Class Journal: Week 4

This week one of my goal in addition to my regular ones, was to explicitly talk about the unspoken rules of classrooms here in Korea. So I started the lesson with a 25 minute lecture drawing from the Xie reading we did recently. So I drew 5 roughly allegorical class rules from the cultural obstacles Xie talks about.

1. Avoid mistakes.
2. Do not disagree with the teacher.
3. Don't interrupt the class with your question.
4. Be modest.
5. Ignore the mistakes of seniors

I talked about how these rules while useful in some contexts is problematic for a language practice class. And then I presented what I called “anti-rules” to show what I would consider useful rules of conduct for our classroom and why.

1. Do not avoid mistakes.
2. You can express a different opinion.
3. You should ask questions in class.
4. Express yourself.
5. Help seniors with mistakes. (Including the teacher)

I realize that speaking about this takes time away from class language practice but today I thought it would be worth the investment of time if students are consciously aware of cultural differences between Western and Eastern classrooms. I was also thinking about the culture shock issues we all discussed in ICC.

So did it make a difference? It's hard to say. But looking at faces I'm sure a few of them took what I said to heart. I think that can make all the difference in classes where the balance of proactive and passive students is close. I have found that once a class gains a critical mass students one way or the other it drags all the other students in that direction.

The other activities I did went OK but I our group work activity was too restrictive. I'm starting to think that our students may be able to handle more free flowing group discussions focused more on content rather than form. I plan to make sure our next group work discussion more like that.

This week I also tried out much more pair activities following the logic that the more people speaking simultaneously the better for students. However in my classroom group work seems to work better for me. Here are the advantages of group discussion vs pair discussion.

1. There is more context with more participants. (More interest)
2. There is a higher ability to deal with language problems. (There's a greater chance of peer error correction.)

The only disadvantages I could see is that each person would have less speaking time. And depending on the task the group may over rely on a single member to get the “work” done without processing things themselves. For my students having a social interest in each other seems to make a big difference to how they perform.