Class Journal: Week 2

I chose class 6 as the one I would do my regular write up about.  What I set out to teach this week was basic introductions from the first unit of our textbook.  But I also had another objective.  I was hoping to teach students some new rules of class interaction.  For example, I had always taken for granted things that westerners commonly do in a classroom.  Such as asking questions unsolicited or contributing to a discussion on the fly.  Today, I thought I would start creating that culture by doing something that Tom has shown us in class.  That is to encourage students to call on each other if they didn't know the answer to a question posed to them.  So I wanted to defuse the stress associated with T-S interaction right from the get go.
In terms of achieving these goals I will say that I did get students to ask for help but I usually had to remind them that they had that option so we will have to wait a couple of weeks before knowing if students create this habit or not.  In terms of introductions, I got them to introduce a friend to the class so that was positive but they were still very nervous about it which is understandable considering the classroom culture in Korea.  But I thought it was great that students could see how I operate.  I took an interest in what they were saying.  I used prompting and cuing when they got stuck.  And when I heard mistakes I took note of them but I did not interrupt their speech.  I went over the common mistakes once everyone was done as not to single anyone out.
So these were the positive things that happened in my class.  But of course not everything went the way I was hoping it to.  With my new focus on trying to get students to communicate as much as possible I found that I couldn't cover as much material as I usually do.  So this week all my classes are slightly behind schedule.  Also I found that the text book we use is very ill suited to group work activities.  Frankly, the activities in the book are not appropriate to EFL classrooms they were designed with ESL classes in mind.  For example, There was one group work activity where students where supposed to discuss people names together which is interesting in a truly international class but rather limp in a classroom where 30% of student are named Kim!
I ended up skipping that kind of material.  If I were to teach this lesson again I might well assign grammar as homework to create more time in class and so students can prepare for class practice.  I addition I would work on my own group work activities instead of relying on the book.  I will have to assign that homework from next week so I won't see extra class time until week 4.  But its good to look ahead.