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!
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