If you have ever heard the song Zombie by the Cranberries you would think that the song was written for my classes this week. One of the lines of the song goes like this, "What's in your head?" That's pretty much is the question going through my head this week as I consider my students.
So how can I explain this vegetative behavior? At first, I though that it might have something to do with how I was teaching. (I'll be frank, even though I'm learning a lot, I don't feel like I've had time to prepare my classes properly.) But as the week limped on it was the same story in all my classes, and I know for a fact that there is no realistic scenario in which I could possibly suck that bad.
So I'm staring to consider some other possibilities. Is it a general pessimism that students have coming up to the end of the semester? Are my students under time pressure to cough up assignments? (I feel them on that.) Or is it simply, the disappointing realization that university life is basically more of the same. That is the initial excitement over coming to a new place has faded into boredom stemming from the fact that the teaching culture in university is just as banal as in high school... minus "baton based motivation" techniques. (BBM, yes I just coined that. You got to site me every time you use that now.)
These students came into class with their affective filters well up. And I'm starting to realize that it is not enough to avoid interaction that raises a student's affective filters, (because I cannot count on anyone one the university to follow my philosophy) but I have to have a way to find a way to proactively lower that filter every time students come to class. I shouldn't have to do that, but that is the reality that I face so I'm thinking about how to tackle that problem.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
Friday, May 11, 2012
Class Journal: Week 10
This week, I read the readings focused on vocabulary and as it happened, this week's lesson had some good vocabulary exercises. So I wanted to pay more attention than usual to how students dealt with the new vocab. As a second objective I also wanted to stop repeating myself as I explained things in class. (I was reviewing my module 2 assignment class videos and transcripts and I noticed that I keep explaining without first seeing if my initial instructions are understood. I now believe that students find this more confusing because they have to find meaning in a barrage of words. It's also probably the reason why some of my students don't listen and just memorize procedures.)
The vocabulary to be introduced were nouns depicting sports and fitness activities. So the burden of learning these words were fairly low. The meanings were all direct correlations to my students L1 lexicon. And dictionaries were not required at all as they were all pretty easy to act out. The only challenges where related to the verbs they collocate with. But thankfully, in this case the verbs matched logically (though the L1 versions of the verbs grouped the sports and activities under differing subsets.) Once I wrote the rule the students pretty much guessed the right verb for random activities I threw out there that weren't in their books. So in the words of President George W., "Mission accomplished... heh heh heh"
In terms of my secondary goal. I caught myself slipping into my old habits on a couple of occasions but I found it easier to stop my self once I adjusted my mindset. Usually, I have a lot of enthusiasm about explaining stuff but this week I just imagined that I didn't give a shit and seemed to work like magic! Habit flushed!
The vocabulary to be introduced were nouns depicting sports and fitness activities. So the burden of learning these words were fairly low. The meanings were all direct correlations to my students L1 lexicon. And dictionaries were not required at all as they were all pretty easy to act out. The only challenges where related to the verbs they collocate with. But thankfully, in this case the verbs matched logically (though the L1 versions of the verbs grouped the sports and activities under differing subsets.) Once I wrote the rule the students pretty much guessed the right verb for random activities I threw out there that weren't in their books. So in the words of President George W., "Mission accomplished... heh heh heh"
In terms of my secondary goal. I caught myself slipping into my old habits on a couple of occasions but I found it easier to stop my self once I adjusted my mindset. Usually, I have a lot of enthusiasm about explaining stuff but this week I just imagined that I didn't give a shit and seemed to work like magic! Habit flushed!
Friday, May 4, 2012
Class Journal: Week 9, Post-testitis and MIC
This week my students seem to be suffering post-testitis. Attendance was down, and the students who did show up looked like they wished they hadn't. It happens every year, so my goal for this lesson was just to nurse students back into the flow of study in a low key way. I tried to keep activities predictable based on what we have done in the past without introducing new procedures or tasks that would require students to lower their affective filter in order to function; with only one exception. So I didn't try to push the envelope this week, as students are simply not game.
However, I was very surprised at the performance of my class 7 and 8 who are my Friday group. I got a lot of participation in terms of students volunteering questions and engaging in pair work. I think I'm starting to reap the rewards of the new approach I've been employing this semester. Student are really becoming accustomed to working together and it's taking much less effort now in order to get them moving. I quite pleased with that.
That said, I also noticed something that I haven't noticed before. That is, a lot of my instructions didn't seem to get through when I tried some variations on way I set up some of the production tasks. I was looking for that this week and I found it. The way I execute a task usually follows the same pattern week in and week out and students know this. It never occurred to me before, but yesterday I realized that the fact my students seem to follow my instructions may have less to do with understanding my input and more to do with remembering my procedures. It was an eye opener as I had just assumed they knew what I was talking about because they did what I was expecting them to do. This was clearly evident in one task I asked students to do this week that involved complex instructions. Instead of explaining the instructions like I usually do I asked students to tell me the instructions for the task. They had a hard time comprehending what I wanted them to do, I guess because it was something they didn't expect at all. It didn't follow from any of my usual procedures.
All in all, I think I've got to prepare my MIC techniques for new tasks in advance. I didn't think I needed to this week and got caught flat footed.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
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.
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.
Friday, April 13, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
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