Class Journal: Week 3

Class 6 is an afternoon class so usually students are awake which is good.  The only problem with afternoons is that usually after a busy morning teaching I could almost fall asleep mid lecture.  However I was able to hold off the sandman today so I was actually able to "teach" them something this time round.
My objectives in this weeks class was to get students acclimatized to being called on and giving students the tools needed to respond when called upon.  In terms of goals it seems a low bar but I unlike in the past when I've been frustrated with how passive students are, I have decided meet this years students where they are at. I've been planning to set regular modest goals to work them to a point where finally they can communicate as openly as students in the west.
In terms of implementation, I spent most of the first hour doing basic things like TSST, using the WB to give structure to their basic answers, and role playing the dialogs in front of the class to get them to see that there is nothing to be afraid of when it comes to speaking.  (My usual tactic is to choose someone who seems shy to go first and once they do it everyone else feels like the task is not as threatening as it first seems.  Can it backfire?  Sure, but you got to judge character to make the right call.  It is also very helpful if the teacher is very supportive, which I am.)   I also did some grammar work with students but that was more of a filler activity.  I had them read the answers out instead of listening to me.  I would only moderate turn taking and comment if I caught a mistake.  If students read too quietly I would ask the class if they heard it and I would let them decide if the student in question should repeat it because I certainly wasn't going to.  In this way I was hoping to encourage them to take more control of the classroom discourse.
In the final 30 minutes we did a group discussion activity.  One of the problems with dong T-fronted activities is that no matter how engaging you are you can only actively communicate with a few students at any given time.  In an EFL class this means that the opportunities for language practice is extremely sub-optimal.  So a group discussion activity is a great way to get multiple students speaking at the same time to smaller and more intimate audiences.  This actually went a lot better than I thought it would and even though the T-Fronted activities took up most of our time I think it gave students the tools and confidence to front up nicely.  I didn't just give them a set of questions either.  I laid out some guide lines for the discussion activity.  These were the 3 rules.  1)  Use English first.  2)  Only use Korean to clarify misunderstandings  3)  If a member is having problems expressing themselves, help them!  My general philosophy for this activity is that communication and feedback should be constant, and at no time should a student feel like they are helpless to contribute to the discussion.
Finally, I assigned the next weeks grammar as homework.  I was worried that student might find it difficult to get a handle on the grammar so I also uploaded a more detailed grammar explanation onto our university's website.  We'll see next week if they actually do it.  But I have feeling that most of them will.  When classes go well students tend to respond positively.
There was only one thing that was negative about this week's class.  That was just how long students took to reply to questions.  Waiting for answers was like waiting for Windows to boot up!  I believe that this is due to social pressure rather than stupidity so I think once they loosen up it'll quickly turn around.  I reckon it will happen sometime before midterms.  So we'll wait and see.