Re:Midterm Exam-Situations and Rules by 이은경

[kellogg]

※ teacher (S) : statement        (C) : command        (Q) : question

  students (s) : statement       (c) : command        (q) : question

The whole class is divided into three teams, Yellow team, White team and Orange team.

T: Now, it's time for a game. (S)

Ss: Wha~Wha~. (as clapping their hands)

T: This game is called "Bombs Comparisons". (S)

A very OBSCURE name. We saw in class that very often the NAME of a game can be a RIDDLE which the children then "unpack" in the subsequent activity.

Now, we also saw that there are (at least) FOUR possible ways to name a game:

a) PARTS

b) MOVES

c) OUTCOMES

d) RULES

I would GUESS that this name refers to c), but I'm not sure. Of course, there are some advantages to using OUTCOMES as game names. If we can tell the kids how to win and what they get, for example, it can provide an orienting overall aim for the activity, it can motivate the kids, and it can make sense of parts and moves by showing how they contribute to a particular outcome.

BUT there are disadvantages. The obvious one is that it will be a long time before the name will make sense to the kids. (Think of "bingo" and "hangman"; by the time the children really understand what they mean, the game is almost over!) Sure enough, that's what the data shows!

Here's rules. (sic)  (S) Look! (C) (The teacher points at the screen. There's pictures (sic) at the left side and explanations are at the right side.)

One finger up, one point. (S) (as the teacher is pointing at the picture that it shows one finger up)

Notice how the teacher uses what we called a "subgrammatical fragment" (when we were analyzing Minkyeong's data) here. She does this (successfully) to avoid using a complex sentence with a subordinate clause; if she uses "if" or "when", then she has to use a kind of grammar that the kids haven't learnt yet:

T: If you see one finger, you get one point.

Later, though she DOES use "if" constructions!

Now, is it REALLY a statement? That's the question.

Two fingers up, two points. (S)

Three fingers up, three points. (S)

Four fingers up, four points. (S)

Five fingers up, five points. (S)

And bomb~, your team lose (sic) all points. (S)

How many points? (Q) (as the teacher shows two fingers up)

Ss: Two. (s)

Ss: Two points. (s)

T: Good! How many points? (Q)(the teacher points at bomb)

Ss: No~. (으~.) (s)

Ss: Zero. (s)

T: Right! You go back to zero point. (sic) (S)

Okay, the team which gets most (sic) points is winner (sic). (S)

(The screen is changed into another scene that shows the game board.

There are each four sports star pictures in two ways namely the vertical way and the horizontal way. Also there are question marks on the sixteen intersections.)

  Look at this screen. (C) Who is he? (Q)

Ss: 박태환. (s)

S: 수영선수다. (s)

T: Right! Who is she? (Q)

Ss: 김연아. (s)

T: 김연아는 뭐? (Q)

Ss: …….

T: Skating. (S) (Is it a statement? Grammatically?)

Ss: Ah~. 맞다.

…………

(There are all 8 sports stars on the screen. The teacher asks their names to Ss one by one.)

T: Now, choose one star in the vertical way and choose another star in the horizontal way.  If you choose 김연아 and 이승엽, you say "I like 김연아 more than 이승엽." (C) (Notice that there are TWO utterances in this turn. The first is certainly a command. But what about teh second? Is it really a command? Isn't it a complex statement, at least grammatically?)

Ss: I like 김연아 more than 이승엽.(Some Ss just repeat after teacher.) (s)

T: Okay. "I like 김연아 more than 이승엽." (as giving gestures to repeat the teacher) (C)

Ss: I like 김연아 more than 이승엽. (s)

T: Okay. Now, here we go! Yellow team, choose. (C)

S1: 박찬호. (s)

T: And~. (C)

S2: 장미란. (s)

T: Okay. Everybody. Ask to Yellow team, "Which star~."(as encouraging Ss to ask to Yellow team with gestures) (C)

Ss: Which star do you like? (q)

Yellow team: I like 박찬호 more than 장미란. (s)

(Teacher clicks the question mark and it's changed into three fingers up picture.) Wha~ . (Yellow team give cheers.)

T: Good job! Next, White team. (C)

S3: 박태환. (s)

T: Good! (??? You can see that we DO need a category for fragments.)

S4: 이봉주. (s)

T: Everybody~. (C) Why is this a command?

Ss: Which star do you like? (q)

White team: I like 박태환 more than 이봉주. (s)

(Teacher clicks the question mark and it's changed into bomb picture.)

White team: 으악! 망했다.

T: Oh, poor White team. ???

Okay. It's your turn, Orange team. (C)

(It goes same way on and on until five turns finish)

a) Give an example of teacher talk which assigns ROLES. How does the teacher use talk to explain RULES? Why are the two functions (assigning roles and explaining rules) so different? Which one is more difficult and why? Would you say this is mostly a ROLE based form of play or a RULE based game?

There is two roles in this game. One is Asking role and the other is Answering role. The whole class is divided into three teams as Yellow team, White team and Orange team for this game. If it's Yellow team's turn, Yellow team's role is Answering and the other teams' role is Asking. The teacher says for assigning roles like below:

Notice that using A Team and B Team or "Yellow Team" and "White Team" is ARBITRARY, it is a layer of SYMBOLISM. Suppose we do this:

Eunkyeong's Team

Jisu's Team

OR:

NBA Team

FIFA Team

You can see the names are no longer arbitrary: they help the teacher to answer WHO says WHAT.

for assigning roles for Answering

T: Now, choose one star in the vertical way and choose another star in the horizontal way. If you choose 김연아 and 이승엽, you say "I like 김연아 more than 이승엽."

for assigning roles for Asking part

T: Okay. Everybody. Ask to Yellow team, "Which star~?"(as encouraging Ss to ask to Yellow team with gestures)

Usually roles are fixed in games. Games or role plays? For example, one student has a father role does only this role. But roles are unfixed in this game. Ss' roles are changed from Asking into Answering or from Answering into Asking.

The teacher explains rules by using the screen that shows rules one by one with pictures. But rules are only about scores. There are six kind of scores, from one point to five points and bomb. If the teacher explains rules without pictures, Ss feel hard to understand why bomb means zero point or losing all the scores that they have got. "Bomb" is not familiar word to most Ss. But Ss understand easily this rule because the picture, the iconic meaning. The picture shows that the bomb is exploding. Everybody knows everything disappears when bombs explore.

True--now, which is more complex: the rules about scoring, or the rules about playing?

What ORDER does the teacher follow in her explanation?

...parts

...moves

...outcomes (score)

...rules (winning and losing)

You can see that outcomes come FIRST, and in fact the outcome is the FOCUS of the name of the game as well.

What is the differences between assigning roles and explaining rules in games.

Assigning roles, there would be situations first. Teachers have to present situations and to explain what's going on. There are role play, 소꿉놀이 and so on.

But that's not true here. Look:

for assigning roles for Answering

T: Now, choose one star in the vertical way and choose another star in the horizontal way. If you choose 김연아 and 이승엽, you say "I like 김연아 more than 이승엽."

for assigning roles for Asking part

T: Okay. Everybody. Ask to Yellow team, "Which star~?"(as encouraging Ss to ask to Yellow team with gestures)

Some games do not need to understand situations. Only getting understanding rules Ss can play games.

Remember, Vygotsky says this:

Take any form of play with an imaginary situation. The imaginary situation already contains rules of behavior, although this is not a game with formulated rules laid down in advance. The child imagines herself to be the mother and the doll a child, so she must obey the rules of maternal behavior. This was very well demonstrated by a researcher in an ingenious experiment based on Sully’s famous observations. The latter described play as remarkable in that children could make the play situation and reality coincide. One day two sisters, aged five and seven, said to each other: “Let’s play sisters.” Here Sully was describing a case in which two sisters were playing at being sisters, i.e., playing at reality. The above mentioned experiment based its method on children’s play, suggested by the experimenter, that dealt with real relationships. In certain cases I have found it very easy to evoke such play in children. It is very easy, for example, to make a child play with its mother at being a child while the mother is the mother, i.e., at what is, in fact, true. The vital difference in play, as Sully describes it, is that the child in playing tries to be a sister. In life the child behaves without thinking that she is her sister’s sister. She never behaves with respect to the other Just because she is her sister – except perhaps in those cases when her mother says, “Give in to her.” In the game of sisters playing at “sisters,” however, they are both concerned with displaying their sisterhood; the fact that two sisters decided to play sisters makes them both acquire rules of behavior. (I must always be a sister in relation to the other sister in the whole play situation.) Only actions that fit these rules are acceptable in the play situation.

There are card games, board games, and a chess game and so on.

But ALL of these games include imaginary situations. Look:

"If you choose 김연아 and 이승엽, you say "I like 김연아 more than 이승엽."

This TOO is an imaginary situation. And so is this;

T: If you see one finger, you get one point.

The reason why these are STATEMENTS and not COMMANDS is precisely because they represent imaginary situations. Vygotsky is right, every game of rules has an implicit imaginary situation.

Take soccer. There is a rule that says you cannot touch the ball with your hands. But of course you CAN touch it with your hands. You are physically capable of doing so. But there is a rule which creates an imaginary situation; you have to pretend that for some reason (we abstract away the reason) you cannot do so.

Now, the teacher chooses (perhaps not to WISELY) to grammaticize the imaginary situation as a highly abstract grammatical form. But the teacher COULD have done it like this, using concrete ROLES:

T: Now, THIS team is a SPORTS MAGAZINE.

What's your name?

SPORT WORLD! Good!

It's your FIRST issue.

You want to have a STAR on the 표지.

Who is your cover?

김연아 or 이승엽?

Say it!

Compare:

T: If you choose 김연아 and 이승엽, you say "I like 김연아 more than 이승엽."

You can see that having concrete ROLES leads to much TALLER but THINNER discourse: there is more back and forth, less abstract meaning. Of course, there are disadvantages to doing this. But there are also advantages!

Some rules are very easy to understand but some rules are very difficult to understand. It depends on types of games.

But we just saw that it also depends on what the teacher does and how the teacher thinks and speaks.

In fact, I think it depends MORE upon these things than upon the type of game. We saw that Wittgenstein was NOT able to draw any coherent conclusions about types of games, and that Caillois' theory led to a dead end too.

 Also rules generally have very symbolic meanings. So they are abstract and not concrete. Even if they aer expressed as commands? However roles has iconic meanings. Even if they are imaginary? Teachers usually give roles to Ss with pictures or gestures that shows their roles. Therefore generally speaking, understanding rules are more difficult than being assigned roles from Ss point of view.

Yes, that's VERY generally speaking. I think it's not so simple!

Don't be in a rush to APPLY what we discuss. The first thing to do is to throughly understand it.

This game "Bombs Comparisons" is mostly a rule based game. This game is effected by rules not by situations.

We can see from this that Eunkyeong is really ONLY focussing on the outcome of the game. This is actually quite consistent throughout her data: the name is about the outcome, the points are about the outcome, and the PARTS and MOVES of the game are pretty much ignored. But it's the parts and the moves of the game that provide all of the EDUCATIONAL interest, no? Why do we care about the outcome? Let the kids worry about that.

b) Would you say this is mostly ALEA (a game of chance), AGON (a game of competition), ILINX (a game of movement or dizziness) or MIMICRY (a game of imitation or role play)? Does the game CHANGE as the data progresses?

This game is mostly ALEA (a game of chance). But there is a little MIMICRY (a game of role play). If the team which has the role of answering does not answer, they can lose their turn. In this point this game is MIMICRY.

What about the grammatical skill involved? Isn't that the whole point of the game, from the teacher's point of view? Let's not be too quick to take the kids' point of view; they are only kids!

But this game is mostly ALEA. Nobody knows the result how many scores are under the question marks. This is really game of luck. It does not depend on any skills or strength.

Suppose I just say this:

S: 박지성! 김승연!

Do I get the point or not? If so, how can the teacher add MEANING to the game?

The game does not change in this data. But it can be changed gradually from ALEA include a little MIMICRY to mostly ALEA. If some Ss are unfamiliar with the comparison sentences they may not answer right away. In that case they may lose their turn. But, this problem will disappear as Ss are getting familiar with that sentences. The game becomes mostly ALEA. 

Is the ability to answer mimicry? Is it ONLY imitation? How can it be imitation if they have never heard the sentence before?

Notice that in the data Eunkyeong very perceptively notices when the kids are just repeating and when they are responding to the task! So in the data it's quite clear when the kids are mimicking the teacher and when they are using their own skills. The problem is the ANALYSIS!

c) Take a look at the teacher’s use of COMMANDS, STATEMENTS, and QUESTIONS. Which does the teacher use most? What about the children? What about the language that the children will use to play the game? Why? How could you CHANGE this if you wanted to?

         Figure 1. Teacher Talk                     Figure 2. Students Talk         

The teacher talk has twenty-seven utterances. There are more STATEMENTS and COMMANDS than QUESTIONS. (Figure 1.) But the coding of the data is a little odd--look at the data. The reason why the teacher tries to have Ss understand the rules of the game that Ss are going to play. So the teacher explains the rules. Explanations are offered with the form of STATEMENTS. The teacher uses QUESTIONS to check Ss' understanding.

What about fragments? I think they are VERY important. The truth is that they are a BIG proportion of the data.

There's another reason why fragments are important, Eunkyeong. Remember that Vygotsky teaches us that every intra-mental function was once an inter-mental, social one. Grammar was once discourse. The long sentence was once a long dialogue, and the sentence was once a set of shared sentence fragments.

While Ss are playing this games, each team has chances ten times for asking and five times for answering equally. (Figure 2.) The teacher makes turns of play by herself and directs the order one by one. So every team has almost same chances for asking and answering. So Ss talk has STATEMENTS and QUESTIONS without COMMANDS.

Good. In general S commands are almost nonexistent in our data. And this tells us a good deal about the relationship between input and output, because there are certainly LOTS of commands in the input.

I would like to change this part. The team which has the turn for answering can have chance to get points. It is so important Ss have chances for answering. So every turn the teacher makes Ss choose the team which will answer by using dice or drawing color cards. It can make this game more exiting. 

Why is making the game "exciting" a valid goal? Actually exciting games (boxing, wrestling) are not very useful for teaching, are they?

dk