Week 8: Test Week

There's not much class stuff to reflect on this week as all I've been doing is giving tests and interviews.  But this may be a good opportunity to reflect on my testing and grading policies.

My classes are much smaller this year compared to last year which has afforded me the time to test my students in a way more relevant to my teaching philosophy.  In my classes, I try to focus on productive skills but part of the challenge of doing that is actually making a test that is relevant to those skills.  One of the problems with testing speaking, for example, is that it is not something that can easily be set up.  It is simply not something that can be done together as a class, unless you have a lab with recording equipment (which I don't) and a computer system setup that is easy to use and troubleshoot (which doesn't exist).  So if I want to test speaking, usually I have to go through the time consuming process of interviewing students one by one.  This is possible with smaller classes, which is great, but on the other hand there is not much time to test each student.  And with a smaller sample of speaking it inflates the importance of even the smallest of mistakes.  This part is not ideal as some of those mistakes are random in nature.  In fact, I'm sure it affects the true accuracy of my evaluation.  (For example, if I happen to ask a question a student doesn't understand well they would get a significantly lower score than if I happen to ask a question that the student student happens to have a good understanding of.)  So on the one hand I have a desire to test productive skills in line with my philosophy but on the other I have time limitations that make it quite difficult to execute well.

You might ask, why test that way at all if it has a higher degree of inaccuracy.  Part of the motivation for me is that without a production based test to back up my production based lessons, students won't move outside their comfort zones in terms of class participation and practice.  If they think that the test is simply a listening and reading test then they would do what they always do in English class... listen and read.  Good skills, but not the skills they need to develop at this point to communicate effectively.  The best compromise I've been able to come up with so far is giving a short 20 minute listening and grammar test in conjunction with the interview in order to more accurately gauge student level.  But my fear even with this is that students focus on this part more than the interview itself.  Even if the interview has a significant portion of the grade allocated to it.

Perhaps the best thing I can do for next semester is to throw out the written test completely and assign less points to midterm and final interviews.  Then I could assign more points to in class work and participation to help mitigate the inconsistencies inherent in the short interview samples.

Class Journal: Week 7 "Input"

Reflecting on my module 1 assignment I've been conscious of how I make free style conversations with students.  Now, I've always been sensitive to student understanding when explaining things to a class.  (Usually because I have cater to the lowest common denominator to get things organized.)  But I've started to rethink how I talk to students who are of a higher level.  In particular, I want to reassess my habit of talking to them too quickly.  (Just like a native conversation.)  Not because I think they can't handle the input (in terms of basic understanding) but because of something I've read in SLA recently.  Drawing from Blooms taxonomy (the revised version from 2001), cognitive processes such as recalling words and meaning are much more difficult in a second language.  With that difficulty, the processing of information is slower and hence much more time is necessary for students to comprehend and reorganize information for more complex higher level processing.  If I want my students to produce higher level out put I think I need to restrain the urge to talk like I naturally do.
Reflecting on my lesson this week I've made an effort to be extra clear but I haven't consciously come up with a set procedure to ensure that my students have time to process the input I give them.  Neither have I come up with a plan to help guild students to higher order thinking.  My interaction with students, was as always, underwhelming. Students usually answer questions with the minimum they can get away with.  There is no elaboration, comparison, evaluation or creation.  Not spontaneously in any case. I think that is problematic.  Students, rarely use anything other than the bottom 2 levels of Bloom's model.  Perhaps, I should reassess my questioning style with the model in mind.  Better yet perhaps I could teach those kinds of questions to the students to use in pair and group discussions. Next week is the mid term test so now is the best time to recalibrate.

Class Journal: Week 6, Warm up reflection

I planned my warm up activity with a couple of goals in mind.  First, I wanted to get students quickly and comfortably interacting with me and each other.  And secondly, I wanted to establish a pattern of resolving problems of CI.  As always I made my plan roughly and fine tuned it over the course of the week.  By the time I got around to class 6 I think I had it pretty well worked out.  I started with introducing the expressions I wanted students to use this week when asking for help or checking meaning.  (The expression used is different every week to keep thing interesting)  Then I employed choral repetition to make sure they are comfortable saying it, and just to be sure they would be able to use it in class, I left the 2 expression written up on the WB for the entire lesson.  Then I wrote up the first warm up question.  (Referential and open in this case.)  Read it aloud and briefly explained one or two words I had pre-identified as problematic (from previous classes) to make it comprehensible.  In hindsight, I think it also helped them to activate their schema.   Then I elicted possible answers from the class.  Calling on individuals when volunteers were not forth coming.  When students where gave one word answers I would call on them to make a sentence.  If they got stuck I would try to mime the words of the sentence I was looking for one by one.  If that didn't work I might say the same sentence in Korean and ask them for a English translation.  Finally, if that wasn't working I would remind them to use the "asking for help" expression to call on a class mate.  Once I got a couple of answer I would write them up as general sentence structure they could use to form many sentences.  Then I elicited a follow up question and answer for that in the same way.  By then we've collaboratively constructed a mini-dialog.  I then modeled the dialog by getting a student to ask me the questions and then answering, following the structure I had just written up.  After that it was pair practice to get people talking and after that I would do it together with the class TSST style, just to hold them accountable and to catch out slackers in the pair work.
I think I achieved my goals for this activity quite well, so I was pleased.  This is the second time I've done something like this so they seemed to understand what I was expecting this time around.

The Cellist of Sarajevo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvsNU4eEt74

Class Journal: Week 5

This week I tried out a new lesson plan this week.  I felt much more organized than usual so writing it down did make a difference for me.  This week, I tried to get students to work in groups though out the class rather than just in the group work activities.  In fact I tried to set up my lesson with that in mind.  For example, I started with a warm up activity asking about the students Membership Training last week but instead of going TSST and chaining it like I usually do, I wrote up the question to dual code.  Then I elicited possible answers from students and used that to write up the structure of possible answers.  Then I got them come up with an appropriate follow up question and an answer to that.  Then I modeled it with a random student once and then turned it over to the groups to practice the structure together.
In other activities, I had students rely on each other to find answers to questions.  For example, I took questions about the dialog we were studying but instead of answering the questions myself, I simple wrote them all up and told the groups to find an answers among themselves.  I then had each group to answer one of the questions they had posed.  They also had to explain it in English rather than give me a Korean translation which I would normally accept if I knew the word.  (Which I often do, because when you repeat a lesson as often as I do, you pick up the Korean translation of trouble vocabulary pretty easily.)
All in all, this week the lesson went quite well.  I had good participation, a little bit better than last week, so I feel like the classes are getting used to my style and are making steady progress.  The one problem, I noticed this week was how much the class schedule depends on student efficiency in interaction activities.  About half my classes couldn't finish the final activity because of time pressure.  In 2 cases, I had to skip the final activity because the previous activities went on too long.  Perhaps, with more practice lesson planning I can avoid having this happen in future, though to tell you the truth I didn't actually include timing in my original lesson plan which I probably should do next time.

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.

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.