Week 5: Clearing Up A Lesson Cut Short

There was a lot left unsaid today, and it seemed as though many of us left class in confusion, irritation or apathy. While I can't claim to answer every question that was left partially answered, I thought it would be valuable to continue the conversation and make sure everyone's on the same page. That's what this post is for!

First, let's quickly go over what we learned, and the context of the last activity:

We have a micro-teaching assignment due in week 6 in which we have to design the Preview section of a lesson based on either reading or listening (receptive skills). We had gotten through all the information about how to write out a lesson plan, and were discussing exactly what the Preview section of a PPP lesson plan focused on reading and listening should entail. We eventually concluded, thanks to Tom's eliciting skills and the combination of our Multiple Intelligences, that a preview needs to include the following elements:

1. Greeting / Relaxing our students
2. Recycling (not reviewing) the TLC from previous lessons
3. Focusing on the topic (aka activating schema)
4. Establishing context (giving the students a reason to listen to / read the material)

I felt that the first two were fairly well covered and understood by the whole group, so will move onto the harder points and the confusion we got into around Jason and Kyle's presentation.

In their presentation of a Preview exercise it was generally concluded that they did an excellent job of activating our schema. We were encouraged to talk about what we were doing these days, and Kyle teacher got to share with us that he is moving house. This led to a natural discussion about our experiences moving house, the things we had to do and what we had to pack. Given the listening dialogue they were given, which I gathered was about someone moving house and a neighbor offering to help out, such questions are a great way of activating students' schema. We were all genuinely engaged and sharing our experiences, and Tom rightly complimented Jason and Kyle's skill in doing this. It's certainly something that my group forgot to include in our plan, and I was very thankful to have had that discussion. I might've missed an important part of the Preview process had it not been brought up.

However, the confusion arose when Tom tried to explain that our Jason and Kyle had not managed to establish the context. It was explained that they had given their students no reason to be overhearing a conversation about moving house in English. Perhaps the confusion arose because the students clearly did have a reason to speak English - the teachers had told them to! This is where we missed the point. The students aren't supposed to be speaking the dialogue or be part of it, they are only going to be listening to the dialogue. It's because they can only hear the dialogue once in real English situations that we really need to activate the schema and establish a context; it gives them a much better chance of understanding and engaging with the conversation.

Let's make sure we've really pinned down what it means to establish context.

We're left with a problem when presenting a listening or reading dialogue in class, namely that language is always used in real situations, and giving our students a dialogue to read or listen to is a completely unrealistic language situation. In reality we almost never simply overhear or eavesdrop on a conversation, but in English classes this is a common occurrence. The challenge is to take an unnatural situation and put it into a real context. In other words, we need to situate the student into the scene as a listener. This will allow students to participate in situated learning.

This was demonstrated by Tom's drawing of an office space on the board. He led us from our desk to the water cooler, where, lone behold! our boss's door was open and we found ourselves in a situation where we could naturally overhear him conversing with someone; this overheard conversation the listening dialogue that we would have listened to had we continued to the next stage of the lesson. It's important to note here that we didn't just jump straight into the situation, we were led to it, and that the students were not a part of the conversation going on, they were merely overhearing it.

Putting our students into a situation in which they could overhear a dialogue without contributing to it was something our group really struggled to do, as we were dealing with a phone call. We spent a number of minutes talking about how the student could be one side of the conversation, as we had forgotten that the student is only going to be listening to it, not speaking. But how can we overhear both sides of the conversation? They're talking on the phone, an activity which by nature only allows an eavesdropper to hear one side of what's being said. So we were faced with the challenge of putting our students into a real situation in which they could hear both sides of the phone call.

I think we managed to come up with a doable idea, and I want to share it to make sure we've really got the idea of establishing context driven home.

The phone call was a conversation between a man and his wife, in which the man was on his way to an important meeting and had left his USB stick at home. The USB stick was the only place he had saved the presentation for this meeting, which he had to attend in half an hour. Since there was no time to bring him the USB stick he gave instructions about where it was, how to access the file and how to email it to him.

How on earth can we get someone to listen in to both sides of this conversation?

The best solution we could come up with was that a boss or team leader was being driven to the same meeting by his personal assistant/team member. This assistant is the man who makes the phone call, who also happens to be in charge of his boss's affairs and therefore has responsibility over preparing the meeting materials. When the boss is double checking that everything is in order, it transpires that the assistant has left the vital USB stick at home, and is forced to call his wife to get the file sent to him. Here's the crucial part: because he is driving he can't simply answer the phone as his hands should be busy keeping the car on the road; he has to put it on speaker phone, and the boss happens to overhear the whole exchange.

How do the students fit into this? They are the boss!

We could begin our Preview by telling the students that today they are the boss (which they are bound to enjoy) and slowly build the situation with them. They have a meeting today. What kind of meeting might they be having? How will they get to the meeting? If you're a boss you no doubt get driven there. If we're going to a meeting we should check everything's in order, so we build a checklist to go through with the personal assistant. Did you bring my suitcase? Is everyone due to arrive on time? Did you prepare the presentation?

And suddenly, in a similar way to how Tom led us to overhear our boss's conversation by the water cooler, our students are imagining themselves in a real situation in which they overhear both sides of a phone call. We have established context with them!

Unfortunately, as I mentioned before, we completely failed to include activation of our students' schema. What is written above is almost all we had time to talk about, so I am very thankful for Jason and Kyle's example.

I hope the thoughts our group had have made exactly what we were trying to pin down in the whirlwind conclusion to yesterday's lesson really clear. I'll summarize it one more time for luck:

When Previewing a listening or reading activity - which I have written in bold font throughout this blog post to really make sure everyone understands that we have to do just this for our micro-teaching assignment - when previewing a listening or reading activity it is vital to activate our students' schema, as demonstrated wonderfully by Jason and Kyle, and also to establish context and make the situation real, as Tom showed us once at the water cooler and I have tried to demonstrate again with the boss overhearing a phone call above.

I think we got there! Thanks for getting to the end of another long post. If I've missed the point or forgotten something important, let's hash it out in the comments. What we didn't have time for in class can continue here!

Week 4: Activating Schema With 3rd Graders

Over my last three years as a teacher I have noticed a couple of things that teachers will do that made no sense to me. For example, the first thing one of my old co-teachers used to do every class was to show her students a plan of the lesson, including the target language and the activity that they could expect. I was silently in opposition to this, as I wanted to surprise the kids with my activities, and create an element of excitement at what may be coming later in the lesson. I might also admit to a fear that telling them to expect something boring (writing, tests etc) would instantly have disengaged them.

I knew another teacher who really liked using books during her lessons. She would choose something related to the target language, and read it with the students. Before doing this, she would show them the cover of the book and ask them questions about it. What's the title, who's it by, what can you see on the front cover, what do you think the book is about... Again, I was impatient and silently wondered why we couldn't just get into the book. After all, the students will find out what's coming soon enough anyway!

Then this last week we learned about schema. And I thought:

Ooooooooooooh....!

I can now see what they were trying to do (though whether it was effective or not is another question altogether) and was instantly persuaded to practice some of this myself. The best opportunity to do so came with my 3rd grade class who are studying how to make simple adjective and noun sentences (It's big. It's an elephant). 

Whatever he sees, he sure looks hungry...

I was very happy when looking through our English department's book collection to find that the teacher mentioned above had left behind 15 copies of the book "Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?". The book is a great demonstration of combining adjectives and nouns in sentences, and is illustrated to match the sentences which follow the pattern of "Blue horse, blue horse, what do you see?", "I see a yellow duck looking at me."

I was pumped to get into teaching the book, and convinced my students would love it, but I couldn't work out how on earth to activate my students' schema before whipping the book and the target language out. I understand how you could discuss daily routines, opinions about an issue or students' experiences before doing a reading activity with an intermediate class, but again and again I feel that these ideas are designed for teaching students how to swim when my students are still splashing around in the bathtub.

Unfortunately I couldn't come to a decision about how best to do this before my class started, so I just went for it and tried out whatever came to mind as I went along. We tried asking students what they could see in the classroom, talking about our favorite animals, and even asking what books they've read.  I also found that just showing them the book got them engaged. Some of them had read it before, others were just interested to see what was inside. Asking them what they thought the bear could see got them thinking in the target language from the previous lessons, and I could see them trying to work it out. They were really engaging with it, and were much readier to receive what the book had to say when we finally got to it.

Awesome!

Every page I tried to get the students to guess what the next animal would be, and they had great fun guessing colours and animals in the context of the target language. I even managed to get around the problem of only the smarter students raising their hands to participate by some crafty tweaks to our classroom points system. The quieter students just needed some encouragement to participate in the classroom arena with the higher-level English speakers.

In just discussing what happened in class yesterday I can see a big difference in my teaching. Almost everything I described above fits into a dialogic discourse model in which I encourage the students' participation and interaction. We're getting somewhere, people!

Now if only I had planned the lesson enough and had the foresight to bring my camera to work with me to see just how different my teaching looks these days. That'll have to be an aim for next week!

Week 3.1: Settling on a Reflective Research Question

This week I chose not to dive straight into choosing my Module 1 paper topic. Instead I wanted to spend the week reflecting further on my classes and making sure I had a good grasp of the CI techniques as lain out by Xie. It’s proving quite a challenge!

The class I recorded for my week 1 assignment, which is due to be the focus of the paper, is full of what I thought CI techniques to be before I read Walsh and Xie. This means that I gave the techniques we learned for our week 2 test a full run, and felt I had been very successful at it; after all, I had included a good percentage of them within a 12 minute clip.

Xie revealed to me, however, that almost everything I did in that class was unadulterated monologic IRF discourse. This was a big shock, hence the overflow of regret in my most recent post. It’s not that I consider the use of monologic discourse entirely unhelpful, but it often compromised the entirety of my classes!

Since then I’ve been doing my best to discover just what dialogic discourse could look like in my elementary classes to varying degrees of success. It is these changes that are causing me problems with the paper; the difference between the video and my classes now is just so large!

I would like to be able to tie my current practices with the contents of that video, but have had difficulty coming up with a reflective research question that ties them all together. Whatever route I consider taking the conclusions seem a little removed from the original purpose.

The best I have come up with until now is the following: To what extent can using a variety of CI techniques within a purely monologic IRF discourse aid L2 learning?

I would set out my attempt to engage the students with the techniques learned for the week 2 quiz, cover a couple of specific instances where the techniques didn’t work, and demonstrate the strengths of drilling language in the context of large classes. The conclusion might be that while the technique is useful to an extent, its overuse results in learners with a very narrow language proficiency characterized by asking and answering a set of questions rather than developing the ability to communicate fluently. Action to be taken would include the things I’ve been trying in my classes since then.

Looking over this post again my proposal doesn’t sound too bad. Then again, lots of the things I think look good on paper until I try discussing them out loud. Maybe I should read Xie one last time just to make sure I’ve got this down…

Week 3: Reactions to Meth

This evening's Meth class was totally defeating. It felt like wave upon wave of oppressive undermining of my teaching. I guess that's the point.

My classes, and in particular the class I recorded for homework, are the epitome of every IRF technique we discussed. Almost everything word I said was a monologic, closed display question. Most of what my students said was exactly what I wanted from them, and when one of my higher lever students offered a good English sentence I squeezed her back into the mould of my lesson. There was no room for dialogue in my class, and there was no need for my students to really engage with or make the language their own. It was mindless rote repetition.

It's not that I wasn't interested in creating dialogue or good classroom discourse; it was rather the attempt of an untrained teacher to help his students get to grips with the language presented in his textbooks.

Again, I suppose that's the point.

Now that I've recognised the ways in which my teaching isn't up to scratch, I can work on it. There's a long way to go, and the view from the bottom of this steepest of learning curves is a depressing sight.

Rather than get down about it though, it's time to be positive.

This is my opportunity to really reform my teaching, taking the parts which are good (for as sure as I have a lot to learn my adeptness at IRF has its uses) and forming them into a truly effective platform for my students to learn to communicate in English.

It also means that I have a heck of a lot to be writing about and learning about, and when I've finally conquered this mountain I will revel in the sense of triumph at having reached the new perspective being at the top of a mountain gives you.

To get to that point I have a lot to work out. Putting everything I learned today into my elementary school context is a daunting task, and I've no idea how I'm going to approach it. But I know that I have to, and that I will get there. Hopefully with your help. God knows I need it!

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