of my lesson about Koreans being late whenever I meet them.

My Teaching - Methodology

Throughout the more culturally-focused part of the lesson mentioned above I noticed that I generally spoke too fast. I tend to notice this as I speak, and my attempts to balance this with slower repetition are observable in the video. I also tried hard to check the students' understanding by asking questions about what I expected of them, almost all of which seemed to be helpful.

A typical example of when this didn't work was when I asked Kyle "What was she doing?". This question includes the target language for this lesson which we hadn't yet studied; I'd introduced it a little too early meaning that Kyle, quite correctly, couldn't answer properly. Because I recognized that the mistake was on my side I didn't push Kyle to give a grammatically decent past tense answer (he produced a present tense verb), but I also didn't just push past it - I asked Jason L to repeat what he said! Naturally, he repeated the wrong answer, and I failed to correct it.

My thought at the time was that this would allow the students to notice that there was a necessary piece of grammar missing, in a similar way to how a Task-based lesson might ask students to complete an activity without giving them the grammar first. However since I hadn't yet identified or isolated this grammar I doubt my students would have noticed anything. They probably would've imagined they were right! In short, these were both utterances that I should've slowed down to notice and allow the students to fix.

During this part of the microteaching I also noticed that I have a tendency not to appear to be listening to my students. Watching my recording I felt as though I was occasionally giving half-answers to them as I was busy doing something else. I should focus on my students' answers to give them a sense of worth, otherwise the students will begin to see less value in answering at all. I need to stop what I'm doing and make efforts to show my interest in my students, even if this means taking a few more seconds of writing or thinking on my part later.

Everything mentioned so far formed the beginning of the presentation stage, which I think successfully followed a Top-down process. The top-down-bottom-up came next, when I asked the students to put my scrambled sentences into order. It was intentional that they didn't have the language skills to understand everything on the paper I gave them. This, along with a short time limit, was aimed at pushing them towards a achieving only rough understanding of the text. We didn't have time to do more than this, but after going through the answers we would then have moved onto identifying what the grammar point is and where it appears in the text, before progressing to the isolation stage.


Overall I was satisfied with this lesson, although there is clear room for improvement, particularly in my questioning and feedback moves. However, I'm happy to think that my students would probably have come away from this lesson with a better level of intercultural competence and the right groundwork to successfully and meaningfully complete the rest of my lesson about conflict resolution.

Week 13: Pronunciation and Teaching

I recorded a video to reflect on last Monday, but found myself doing everything but reflecting. I had the same students again this morning and they reminded me about many of the things I had thought about last week. So I've come back to it!

Despite the title of this post this lesson was not primarily about teaching pronunciation, as we were introducing the "Can I...." form of requesting for the first time. This means that the first part of my reflection "What We Did" talks mostly about, well, what we did, and also some reflections on my attempts at MIC and CI techniques during the lesson as a whole.

The second part reflects my main interest for this post, the pronunciation aspect of my lesson. Although the actual pronunciation teaching content of this lesson was very limited, there was certainly material worthy of reflection. Therefore, the section imaginatively titled "Pronunciation" is arguably more interesting. Skip over the first section if you came to this blog expecting to read about pronunciation!

What We Did

In introducing the how to make requests using the structure "Can you..." I aimed to catch my students interests by showing them that what they have learned until now is wrong (in the sense that "can" doesn't have one meaning). I elicited the usual ability focused "can" which my students are well acquainted with (along with a picture of a can) and challenged what they knew. Thinking again now this seems like quite an abstract way of motivating a group of uninterested 5th graders, but they seemed engaged.

It certainly allowed a stronger sense of interest in the listening activity I provided to teach them the structure. At this point in my teaching I'm still trying my best to consciously implement a Top Down --> Bottom Up strategy, as I find it doesn't yet come naturally. To do this here I first showed them the context of the listening activity (which also had a video), which was an old people's home where some students were volunteering. I successfully elicited this from the students, and gave them a clear focus for what to do in this activity - listen out for three sentences which use the word "can" and take a note of them if they can.

The first two sentences were easily elicited, and I mainly used short, simple recasts and WB use to try to help students reach the right answer without giving it away. The third one took some time, but we eventually got there. We then did the listening a second time the students had to listen for how the sentences were used and what they meant. This, too, seemed to work pretty well. A few of the smarter students quickly identified a rough Korean equivalent which didn't involve the idea of ability, and the others seemed to follow along.

At 18:00 I tried to make this really clear by talking about the absurdity of answering the question "Can you open the window?" with "Yes, I can", but I found I was largely talking to myself and assuming an understanding of the target language content. Not only did I not make what I was saying clear, but I kept answering my own questions and found myself thankful to the few students who followed me and proceeded to correctly display some excellent examples of how we should answer the TLC question. I put this down to a lack of thought and preparation in this area; I had noticed it might be helpful to mention it at the last minute!

When I felt the students had got the meaning I spent a lot of time emphasizing the importance of the structure by playing a version of Simon says. I used my over-acting skills to demonstrate the rudeness of telling someone to "OPEN THE WINDOW" in contrast to the positive feelings associated with asking someone "Can you open the window, please?". This question form effectively replaced the function of the "Simon says" structure, with students only doing the action when I was polite. The students found the game, aided by my over-acting, great fun, and I really think they picked up on what I was trying to get across.

There was one main problem with the way I approached this, however. Have you worked it out? Yup, it's...

Pronunciation

My pronunciation teaching in this lesson was meditated and intentional, but the actual time spent directly teaching it was fairly brief (see 18:47). This was my first ever attempt at teaching "natural" sounding English, and I decided to show my students the shortening of "can you" to "cnya". It didn't take long to get them to see what I was saying, and from the choral repetition I got I assumed that everyone had got it. However, looking back I now see that I didn't provide any opportunity to check individual students' pronunciation. I simply got a few loud choral repetitions and some obvious understanding from a few students, and moved onto the Simon says activity mentioned above - a listening activity (if that). I can't even say that everyone had tried the pronunciation out at that point in the lesson.

This wouldn't have been too much of an issue if I'd returned to lots of speaking practice later, but I didn't really do this. I instead aimed the activities on making sure the students understood the target language content. There was a speaking activity planned for the end of the lesson, but we ran out of time (we started it at 39:00!) and my students were so keen to go that the activity didn't really work. But I shouldn't blame this on them - I didn't prepare enough speaking time.

The biggest problem, however, wasn't my use of activities, but my lack of use of the pronunciation I was teaching. Because I'm used to changing the speed and level of my English in class I didn't expect this to be a problem, but I really failed to consistently pronounce the TLC the way I'd taught it. I found that I really do have a teacher voice! I think this is alright for my normal teaching, as it's important for the students to get to grips with what they are learning through my clear example, however given this all the time I'm in no doubt that my students won't have a way to understand real English outside the classroom. I say I don't mind giving clear, slow English a lot of the time because my learners are at such a low level and because I can potentially provide more varied and real speakers on listening tasks, but this lesson really highlighted the need for me to teach pronunciation, and consistently, to my students.

A really great thing, however, happened when I met this class again this morning (I only see them once a week). I was both shocked and delighted to find many of them coming out with the pronunciation I taught them last week without my prompting. The fact that they had remembered was a great start, but I was much more impressed at how much more natural their English sounded after such a short and simple change... Suddenly they didn't feel like my students any more!

I think it's not unreasonable to mark this as a big realization about how I've been teaching and what I need to teach in the future. The size and level of my classes is not a reason or excuse not to teach pronunciation, and nor is my ability to understand them. I would almost say I'm morally obliged to teach them natural pronunciation the way I have been learning to recently. If I don't they will finish four years of English education with me and not be able to go out into the world and speak English with anyone other than their classmates. That reality would be far from my recently formed aim of teaching them to communicate.

Is it time to get the rubber bands out, then?