In Which I Try and Explain My (not so) Peculiar Situation

I realized the other day that I usually include a sentence like, “Many of my students didn’t attend junior high school,” in my blog posts.  It’s my shorthand for explaining my school environment.  But it probably doesn’t do much by way of giving a full picture of what my school is all about.  So I thought I would take a few minutes and do a better job of putting the issues I deal with on this blog in context.

Most of my students, about 80%, have suffered from school refusal syndrome.  Before I worked here, I had never heard of school refusal syndrome.  And even though it puts me at risk for loosing my A+ Empathy rating, I had always figured that students who didn’t come to school fell into one of two groups, those who were ill and those who were truant.

But after talking with a large number of students who actually woke up in the morning, got dressed, and packed up their school bags, only to find that they couldn’t bring themselves to walk out the door, I realized that these students weren’t just skipping out on their education.  They wanted to go to school.  They just couldn’t get out the door to do it.  Not surprisingly, school refusal syndrome is usually marked by a kind of generalized and pervasive anxiety about school.  This anxiety sometimes results in somatic features such as upset stomach or headaches.  But if you ask students suffering from school refusal syndrome, they will insist that in spite of the anxiety, stomachaches, and whatever else they might be feeling, they would like nothing more than to go to school (Hersov, 1972).

Aside from the syndrome presenting itself as physical symptoms, there are other major psychological symptoms which correlate strongly with school refusal syndrome, including: avoidant disorder, social phobia, fear of evaluative situations, depression, attention deficit disorder (Kearney and Silverman, 1993)…actually the list stretches on and on.  One striking aspect of most of these symptoms is how closely they align with the kinds of issues that impede second language acquisition.  And on top of that, in Japan school refusal is defined as a minimum of 30 days of absence from school per year.  That means that students missed at least 90 school days during their junior high school careers.  Most of them missed much more.  And some did not attend school at all from the age of 13 to 16.  Now in such a situation, I tend to think the best thing we could probably do would be to split up the English classes by levels, providing students with the kind of targeted content which would help lower anxiety and increase a student’s chances of success.  But, at least for the first semester, the school has decided that the most important thing we can do for our students is provide a school environment in which they feel comfortable coming to school.  And for most students, that means helping them develop a strong social network.  Basically, they need to develop supportive friendships, and to do that we let them stay together in their homeroom classes throughout the day.

So my classes are made up of a dizzying array of students with varying levels of English ability.  There are students who like English, studied on their own at home, and are at an intermediate level or above.  And then there are students who are almost entirely unfamiliar with the English alphabet.  With that in mind, I’ve tried to find and implement activities which can engage students of all levels.  The activities need to be challenging enough so as not to induce boredom, but not so difficult that they result in the kind of anxiety that keeps a student from walking out the door in the morning.

One of the first things I noticed in class was that regardless of the level of a student’s other skills, almost all the students were true-beginners when it came to listening.  But because some of the students cannot write, dictation, one of my favorite listening activities, is pretty much unusable in class, especially at the beginning of the year.  So in place of words, I do a simple substitution table activity during which a student creates a sentence using images instead of words while the rest of the students keep up a running dictation of the sentences by drawing pictures as well.  The activity is a slightly modified version of one John Fanselow introduced during a recent in-service at my school (and is actually now available online at: Nveer epxailn gaammr relus or aks yuor stutends to). Interestingly, image based tabling also closely mirrors a number of low stress early literacy activities recommend for very young L1 learners by the Center for Early Literacy Learning (CELL, 2010).

A traditional substitution table for S+V(be)+adj might look something like this:

I                    am            happy
you               are               sad
he/she           is               wild

Students would have just a bit of freedom to mix and match the words in the table to form sentences and get a bit of practice with the pattern.  As the students become more familiar with the pattern, they are given more freedom to replace different components within the sentence.  An image based substitution table, on the other hand, looks like this:

image based substitution table

[side note: If you are wondering what the equal sign is all about, it’s the symbol that students have written the most for “be” verb in my classes.  So it’s kind of become a standard part of the image based tabling vocabulary.  And it makes pretty good intuitive sense.]

One of the benefits with using images for tabling is allowing students who can’t read to more fully participate.  But more than that, it also allows students who are super hesitant to produce orally and can’t read to participate in class, and I have a bunch of students like that.  For those kinds of double whammy students, all they have to do is point to the images to construct a sentence and then the teacher (or a partner if they are doing pair work) can produce the sentence orally.  But for me, the most exciting thing about image based tabling is how vocabulary is no longer a stumbling block to communication.  If a student can take a word in their L1 and come up with an image for it, they can create a sentence.

So how does it actually play out in the classroom.  Here is a series of picture-based transcriptions produced by a student while the class was tabling ‘be’ verb in the simple present tense:

“be” tabled in the simple present

That third sentence down is  just wicked groovy.  “My mother is busy.”  The student knew neither the word “busy” nor the possessive my, but they were able to create a full on image based sentence.   And their partner understood it and said it back to them in words.

As students’ reading and writing skills increase over the course of the year, students are encouraged to replace pictures with words to a larger and larger extent, but we always return occasionally to pictures.  Once students have developed a set of stable images to represent words, drawing the pictures often takes less time than writing words and allows for greater amounts of language exposure during any given class period. In addition, requiring students to translate information from words to images and then back, results in a series of decoding and encoding steps which requires a deep level of cognitive processing.  This deeper level of processing, especially as it relates to image creation, has been shown to lead to high levels of retention (Craik and Tulving, 1975). Paul Nation (2009, p. 47-49) also points out that these types of transformation exercises provide good opportunities to not only learn vocabulary, but, “grammatical items contained in the spoken or written text,” as well.  And students become quite adept at visually representing grammar items.

[picture based transcription of ‘be’ tabled the simple past tense]

As can be seen in the student produced table, a small arrow served to help remind the student that the verb was in the past tense.  Similarly, writing three equal signs helped remind the student that the verb was also modified to agree with the third person plural subject.

All in all, image based substation tabling (and image based dictation as well) allows all students to engage with the language on a pretty even playing field.  It is challenging enough for the higher level students to stay engaged, but accessible enough for even the lowest level student to succeed.  And by giving students five to ten minutes at the end of class to convert each image-based sentence back into words, I can also provide students with the kind of practice they need to develop some fundamental writing skills without the pressure of orally decoding and writing at the same time.

I was talking to one of my coworkers today about the particular challenges our students face when it comes to learning English.  He said, “It’s kind of a difficult situation.  The more I know about our students, the more I feel we’ve set ourselves an impossible task.”  I would be lying if I said I didn’t sometimes feel the same way myself.  But all learners have their own obstacles to overcome when learning English.  Even for the students at my school, it’s really just a question of degree.  I have a third year student now who started her high school career without being able to read even the most simple sentence.  She sometimes would hover outside the classroom door, afraid to turn the handle and walk in.  She went from drawing pictures, to writing sentences, to being able to engage in full dictation exercises without any visible signs of anxiety.  And lately, she has been helping to coach the first year students to prepare for their mid-term exams.  Part of it is just the fact that she has grown up and grown out of some of her symptoms.  But I would like to think that picture based dictation and the other challenging yet low anxiety activities we use in class were the soil which, at least in part, helped make her growth possible.

p.s. image based substitution tabling became the basis for a slightly more detailed activity called pictogloss, which you can find more out more about right here!

p.p.s If you are interested in John Fanselow, the man who introduced me to image/picture based dictation, I highly recommend joining his upcoming iTDi course, Contrasting Conversations: Activities for Exploring Our Beliefs and Teaching Practices, in May.

References:

Center for Early Literacy Learning. 2010. Center for EarlyLiteracy Learning. 3 July, 2012 <http://www.earlyliteracylearning.org/index.php&gt;

Craik, F.I.M. and Tulving, E. (1975). Depth of Processing and the retention of words in episodic memory.  Journal of Experimental Psychology 104: 268-284.

Hersov, L. (1972). School Refusal. British Medical Journal 3: 102-104.

Kearney, C. and Silverman, W. (1993). Measuring the function of school refusal behavior: the school refusal assessment scale. Journal of Clinical Child Psychology 22 (1): 85-96.

Fanselow, J. (n.d.a), Nveer epxailn gaammr relus or aks your stutends to: tapping the richness of sketches/images/icons for generating language

Nation, I.P.S. and Newton, J. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL Listening and Speaking. New York: Routledge.

To Gather Up (A Short Story for ELLS)



Photo by David Sky



I live in Lone Temple, a small town surrounded by a ring of mountains.  I am the town’s station master.  Not that it’s much of a train station.  Just two tracks, one platform, and two freshly painted benches.  I paint the benches myself twice every year.  This year in the fall I painted them sunrise orange.  Last week, I painted them tear drop blue.  Sometimes someone will notice and say something nice about the color, and that makes me feel pretty good.  

During a Lone Temple winter, there is snow and more snow.  Every year the neighborhood children build a snowman in front of the station.  Each year there are less and less children, but they manage to get the job done.  This January they built a real giant of a snowman.  It took them all day and it was already dark when they finished and ran home.  It was a cold evening and there was a touch of salt in the wind. Suddenly, I felt sorry for the snowman.  He was out there, left behind, and probably already forgotten.  So I dug through the Lost and Found box and pulled out a bright red knit cap.  I had to stand on a step ladder to put the hat on the snowman’s head.  The snowman had a strange half smile made out of grey rocks.  I thought he looked a little more comfortable with the hat on.

There is always something to do at a train station.  There’s always a floor to sweep, a weed to pull, a sign to straighten.  But there is also nothing that must absolutely be done right now at a station.  And this is also good.  I can make a cup of coffee and watch the steam curl up towards the ceiling.  I can set a small plate of smoked fish down behind the worn row of lockers and wait to see which cat comes to eat it first. In this way time passes.

It was a long winter and the snowman didn’t really start melting until the beginning of April.  He got a little smaller every day and by May first, he was gone.  I went out, picked up the bright red hat from the ground, and started to put it back in the lost and found box.  I looked at the long pair of soft leather gloves, the folding umbrella with the bent handle, the pack of faded playing cards, the loose collection of keys and broken watches and I changed my mind. I put the hat in the bottom drawer of my desk instead.  It wasn’t a lost thing anymore.  At least, not for a little while longer.  Not as long as there were still enough children to gather up the snow that was sure to fall in the winter.


470 words total
Flesch Reading Ease Score: 96.2
Flesch-Kincaid Grade level: 3.2
Words contained in the GSL: 96.63%

Role-play as (train wreck) learning experience

 

Every week I teach an intensive language class for interested students (and by interested, what I really mean is students whose home-room teachers have decided that said student is interested).  The number of students and student levels fluctuates wildly from week to week.  And I am always looking around for new ways to spend two or three hours after which all of the students will have some sense of satisfaction.  Kevin Giddens’ blog is a great source of lesson ideas and I stumbled across a description of a particularly interesting beginner Bosnian lesson  facilitated by Mary Cay Brass at the Summer Master of Arts in Teaching program at the SIT Graduate Institute.  So first off, I would like to lay all the blame for this disastrous lesson on thank Kevin for a great lesson idea which I fiddled with to the point of destruction.   

There were only five students in the class on this day, two lower level first year students and 3 upper level second year students. The six of us sat in a tight circle in the middle of the room with a table in the middle of the circle.  On the table was a voice recorder.  In the standard way this lesson works, students think of something–anything really–that they would like to say in English, tell the teacher and the teacher then provides the student with a translation of the sentence into the target language (in this case English).  But as I was dealing with a mixed group and felt like the students would be missing the energy and excitement that would me generated by studying a novel language like Bosnian, I decided to add some extra spice to the lesson goulash.  I decided to turn it into a role play.  I figured that if the students were in a role where it did not matter what their English levels were, but had to work together for a common end, then it might lead to better group cohesion and everyone might get more out of it.  And this was the absolutely brilliant idea that flashed out of the nether regions of my brain: have the students pretending to be UN Peacekeepers about to head off to a hot spot.  I explained that they had two and a half hours to learn the phrases they might need to interact with the native population and keep themselves safe.  I was going to be taking the role of their language instructor for this intensive course, but as they were trained soldiers who had a better idea of what kind of language they would need to master, I would be leaving all language generation up to them. 

I waited.  The students looked at each other.  One of the lower level students kept looking around at the upper level students pleadingly.  The other lower level student just looked at the ground.  Finally, one of the upper level students screwed up some courage and in Japanese said, “Do you and your family have enough to eat?”  I said the sentence clearly and slowly in English.  The student repeated it a few times, picked up the voice recorder, and said it into the machine.  I waited.  Nervous laughter.  More nervous laughter.  Shifting in chairs. 

One of the students said to me, “Kevin, please help us.” 

              “I want to help you,” I said.  “But my role is to support you.  I’m afraid you will have to come up the sentences on your own.”

              One of the three upper level students started giggling uncontrollably and left the room.  And I waited.  A few minutes later the giggler popped back into the room.

              For 40 minutes this pattern continued and we ended up with 10 sentences which included:

              “This area is not safe.  Follow me as quickly as possible.”

              “We would like to throw a party for you to thank you for your help.”

              “Our countries might seem like enemies, but I am here to help you.”

              “Is there anything you need?  Blankets?  Heating oil?”

               

I then wrote up those sentences on the board with the literal translations beneath each word and passed out 5 long slips of paper to each student.  The students were then encouraged to pick up some of the language from the board and jot it down on the slips of paper.  They could pick just a word, a phrase, or a complete sentence.  Finally all the students gathered back together and were given 15 minutes to make novel sentences, folding the slips, placing them next to each other, or placing one slip directly on top of another for word or phrase replacement.  After they had made a novel sentence, I would ask them what they had wanted to express and if necessary I would correct the sentence so it was accurate.  The students enjoyed this part of the lesson and it worked pretty much as I had hoped.  There were a lot of interesting collocations and phrases that ended up becoming apparent, like “as ~ as possible,” and “I would like to ~.”  The higher level students did a lot of scaffolding for the lower level students.  A bunch of nonsense sentences got formed.  And students started to smile.

So what went wrong in the beginning?  I talked to the students and the biggest complaint was that they had no idea of what it would mean to be a peacekeeper heading off to a hot spot.  Woops.  My bad.  Part of the problem was a basic mistake in how I conceptualized the class.  I wanted to have a time limited role-play which would generate a fair number of sentences quickly enough to move on to the second stage of the lesson.  But I had confused goal with process.  I didn’t simply want students to take on a temporary role to practice a specific type of interaction, like buying a pair of glasses or refusing to go on a date, which is what role-playing, is good for.  I had wanted the students to more fully inhabit the role of Peacekeepers and for the content of the lesson to flow from that role.  This isn’t a role play.  This is a simulation.  Drama activities in the language classroom can be seen along a continuum from scripted on one side to ever more improvisational on the other (Kao & O’Neill).  Improvisational dramatic activities in ELT can further be broken down into three rather broad categories:

1)      Improvisational role-playing: limited time duration.  Used to practice a specific type of interaction in which a specific language might or might not be targeted. 

2)      Simulations: extended activities in which students do not take on roles, but play themselves in novel situations and in which the process of production is perhaps even more important than the final product.

3)      Process Drama: where students take on multiple roles which can span a number of different situations all dealing with a similar issue which is to be explored through dramatic response. 

There are a lot of texts on simulations and process drama filled with concrete advice like: ask questions of the participants to let them help shape the situation (Jones); verify that the situation is understood well enough to, “sustain reality of function.” (Jones); describe the “frame” of the drama well enough to give the dramatic act a sense of tension (Bowell & Heap).  All of which I blithely ignored.  What is even odder, I have actually run a process-drama class in my school.  I’ve spent hours putting together sets of faux-newspaper articles and trial-transcripts just so my students would be able to dramatically explore a re-trail of the big bad wolf from The Three Little Pigs.  That’s right, The Three Little Pigs!  So why did I think that these same students would be able to simply slip into the role of U.N. Peacekeeper?  Somehow, the flash of a good really terrible idea and the fog of expectations that followed had kept me from reasonably assessing the situation and pivoting when necessary.  I think this is a pretty clear case where if I had just stopped and really thought a little more about the theory and methodology which should underpin the lesson, my students and I would have had a much less seat-shifting-cheer-creaking-nervous-laughter fifty minutes.

When I was at university, one of my writing instructors always said, “Kill your babies.”  By that he meant that any turn of phrase or sentence you felt was precious to the piece of writing should be edited out by the final draft.  And while I don’t know if I believe that all ideas that seem to sparkle on first glance should be chucked in the trash, at the very least, they should probably be appraised by at least one other set of eyes.  This is actually one more piece of good advice when it comes to crafting a simulation.  Don’t do it alone.  If you are going to make a world which your students can actually inhabit, even if it’s only for a few hours, it’s best to recruit as many sets of hands as possible.  After all, we’re only human.         

Addendum:

There were a few reasons for why I really wanted to give this lesson a go in my class.  At least in the first half of the lesson, the methodology goes against most of my beliefs of what makes for good language teaching:

–          There’s extensive use of translation. 

–          Students produce discreet units of language which might or might not have any direct connection to one another. 

–          While the students are producing content, the teacher is in a very clearly authoritative role. 

In spite of the flawed way things turned out, I could see how all of these techniques for language teaching and learning could be put to good use in this particular lesson.  So don’t worry students, your suffering wasn’t for naught.  Next year, your teacher might have a few new tools to make class more enjoyable, even if you have no interest in ever becoming a UN Peace-Keeper.

Reference Works:

Kao, D. & O’Neill, C. (1998) Words into Worlds: Learning a Second Language Through Process Drama. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation

Bowell, P. & Heap, B.S. (2001). Planning Process Drama. London: David Fultone Publishers.

Tompkins, P.K. (1998). “Role Playing/Simulation”. The Internet TESL Journal 4 (8).

Jones, K (1985). Designing your own Simulations. London: Methane

Hey…I know…Let’s role-play it…

Before I morphed into an English teacher, I was a social worker for six years in Chicago.  Teachers, in general, are pretty keen about role playing.  And there are always a handful of teachers who jump into the role of “difficult” student.  But usually they are a source of comic relief more than an actual threat to the teacher’s control within the role-played situation. Social workers are different.  When a social worker gets into the “difficult” client role, they take years of pent up frustration and a deep understanding of human pathology and then focus it like a laser of discontent on their poor coworker. 

I remember one particular training on personality disorders.  Now personality disorders are messy things.  Think about it, personality disorder means just what it says, a person’s personality, their core style of interacting with the world, is their illness.  One of my coworkers, a lovely woman by the name of Lucy, was acting as if she suffered from passive aggressive personality disorder.  I was her social worker.  I asked her about her day and she replied in a non-reply kind of way and slowly pulled a half eaten sandwich out of her pocket.  I tried to get her talking about her upcoming job interview, but “P.A. Lucy” just methodically took her sandwich apart, layer by layer until she had three nice piles laid out in front of her, one of bread, one of sandwich meat, and one of lettuce.  All the while a half-smile played across her lips and she agreed haphazardly with everything I said, including the suggestion that she put her sandwich away.  I did not feel like laughing.  I’m pretty sure the other social workers in the room also did not feel like laughing.  We were all linked by a taught thread of impatience, a desire to slap the sandwich pieces across the room.

So I was wondering about the connection between role-playing in social work, teacher training and the language classroom.  If we look at what the basic ELT literature has to say about role-playing, we find out that it is classified as a social interaction activity (Richards & Rogers, 1985), that it, “allows learners to explore the effects of different contextual factors…on language,” (Thornbury, 2006), and that it helps to activate a learners, “emerging language skills.” (Nunan, 2004).  Now if we replace the word “language” with “therapy” or “teaching” I don’t see much of a problem with how role-playing is similar whether you are an English teacher, social worker or language student.  Role playing allows us to contextualize what we have learned and allows emergent skills to find further room for expression and development.  It also provides students (and social workers, and teachers) with a chance to work on fluency and accuracy; to not so much develop new skills, as to sharpen or keep the ones already acquired in good working order.  

In Moral Principles in Education, Dewey (1909) writes about a swimming school where the students were taught to swim without actually ever going into the water.  When one of the students was asked what he did when he finally did get into the water, he said simply, “Sunk.”  There’s actually a Japanese saying, “Swimming training on the tatami mat.”  It’s usually used when referring to someone who has only studied theory without attempting to put it into practice.  And perhaps that’s what makes role-playing so attractive to social workers and teachers.  It lets us get off our tatami mats and flounder around in the water, although teachers are much more likely to offer each other a hand if things get choppy, while social workers take a little bit of joy in pushing each other under. 

But for language students, I think the attraction of role-playing is a little different.  Students are continually constrained by the limitations of the classroom and these environmental boundaries invariably rub up against the students’ desire for a more uninhibited form of expression. Role-playing offers students an exit from the boundaries of the classroom.  When everything goes well, students can find themselves washed up on a deserted island or making contact with an alien civilization.  It’s a psychic-affordance which is wholly dependant on the students’ imaginative capabilities and willingness to fully invest in a roll. And once invested, I think that role-playing also serves as a kind of buffer for the ego, allowing for greater risk taking than might otherwise be possible.  Which might explain, for the most part, why during roles plays:

– (nice) social workers seems to get nastier

– (disciplinarian) teachers revel in rule breaking

– and (disaffected) students sometimes go way out on a limb

 and start show genuine signs of caring for each other…

(OK, I did my homework.  I read and thought about what is positive about role-playing.  Tomorrow I start to write about how such a good idea could have gone so terribly wrong in my 5th period class yesterday.  Hope that brings you back for post #2 on role-playing.)   

Sources:

Dewey, J. (1909). Moral Principles in Education. The Riverside Press: Cambridge.

Nunan, D. (2004). Task-Based Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.

Richards, J. C. & Rodgers, T. (1986). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.

Thornbury, S. & Slade, D. (2006). Conversation–from description to pedagogy. Cambridge University Press.

It’s only a test…but it could be more, you know

Lately my wife has been kind of worried about me.  We usually have a drink after we finish up our after-work-work and the other day she said, “You know, the way you talk lately, it seems like you’ve hit some kind of wall in your teaching.”  Which is exactly how I feel.  I’ve hit a big wall.  I think if I could step back a little and look at that wall, it would be covered in graffiti.  Maybe a nice red, green and black color scheme. And once the colors came into view, if I took a few more steps back, I would probably be able to read the words, “reflective teaching can hurt!” in giant loopy letters.

But right now there is no wall.  There is only my computer.  And if I finish up in the next hour or so, a drink with my wife.  On Valentine’s Day.  A rainy valentines day.  It rained all day today.  It rained all day yesterday as well.  So I was pretty sure that my students wouldn’t stick around for the STEP interview test practice.  But two students did.  They were waiting for me in room 403.  They were flipping through the notes from their last practice session.  Flip, flip, flip.  And right off the bat I felt guilty.  “Sorry guys, the answers aren’t in there.  I made a mistake,” I wanted to say.  But I wasn’t sure.  So I sent Mi-Chan outside so we could do a run-through of the test and see what happened.

Now the STEP test is made for the Japanese market, so I’m not sure how much teachers in other countries might know about it.  The written part of the test is pretty standard, with some vocabulary questions, dialog transcript based questions, and reading and comprehension exercises.  There’s also a listening section which is actually pretty uselessinnocuous as it only tests students ability to listen for specific information.  But my students rarely break a sweat when thinking about the written test.  It’s the interview portion of the test that makes them crazy.  And why?  Certainly not because of the content.  A typical STEP test question for the pre-2nd level (high school second year) might be something like, “Do you think Japanese young people watch too much TV?” or “Are Japanese people losing interest in traditional arts?”  And basically you only need to put together two grammatically correct sentences to receive a passing grade for each question.  But Japanese people have been told over and over again that they just can’t speak English.  If you Google “Why are Japanese people bad at English,” you will actually find page after page of articles which deal with this issue as if it is an issue.  Whereas if you type in “Why are French people bad at English,” only the first two hits actually have anything to do with French people’s perceived English deficiencies.  And if you type in “Why are Chinese people bad at English,” none of the first page of hits has anything to specifically do with Chinese speaker’s inability to handle English.  So while there might be valid reasons for lower level ability in Japanese learners of English (which I’ll take up in another post some day), there is undoubtedly the very real issue of self-confidence, or complete lack thereof.

Knock, knock, knock!  That was Mi-Chan banging on the door.  So I cleared my throat and doing my best impression of an official STEP test tester invited her into the room.  Mi-Chan had diligently studied her notes and answered every question I asked as if orally dotting a series of ‘i’s. 

Then I asked her, “Do you think people in Japan work too much these days?” 

Mi-Chan thought for a second and said, “Yes.  I know many people who work too hard.  They are working for 10 hours a day.” 

This was exactly the kind of answer I had been helping my students put together over the past week.  I looked at Mi-Chan.  Her shoulders were up.  She was looking over my shoulder.  When she finished her answer, she didn’t relax her pose.  She didn’t lean back.  It was like she was waiting for the next tiger to pop out of the door in the arena or something. 

“Mi-Chan,” I said.  “I’m sorry.  I made a mistake when I was teaching you how to answer these questions before.”  I explained that I didn’t want perfect answers.  I just wanted her to tell me how she felt and what she really thought. 

Mi-Chan hesitated, but finally she said, “My father works too much.” 

I nodded.

“He works every day.  I never see him.”

Pause.

“People need relax time.  Seriously, I think everybody need more relax time.” Mi-Chan looked at me, waiting for the next question of the test.

“I think so too.  I’m sorry your father has to work so hard,” I said. 

And then it happened.  Mi-Chan leaned back in her chair.  Her shoulders drooped.  And we talked about what it means to work too much.  I recorded it all.  We went over how to use the phrase “time to ~.”  We practiced three more sets of questions.   And Mi-Chan used language that she rarely has demonstrated in a classroom environment.  Probably my favorite answer of the day was in response to the question, “Do you like to stay in luxury hotels on vacation?”  Mi-Chan thought for a moment and said, “I can’t stay in luxury hotels.  I don’t have enough money.  If I were rich I would stay in a luxury hotel.  I think everybody wants to stay in a luxury hotel.”

The other day I wrote that even standardized testing can be an affordance.  I still believe that.  But more than that, practicing for standardized testing can be a humanizing endeavor.  Maybe, as teachers, that’s our job, taking the dehumanizing machinery of a standard test, and making it human, teacher to student, question to question.  I know that with the three students I practiced with today, just by giving them a little more space to express what they wanted to express, their English ability as measured by richness of vocabulary and complexity of grammar showed marked improvement.  And maybe more importantly, they laughed or sighed or shook their heads in a way that wasn’t just about answering a question.

It’s 11:00 PM.  It’s Valentines day.  Time to have a drink with my wife.  She’s right.  I’m bumping up against a wall lately.  But it’s probably a wall I should have bumped into a long while back.  And it’s only the first of a long series of walls I’m going to have to find my way over.  But tonight is Valentine’s Day.  Hope yours was filled with love.

Walking the Walk: testing should be an affordance, but…

I’ve had something that’s been bothering me for a while now.  It’s the pebble I can’t shake out of my shoe.  It’s the English STEP test.  3 times a year I’ve got to prep my kids for the listening and then the interview test.  And my school is just crazy about these tests.  I’m not going to spend much time pointing fingers at the administration.  STEP test results are good for business.  When students pass the 2^nd level, its something real they can put on their resumes.  It helps them get into university.  The shiny certificates make for great photo shoots.  And the test isn’t the problem.  How I teach for the test is the problem.

You see, after 13 years of preparing students for the test I know what a student needs to do to squeak by.  Especially in the interview test.  If the tester asks, “Do you think cars will still use gasoline in the future?”  All the student has to do is catch “car” and “future” and string together two grammatically correct and understandable sentences about cars in the future.  Or if they catch “future” and “gasoline” they can do the same with those two key words.  For example, “In the future I don’t think there will be gasoline.  Gasoline is very bad for the environment,” or “I don’t think there will be cars in the future.  Most people will use buses or maybe bicycles.”  Basically, you can teach students to listen for key words and then use whatever bare-minimum language they can put together to answer the question.  But this is not communication.  This is not teaching English.  And worst of all, this is not respecting the students and believing in their abilities.  

Now I would like to say that I use the STEP Test as a chance to help students develop critical thinking skills, express their opinions and generally work on their communicative abilities.  But, truth of the matter is, I spend much more time just making sure they pass.  How do I know?  Because I record the students when we do mock interviews.  And this week I also recorded myself giving them feedback.  And then I listened to what I focused in on with the students.  

I did the mock interviews in one of the larger empty classroom on the 4th floor.  The recorder had a good mic., so it caught the echo as my voice rang off the walls.  While I was listening, I started to feel uncomfortable.  I sounded so sure about everything I was saying.  That was the first sign that something was off.  I’m rarely that sure in the classroom.  As I listened I kept hoping to hear something that put the student at the center of the experience.  One of the mock questions was, “Do you like to stay at luxury hotels?”  This could have led to real exchanges about family vacations or Japanese hot spring resorts.  But no.  My feedback was on how to pass the test, how to keep it simple and be understood, not on how to answer the questions in any kind of way that fostered self-expression.  

So what am I going to do about it?  Just keep walking around with the pebble in my shoe?  The truth is, I don’t know if I have enough courage to do what I think is right.  Why?  Part of it is self-preservation.  Another part is fear that if the students fail, they might end up damaged (and I know that is so patronizing).  I could just ask the students, “Do you want to focus on getting better at English or on passing the test,” but that seems like an abdication of responsibility.  And I don’t need to ask.   When I listened to the recording of one student’s wonderfully convoluted and nearly two minute long answer about why she likes to watch movies at home, I knew that what that student wants, what almost all my students want, is for someone to understand them, not to just be merely understandable. 

When I think of the English teachers and teacher trainers I really respect, I feel like I know what they would be doing in a similar situation.  From Monday to Friday I have five days in a row of Step tutoring.  I’m going to try to do what I can to change directions.  Hopefully, by the end of the week I’ll have something positive to post.  I’ve had enough of this hobbling along.  

(Thanks to #ELTchat for bringing up the issue of testing in general.  It was the outside force I needed to help me take a harder look at what I am doing in my classroom)

But will this class fly?

My school has been hit hard by influenza.  We would normally cancel classes, but most of the first year students are off on a school trip in Hokkaido and the seniors are finished with classes for the school year.  That leaves only the second year students.  My morning class was reduced to six students.  Six students who were probably using most oftheir energy wondering how long they had until their joints started to ache and the doctor told them they had to stay home.  Not a high energy group.

There’s been a lot of posts on the net about functional grammar/pragmatics/cognitive grammar lately.  Scott Thornbury’s post on construction was one of the things that got me thinking more about functional grammar this week.  And then there was Brad Patterson’s post on “What it means to be polite.”   In my teaching environment here in Japan, at a school for students with extended periods of absenteeism, I bump up against the following issues when it comes to functional grammar and pragmatics:

1.      My higher level students see English as a means to pass university entrance exams, so functional grammar in the way of oral communicative English turns them off.  They don’t see the point.

2.      My students, if they use English in the future, will primarily be using it as a communication tool with other non-native speakers.  So how to implement f.g. when teaching ELF?

3.      My lower level students missed much of their junior high school English schooling, so, for those students, I want to keep class as simple as possible and provide them with language they can pick up and run with.  This means teaching a lot of chunks of language and a conscious decision to keep it simple.

But my mentor on the Dip TESOL told me the other week, that because Japanese has such distinctive registers, perhaps I was selling my students short.  Maybe they would be able to transfer some of that L1 knowledge and pick up on differences in register more quickly than I thought.  So I decided to teach some functional grammar to the still-standing-six who shuffled into class this morning.  How?  Paper airplanes.

I had the students space out their desks in a big circle.  Then I passed out sheets of blank paper.  I started folding a paper airplane.  The students looked a little anxious.  But soon enough, without any spoken directions, all of them were happily folding airplanes. 

I turned to S-san and said, “Can I see your airplane?”  As expected, she held the airplane up for me to see.  So I asked K-san, and he did the same.  Finally I just said, “Throw it to me!”  Then we talked about what “see” meant in the context of my request.  All the students wrote the question, “Can I see your airplane?” somewhere on their paper airplanes.  The students then had some time to look at each others airplanes.  But they couldn’t leave their desks.  This led to much paper airplane throwing.  I asked the students to get their paper airplanes back.  Silence.  One student said, “Can I see my airplane?” to another student.  But I could see that she was dissatisfied with the language she had used.  So I said to N-San, “Hey, can I have my airplane back?”  Which was an ‘aha’ moment for most of the students and a few moments later, everyone had managed to get their own airplanes back in hand.  And without prompting, they all wrote, “Can I have my airplane back?” on a wing or the body of their plane.

“OK,” I said.  “Now let’s see what everyone thinks of our airplanes.  How can we get another person to really think about our airplanes?”  Which, happily led to N-san asking another student, “Can you see my airplane?”  Ah, the joys of look vs. see.  A short explanation and students were ready to make the request, “Can you look at my airplane.”  But here I stopped the airplane throwing for a moment and we talked about the nature of our three requests:

–          Can I see your airplane? (I want to do something.)

–          Can I have my airplane back? (I want to have something.)

–          Can you look at my airplane? (I want you to do something.)

Most of the students agreed that there was something different about the nature of the third request.  It required more of the person than simple tossing a paper airplane.  There was some sort of extra effort required.  So I suggested, instead of “can”, perhaps “would” might be more appropriate. 

Now I noticed that while most of the students were enjoying breaking class rules, some just couldn’t bring themselves to throw an airplane in the classroom with joy.  What’s wrong with kids today that they don’t want to toss airplanes around a classroom??!!!  So I asked them if it was uncomfortable to throw an airplane in class with a teacher watching them.  And it turns out, it was.  So I left the class and listened in at the window.  There was definitely less hesitation than when I had been in the room.

By the end of the class, students had also written, “Would you get me Maria’s airplane?” And “Could I please keep this airplane?” somewhere on their airplane.  I’m not 100% sure, but I’m pretty sure that students had developed some ideas of how levels of politeness can, in part, depend on where the locus of action is within the request as well as the duration of the request (“Could I please keep this paper airplane” resulting in a permanent state as opposed to say “Can I see your airplane” which is merely temporary).  And if not, they at least practiced some pretty basic requests which we can build on in our class tomorrow.

At the end of class, every student but one happily kept another student’s paper airplane even after the bell rang.  That one student, for whatever reason, just couldn’t bring himself to join in the last 5 minutes of practice/throwing.  So I hit him up after class and asked him what kind of things prevented him from participating.  And he said, “I just felt embarrassed.”  So I asked him if, when we did these kind of wacky lessons, he wanted me to just prompt him once in a while.  Would that make it easier for him to join in?  He looked relieved and said, “please do.”  So I took my airplane and wrote, “Would you please do that” on the inside wing, gave it to him, and headed downstairs to write up my class notes.

Action Research…too organic for me?

I’m working my way through the Dip TESOL course now.  The theory stuff on SLA, loved it.  Action research, not so much.  And it really is getting to me.  Why don’t I dig the action research?  Here’s my chance to evaluate what’s going on in my classes and for some reason I find myself shaking my head side to side much more than up and down.  I had to critique Nunan’s Action Research in the language classroom and giving it a careful read changed my mind somewhat.  But there is still this lingering unease.

Kemmis (2007) has said that, “Action research aims at changing three things: practitioners’ practices, their understandings of their practices, and the conditions in which they practice.”  So what could there be to disagree with.  I want to improve how I teach English, I want to have a deeper knowledge of how I see my teaching, and there is no doubt I would like to have a mechanism for changing the environment in which my teaching takes place.

I guess part of my problem with action research is the idea that I can spot a problem or am aware enough to pick out something useful in my teaching to focus on.  Sure, I understand it’s subjective, that there’s no wrong thing to focus in on. If I or a co-worker identify an issue in my classroom, then I’m good to go.  I should tackle that problem with the same kind of focus I have when I read about and try to implement SLA research in my classroom.  But…but there is always the feeling of “but.”

I did what I usually do in these cases.  I read more.  I buried myself in Action Research for Language Teacher (Wallace, 1998).  Good book.  Didn’t help.  Kept getting hung up on lines like, “the process of professional development varies from one person to another,” and “[Action research] nearly always arises from some specific problem or issue arising out of our professional practice.”  Am I crazy or are there other people out there who feel that problems and issues that ‘arise’ might not actual be so much of a problem as the problems and issues that somehow stay hidden?

 

Then I read Head & Taylor’s (1997). Readings in teacher development.  Chock full of goodness.  Especially the stuff on ‘Self and peer assessment.’  But did it leave me satisfied?  Nope.  So instead of reading, I decided to take Head & Taylor’s advice and do a peer assessment.  They said watching another teacher was going to teach me loads about my own teaching.   

Luckily I have a game fellow teacher by the name of Scott.  We teach together on Fridays.  So I hit him up and he said no problem.  As suggested, I asked him what he was interested in getting feedback on.  Turns out that the issue arising from his professional practice is, “how to give classroom instructions.”  Then I sat in the corner and took notes.  Lots and lots of notes.  Scott, like me, is a big kitchen timer kind of guy.  If you’re interested in my kitchen timer fetish, just check out my earlier post.  As I was watching him give instructions, very similar to my own style, I started to feel kind of itchy.  “OK,” he boomed out, “let’s practice for 3 minutes.  Go!”  or “OK, we are going to practice for 3 times.  1^st time is 2 minutes.  Start!”  The look on the kids faces.  He said “start” and it was like the crack of a whip.  Is that what the kids looked like when I pushed the button on the kitchen timer?  Not good.

During our feedback session, I asked Scott, “How do you come up with the times you set for your activities.”  He didn’t know.  He looked a little depressed.  I told him I only asked because I also didn’t have any real basis for the times I set either.  We both kind of agreed that maybe it might be better to just ask the students, “How long do you think you need to practice this language to get a little more comfortable?” or see how many times the students wanted to practice. 

That’s what I’ve been doing in my classes since Friday.  With a little tweak.  First I give the students a ridiculously short amount of time to practice.  Maybe only a minute.  Just so they can see how far they can get.  It’s their baseline.  Then I ask them, “OK, how much time do you really need to practice this conversation from start to finish one time.”  The student suggestions are, in and of themselves, awesomely random.  Students yell out, “10 minutes,” “3 minutes,” “5 minutes.”  But they YELL out a time.  They are yelling to practice English.  Same goes for number of times to practice.  In my morning class today the kids built a dialogue on hobbies. One kid said he wanted to practice it 35 times.  We would have been in class until 7 PM.  Luckily the other students had a bit more confidence and negotiated him down to 7 times.

Identifying an issue, careful observation, and just a little bit of feedback has already made my class more student centered and probably more productive as well.  And I wasn’t even the one being assessed.  Still, I can’t shake my doubts about how I should go about implementing action research for myself.  I long for some kind of truly objective tool to help me identify what to focus on.  That being said, probably my biggest issue with action research is just…me.  I want to learn something before I do it.  I want to break everything apart and put it back together mentally before I’m willing to try it out on the road.  But reading text after text isn’t going to carry me any closer to a place where I’m comfortable with action research.  Just like arbitrarily setting a 3 minute time limit on practice isn’t necessarily going to get my students any more comfortable with a particular aspect of English.  However long it takes, it takes.  However many times I need to try it, I need to try it.  To find out the value of action research, I’m going to have to put it into practice and watch as it unfolds inside and in-front of me. 

Head, K. & Taylor, P. (1997). Readings in teacher development. Oxford: Heinemann.

Kemmis, S. (2007), “Action Research As a Practice-Changing Practice.” Opening Address for the Spanish Collaborative Action Research Network Conference, University of Valladolid. Retrieved 17 January, 2011 from http://www.infor.uva.es/~amartine/MASUP/Kemmis_2007.pdf

Nunan, D. (1990). “Action research in the language classroom.” In J. Richards & D. Nunan (Eds.). Second Language Teacher Education (pp.62-81).  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Wallace, M.J. (1998), Action Research for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

But am I familiar with familiar?

Lately I am so grooving on Paul Nation’s 4-Strands.  I mean, it’s got it all, right?  25% of your time on meaning based input (graded readers, book floods, news stories simplified with a frequency checker, movie clips, audio books), 25% on meaning based output (tasks, student directed conversations, role-playing), 25% on form or language focused work (ah, the glories of saying SVO, prefix and suffix challenges, comparing various uses of polite language) and finally, my favorite until recently, 25% of course time on fluency.  And you know why I used to love fluency?  Because it was something I just didn’t spend enough time on before.  I was always in such a rush to give the kids something new to learn (there’s quite a bit of pressure at my school to produce results) that I didn’t take nearly enough time to practice what the students had already learned.  But you know what?  Fluency has fallen off my list of faves. 

Paul says the students should be using language which is “largely familiar” to them in fluency activities and that the key point is to push them to use the language a little faster, a little smoother than they are used to.  The pressure is the key.  Take that “familiar” language and push on it and turn it into a diamond of fluency.

So what’s my beef with Paul Nation?  Almost nothing.  If it weren’t for him, I would have never have even known about frequency checkers.  And that alone has changed my life for the better.  No, I’m not angry with Paul Nation.  I’m angry with my own inability to clearly identify just what language my students are “familiar” with.  For example, if I use key vocabulary (including phrases) and grammar (including functional grammar) from the previous lesson, but the students somehow managed to forget it over the weekend (imagine that), I somehow go from a fluency activity to a meaning based output or input activity.  Which has gotten me thinking, what does it mean for a student to be largely familiar with some aspect of language anyway?  I’m not trying to be facetious about this. 

Lately there was a little dust-up on how to teach vocabulary on the Osaka-JALT page on Facebook.  It all started with Mike McKay’s request for help: “How can I get my students to understand that ‘smart’ means ‘intelligent’ instead of dressing like Dapper Dan?” Suddenly I was faced with the fact that students might think, “Hey, I know this language!”  But, in truth, not so much.  This could be due to L1 Interference, misunderstanding at the outset, or an inability to even recognize when they don’t recognize something (a problem of awareness or what I like to think of as the ‘lemon juice effect’).   So just how familiar with the language do students need to be for their level of familiarity to qualify as familiar?  

Or maybe I’m just too hung up on putting things in their nicely labeled boxes.  Paul Nation never said that there wasn’t a constant flow between the four strands.  If a student forgot most of the materials from Friday’s lesson over the weekend, and the planned Monday morning fluency activity turns into meaning based output activity, that doesn’t mean that in the middle of the activity that same student wouldn’t be able to shift into practicing fluency…right?  I guess I just got lulled by those crisp clear “25%”s marching through the article.  I thought I had finally gotten ahold of a more concrete and perhaps less time consuming way to organize my courses.  But of course language teaching isn’t crisp and clear. 

I’m also reminded of another number.  This one pops up in Lightbown (2003).  “1”.  As in students, “cannot achieve native-like (or near native-like) command of a second language in 1 hour a day.”  At my school, students aren’t getting 1 hour of English classes a day.  And a majority of them aren’t studying 1 hour a day either.  That doesn’t mean students don’t need to practice for fluency, just that I have to do the messy hard work of keeping track of where my students are to make sure that that particular 25% finds its way into class.

Lightbown, P. M. (2003) “SLA research in the classroom / SLA research for the classroom.” Language Learning Journal 28, pp. 4-13.

Nation, I.S.P. (2007) “The four strands.” Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching 1, 1: 1-12.

Nation, I.S.P. (2003) “Vocabulary.” In D. Nunan. (ed.) Practical English Language

Schmidt, R. (1993) “Awareness and Second Language Acquisition.” Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 13, pp. 206-226.

             

"What do you want to talk about?"…novel?

Note to readers: this is just a straight up reflection of a lesson I ran today.  There’s no overarching theme.  And the lesson itself has been done in a similar way by hundreds and hundreds of teachers before me.  But while I was doing it, it felt novel and new to me.  As John Fanselow says, “Each of us has to reinvent the wheel even as we see others using wheels.” So here is my new wheel.  Not perfectly round, but it rolled well enough for 50 minutes today. 

     Influenza is knocking out students left and right at my school.  Most of the classes don’t have enough students present to push forward.  So instead of rushing ahead with the one (mostly) full class of first year students I had, I decided to take some time and talk with the students.  We dragged the desks to the back of the room and sat in a cirlce.  I said, “If you could suddenly speak perfect English today, what would you want to talk about?”  Here were the answers I got:

–       Delicious Food

–       Hobbies

–       Music

–       Sports

–       Talk to Kevin (that’s me)

–       Movies

–       The differences between Japan and other countries

–       Just talking with a friend, answering and asking questions

–       Where I live

     I asked the students if they had ever spent time in their English class just freely talking about any of these things?  The answer was “No.”  Which is pretty amazing.  Not that they didn’t have a chance to talk about these things in their English classes.  That’s to be expected considering the school’s set curriculum and teachers’ hesitation to deviate from it.  What was amazing was the fact that most of the students answered the question at all, verbally or with a head shake.  They were engaged.  So I apologized for the fact that, during their first year in high school they didn’t get a chance to talk about what they wanted to talk about during English classes.  As the coordinator of the International Course, I felt at least partially responsible.  Now to defend myself (from who?), we actually did cover most of these subjects in oral communication class this year.  But obviously something about the manner in which the topics were presented and how practicing the language was carried out left students with the impression that they had never talked about hobbies or music or delicious foods in class.  Maybe my heavy handed focus on form short-circuted their ability to focus on content. I should have been thinking of ‘time-space.’ 

So I made a promise to the students.  We have about 1 month left of regular classes.  About 7 or 8 classes depending on what other things pop up in the schedule (and things always do pop up at my school). I promised we would spend those 7 or 8 classes just talking about a few of the subjects they had brought up.  I asked the students to vote and we would focus on the three topics students had the most interest in.  Now I felt kind of conflicted about this step at the time.  And feel even more conflicted now that I’m writing it up.  Exactly why did I feel the need to force the students to pick 3 topics?  Probably I wanted to regain some feeling of teacherly control in the classroom.  At least that’s what it feels like now.  And maybe it was anxiety about not being able to teach the students well enough or just “enough” as far as content is concerned.  I wanted to hedge my bets and give myself a chance to prepare. 

Students ended up picking “music”, “hobbies” and “movies”.  And by a vast majority, they wanted to spend the rest of class time–35 minutes– talking about hobbies.

So I said, “OK, talk to each other about hobbies.  Just give it a shot.  Talk for a minute.” I pressed the start button on my kitchen time (that’s how I keep track of time in class). 

The students talked.  I heard “Do you have what hobbies?”  and “What have hobbies?” and “Do you hobbies?” 

And I heard answers.  A lot of answers in…English.  The timer beep-beeped.

On the white board I wrote down, “What is Nanae’s hobby?” and I asked a student.  I said, “Kesukei, what is Nana’s hobby?”  He said, “Watch TV.”  Which I corrected verbally and then wrote on the board as “She likes to watch TV.”  I got all of their hobbies up on the board.  They were:

–       Watching TV

–       Listening to music.

–       Playing video games.

–       Using a computer.

–       Drawing pictures.

–       Reading books.

Then I wrote the letters “W” “d” “y” on the board.  I wrote them as giant frankenstein letters, scary in their enormity.  And there was also a lot of white space between them.   Then I asked the students to talk to each other about hobbies again but for 2 minutes this time.  They talked for a few seconds and then some students looked at me pleadingly.  I wanted to help, but we had an odd number of students and I was busy talking to Saki.  I was torn.  The kitchen timer beeped.  The students looked relieved.

 I asked the students what it was they had wanted to say or ask that they couldn’t get out.  One student said he wanted to ask about when their partner did their hobby.  I should fess up to the fact that I speak Japanese, so the students told me what they wanted to say in Japanese. But I didn’t rephrase it in English.  Instead, I pointed to those magic letters, “W” “d” “y” and said, “Here’s all you need.”  I was patient and waited and sweated while the students were thinking and they came out with, “When do you hobby?”  Which was great as far as I was concerned.  I got it on the board and circled hobby and replaced it with words from the hobby list and we were good to go.  And then another student said they had wanted to ask about where their partner did their hobby.  I pointed to those letters again and we got, “Where do you hobby?”  I’m not sure of hobby as a verb here, but as a kind of place holder it seemed to work and students didn’t actually use the questions, “When do you hobby?” or “Where do you hobby?” So maybe it was OK, although I think there could have been a smoother way to handle this linguistic hiccup. 

     I started the kitchen timer and told the students they had three minutes of talk time.  And as this is a reflective teaching piece, I have to ask myself, “Why are you so hung up on this whole keeping time thing Mr. Me?  Can’t you just throw that kitchen timer out the window?”  I’ll have to take that up in another post soon.  Maybe I should write it while watching a kitchen timer counting down.  Anyway, I talked with my partner, Keiko, who it turns out likes to watch TV shows.  American dramas. Every evening before dinner.  In her room.  But her TV is small.  Then I was ready to find out about the other students’ hobbies.  So I had the following conversation:

Me: Taka, what is Kenta’s hobby?

Taka: Reading books.

Me:  Really.  I didn’t know that.  Where does he read?

Taka: In his house.

Me: When does he read?

Taka: Every day.

Me: What books does he read?

Taka: ???????

Me: What books does he read?  Novels?  Nonfiction?

Taka: I don’t know.

Me: OK, Kenta, what books do you read?

Kenta: Novels.

I wrote the sentence “What novels do you read?” on the board and underlined the words “novels” and “read”.  I passed out blank sheets of paper to the students.  I set the kitchen timer for five minutes.  I said, “please tell me about your partners hobbies when I come back.”  And I left the room.  5 minutes of talk time for the students. 5 minutes of pacing the hall for me.  5 minutes with no over-eager teacher sucking up oxygen.  I think that must have been nice for the students. 

When I went back into class we were almost out of time for the day.  Just had a few minutes to find out that Kenta and Saki both really like the same author.  And that they felt pretty happy to know that.  I also asked students to let me know how they liked the class.  Because if they didn’t like it, they had to let me know or they might be stuck with this style of lesson for the next month. 

I did end up getting some feedback while I was helping students clean the entrance hall at the end of the day.  Kirara, a quite girl who sometimes avoids English class entirely because she hates the pressure of having to speak, told me, “today’s class was good.”  She got to talk about something she was interested in, she said. On the flip side, two of the more studious boys were sweeping and stopped to tell me that today’s kind of class was their, “real weakness.”  And I told them, “me, too.”  And it’s the truth.  I’m a plan-it-out kind of guy.  I try to be student centered, but I know my classroom can lean in the other direction.  Still I would like to think some of the teacher centered classes and focus on form exercises we did this year were useful.  I’m pretty sure that without them, the students would have never come up with the questions from the letters, “W”, “d”, “y”.  But then again, if the classes had been a bit more student centered, maybe the students wouldn’t have so completely forgotten what we had been talking about while studying the forms.   

Four more weeks and a pretty long list of required grammar points still left on the syllabus.  7 or 8 more lesson…seems just about the right amount of time to figure some things out, or at the very least, stumble upon a whole different set of questions. 


(A big thank you to all the bloggers on the right side of this page and many more.  In the past few weeks, your posts on teaching unplugged, Dogme, and reflective teaching have helped me to take a clearer look at what I am doing in the classroom and given me the confidence to admit when I can make something better.)