Week 2: Altering Classroom Discourses

I'm in quite a conundrum. See, I intentionally chose to write this blog post later in the week so that I could have some teaching time before really reflecting on what I've been doing. However in doing so I've suddenly found that there's this reading by a guy named Walsh which challenges most of my teaching style, and I find I'm left with a big gap between my thinking last week and now.

Should I have written a blog post just two days ago it would have been very different in content, as I was largely confident that my teaching was decent quality (due to my own pride and praise from colleagues).
Now I'm not so sure.

The first homework we were given that fed directly into our classes was to prepare a warm up using Classroom Interaction (CI) techniques. I felt as though I did a lot of these in my classes (indeed, I still hold that I do), and decided to demonstrate my varied use of them. I made intentional use of repetition, various error correction techniques, getting students to interact with each other under my guidance - I generally felt like a star.

This became even more the case when I noticed my STG classmates uploading comments about how they had seen recordings of themselves teaching and were horrified at their useless and sometimes confusing insertions of "um"s and "so"s; my teacher talk didn't seem to have much of that at all. Great!

If I had looked for a weakness, it would have been that I often stuck sentences together too closely, and rushed the beginnings and ends of what I said. The students may have got what I was communicating, but they must have missed a lot of what I said. It was my aim to change this particular form of classroom discourse during my lessons this week, and I did so to some success. My results were to be the contents of this blog post.

After having read Walsh, however, I can see where I am in error. The reason that my classroom discourse seemed to run so smoothly was that I was in control - complete, obstructive, monologic control - of my class.  The students answered when I called, repeated when I demonstrated and complied with my requests. Never was there a sign of learner autonomy, or real student engagement with the language.  Have a look for yourself here.

Walsh, however, might well say that I was obstructing my students' chances to learn at every turn. Yes, they had time to practice and get things correct, but there was no conversation, real use of English or personalization of learning - the latter of which I find extremely important to my continuing Korean studies.
It is partly because of my independent language study that I find so much truth in what Walsh has to say. It makes a lot of sense that students will learn more and have better conversational ability if they're given more chances to speak and there is less obstruction by the teacher. I would really love to try this in my classroom and allow my students to get into the practice of autonomous learning, which seems at the moment to be the holy grail of communicative teaching practice.

Yet I can't conceive of a way to break my current teaching habits. I tell myself that there are reasons for the way I teach. The largest is perhaps that I have large classes of 8-12 year old kids with language proficiencies ranging from practically non-existent to near-fluent. My large use of repetition and controlled activities is a way of keeping the whole class focused, and making sure every learner is getting some exposure to the language.

Not my students, but equally uninterested.

The argument which is stopping me from wholeheartedly embracing Walsh's ideas is that if I were to try them with my students, I simply wouldn't be able to get them to focus on the lesson. I have enough trouble getting them to listen to brief controlled language exchanges. Having open conversations where the students are encouraged to be involved would mean that a few students would continuously speak over each other, and the quieter students would shy away more. By repeating and doing controlled exercises I feel as if I'm giving everyone in the room an equal language opportunity.

I also feel like there's something missing in that, though. Perhaps I'm just imagining worst-case-scenarios rather than really giving it a try. There must be a way to get students involved and motivated to speak English in more student-orientated ways without losing control of the class. A good place to start may be my sixth grade role-play lesson tomorrow morning. Then again, the co-teacher who taught them alone last lesson tells me to expect it to be... messy.

Rather than doing sixth grade role-plays, which are about as linguistically challenging as my classes get (they're actually writing the scripts themselves in teams), what about if I were to take a simple third grade lesson like "I like apples". If I took phrases such as "What do you like?" and "Do you like apples" as the target language, could I get them to have active conversations about their likes and dislikes either in groups or as a whole class?

I really don't feel as though this would work, but there must be a way. If you've gotten to the end of this post I would really appreciate your thoughts!

Week 1: Using Classroom Interactions During the Warm-up Stage

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!

My Teaching Context

This blog has been started in order to reflect upon my teaching practice as I complete the Sookmyung University TESOL Global course. However, before reflecting on my teaching I thought it would be wise to kick off with a short explanation of the context I teach in, for my own reference and for those who may come to read this blog.

I'm currently teaching at XX Elementary school (ㅇㅇ초교) in Gangseo-gu (강서구), Seoul. I have to teach third through sixth grade once a week, and currently meet fourth grade twice a week. As these classes don't make up my required hours I also teach two daycare classes a week (where I teach those first and second grade students whose parents leave them at school in the afternoon) and am supposed to do a teacher's class every week, but this quickly stopped as teachers become too busy.

My contract states that I am always to co-teach (my official position is that of an assistant), but in reality I sometimes find myself leading classes with the Korean teacher watching, or just teaching alone. I have two co-teachers: J and S. Simply put, I don't get on with J and I do get on with S. I teach with the former two days a week and the latter three times a week.

S is a good, experienced teacher and shares the workload with me well. She makes good lesson plans, but is much more reserved than I am, so I tend to take the lead in our classes. We try to aim for an ideal of teaching everything together side by side rather than one or the other taking the weight of a class or activity.

I said I don't get on with J. The reason for this is that I believe she is simply not a good teacher. Her knowledge of English grammar is reasonable, but her skills end there. This knowledge doesn't show in her production of English, which both spoken and written is hard to understand. Her listening skills are worse.

Of course, this is common in English teachers worldwide, but the problem is that she seems to genuinely believe she is an expert at the English language, and that she is an excellent teacher. She is not. If the situation at our school weren't as political as it is she would be fired, however the situation as it stands doesn't allow for this.

On top of this, this term I have been asked (read: forced) by my vice principle to take over the failing after school English class. The company that was running it pulled out of our school, and the solution found was to give me all those extra teaching hours on top of the ones I already have. So I've gone from 22 teaching hours to 31. This means I teach straight from 9 - 4 three days a week, plus all the preparation for these. I have small consolation in being payed extra for this, but the hourly rate is less than half than my normal hours.

With all this going on I wonder how I will manage any teacher reflection or application of my TESOL course. I rather imagine I will be napping between classes! Nevertheless I intend to give it my best shot.

Hooray to better teaching at the cost of sleep deprivation!

Perhaps I should just take this as preparation to have that baby my wife insists will be coming soon. :D