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?

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?!

Week 11: ICC Reflective Video 2

This is the second of my ICC reflections which are due week 12. The last one, which employed CCDA around some Christmas adverts, can be found here: http://tomsteaching.blogspot.kr/2012/11/week-10-icc-reflective-video-1.html.

Gestures

After giving some thought to what would be most engaging and interesting to my 6^th grade students I eventually settled upon gesture. They know about this and use it a lot when they speak in Korean, but in English class they don’t have a set of gestures to go with what they say; most of the time they’re carrying their books, a card or some such. I was also aware that many of these kids are getting well into puberty and I have to spend copious time stopping them from fighting, resolving minor bullying issues or showing them that swearing is not ok (in the classroom at least).

My idea was to show them that different gestures can mean different things in different countries, and that they should be careful. I also wanted to encourage them to use gesture when they spoke English. The video clip below is from the first fifteen minutes of one of these classes, and focuses on the gestures part of the lesson. This was followed by some more focused language learning about “What would you like to ______?”, with the lesson culminating in a pair-finding activity in which I encouraged the use of gestures alongside the language.

From a methodological point of view I’m afraid this class seems a little teacher fronted. I spent a lot of time talking about what the different gestures meant rather than allowing the students to speak. I could have easily combated this by allowing them to talk in groups about what they thought each gesture meant before sharing with the class.I could also have better used my time by asking them to suggest situations in which we could use each gesture. My own example of this can be seen after 5:18, where I talk about using a certain gesture in France. If I had given them time to think more themselves then they could have personalized the ideas much more and may have come away with more intercultural understanding.

I was also a little worried about the moral content of the lesson – should I be teaching my 6^th graders how to swear in another language?! Before the class I justified this by telling myself that these kids are all swearing with each other anyway, and that there must be some value in being frank about such subjects. When the classes were finished, however, I was somewhat worried I might get a parent calling me and complaining about my teaching, but I got no such phone call.

Despite my worries I think there was enough value in letting them know to be careful how they use their hands in other countries, and they all seemed to leave with a good knowledge about other cultures being different, and this not only being acceptable but great news (perhaps because it allowed them to swear at their teachers without the teachers knowing what was going on…).

I like to think that there will be a few students who later travel to England and think twice about flashing a backwards “V” when they take photos!

Week 11: Teaching Vocabulary

Although the lesson I recorded wasn't specifically designed to show vocabulary teaching, I figured that, as I was planning to blog about it anyway, I might as well take the vocabulary teaching elements that happened to be included and blog about those. It's a shame that I won't be able to talk about the CI and MIC aspects of it, as I really tried to push it as far as I could with this lesson without too much planning - I want to see if these ideas are starting to seep into my subconscious! If you're reading this and have time I'd be interested to know how you think this lesson went. It gets a bit out of hand when the students are producing language at the end, though...

Anyhow, let's lay down the context. My lesson this week was about prepositions, specifically "There is a _______ on/in/under the ______." Most of my students have learnt these before, but quite a while ago. This lesson is designed to be partly review of what they know and more depth into the same subject. I believe last year they learned "Where is the cat? It's in the box." Pretty basic stuff.

This time around, then, we took the same simple prepositions and tried to expand their meaning beyond "on" meaning "on top of" and "in" meaning only "inside". My students have a very narrow view of these very widely used words. So what did I do to teach this vocabulary and how did it work? Have a look at the first ten minutes of this class if you have a moment:

I first began by eliciting the vocabulary by showing the students a situation - beginning with placing a rubber on my head. As well as getting some giggles and funny looks, my students correctly produced the word "on", and proceeded to complete the target sentence for the lesson (recycled from the previous lesson). While I didn't manage it in this video, in other classes I managed to expand the meaning of "on" to include anything that is "stuck" onto something - the clearest example being the location of the clock on our classroom wall, or a mark on someone's face.

In this way I managed to get students to construct and develop their own meaning for the word and show them how to produce it in a sentence. I did the same for "behind" by placing pencils behind my ears, and for "in" by holding the scissors in my hand. My students seem to find this kind of visual demonstration very clear, and in my observations of a similar production activity later I found that they had a thorough understanding of these prepositions in relation to the body.

There were also a couple of vocab items that came up during class which I hadn't predicted my students having a problem with. Each provided a chance to use a different kind of vocabulary explanation.

The first was how the word "scissors" is used in English, and how to place it into our target sentence correctly. My students weren't sure whether scissors are countable or not - thus whether they need to be used with "is" or "are". I tried to explain this quickly by showing them the two blades of the scissors and comparing them to a pair of glasses, a vocabulary item they are more familiar with. I then elicited the correct sentence form from the students, and even made sure they knew how to spell the word by eliciting it from them. It was clear that they weren't sure about the spelling, and I'm not sure if my teaching was effective - I merely wrote the word up as the correct letters were called out. Hopefully this provided the students with a chance to notice the spelling, though I think a chance to produce the spelling themselves would have been helpful.

The last vocabulary item also got the shortest attention, as it came up in the middle of my first presentation activity. As the students were reading the instructions off the interactive board and following them by decorating their human statues (you didn't watch the video? It's fun, go have a look :D) it became clear that not everyone knew the word "shoulders". To keep the activity flowing and to help those who were confused I quickly modeled the sound of the word, showed them the meaning by touching my shoulders and repeated the word in Korean when they had made the connection themselves.

I find these simple vocab items fairly easy to explain, and I feel that I do a good job of them along the lines that Nation suggested. However, if I were to teach harder vocabulary to an older, higher level group, I feel that I would have a lot more trouble. There is so much useful information about each word that I can't get across, and I feel I'd need a lot of preparation time to get it right. I think it would be valuable for me to try a lesson based purely on vocabulary and dictionary use, as at the moment I feel I would find myself flailing and unsure what to do. For now, though, I'll stick to adding in vocabulary items in opportune moments. This seems like the quickest and most useful way for my students' situation!

Week 10: ICC Reflective Video 1

This is the first of my ICC reflections which are due week 12. The second one, in which I try to teach about the intercultural usages of gesture, can be found here: http://tomsteaching.blogspot.kr/2012/11/week-11-icc-reflective-video-2.html.

Note: This post reflects on the CCDA parts of this lesson, which run from 9"32 to 28"57.

I understand what we’re supposed to be doing with Cross Cultural Discourse Analysis. It makes sense, and I can see the value in doing it. But actually trying to make it work in my classroom is a real struggle. Here’s the first attempt I made a couple of weeks ago.

Actually, this isn’t my first attempt at culture in the classroom. In the past I’ve done sections on holidays and customs, and occasionally even taught about table manners. However these were always me showing my students what other cultures are like. It was very much a presentation, with perhaps a couple of students trying things out. I never helped them engage with or think about the material, and I doubt they developed intercultural competence from what I taught.

My aim in this lesson, however, was to let the students work out more about other cultures for themselves with my lead. Let’s talk about how that went (I’ll give you a hint: not well!).

After a look at me showing the students the first video (about Paris Baguette) it was very clear that I was still dragging my students through the material and pointing out interesting things on the way. I asked them rather meaningless questions (Who is in the video? What are they doing?) and proceeded to tell them what this means for each culture. All my questions were very leading, and if the students didn’t give me the answer I was looking for I guided them to it.

The work we did around the second video was a bit better. Because the content was more unfamiliar to the students and the video was more interesting they seemed more engaged. They were genuinely trying to work out what the people in the video were doing. We managed to sort this out and identify who Christmas in the UK seems to be for, and the activity that followed afterwards was good for demonstrating this point. However I seem to have dropped the cultural significance of the video when I began the activity, and simply refocused on only the English. I think this was partly due to a lack of time, and partly because I felt I had pushed the cultural discourse as far as it could go with these students. They were losing focus again!

I can’t work out a way around this. For a start it is evident from the recording that I struggle to keep the class focused; I can get them to pay attention, but when I start asking questions and try to create a dialogue with them a dozen different conversations burst out (many in Korean, too). On top of this many of the students seem to understand my questions, but most of them aren’t really capable or motivated enough to answer them. Or perhaps they can answer, but their answers aren’t as meaningful as they would be in Korean. They say what they know rather than what they need to say to express a real opinion or observation. How can I develop a meaningful discussion of cultural differences in a large class who don’t have the language skill or focus to express anything helpful to the subject?

Perhaps I just chose the wrong type of activity. They’re just not ready for a discussion! But then what else do I do to encourage CCDA? My next idea for a lesson is to do an activity from this week’s reading – Activity H (cross cultural trivia) - but rather than reading them out like a quiz I would demonstrate each one and ask groups of students to assign a meaning to each one. I could then help them to see how different cultures have different forms of non–verbal communication. Might this work better? I’m hoping so, because I don’t want to try to work my way through another class like this one!