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a) Teach Boys' names / Girls' names
Guess whether it's a boy's name or a girl's name.
Minsu, Younghee. Minhyeck,.....
You're correct.
Ms Ahn's first move is to provide a FUNCTIONAL EQUIVALENT of the task she wants done in English. Now, on the face of it, this is a mistake, for three reasons.
First of all, it goes against "Teaching English Through English", because the names are Korean. It points to the wrong language.
Secondly, it goes against the kind of analysis she wants the children to do, because the English rule is a PHONOLOGICAL rule and not a SEMANTIC rule as in Korean. It points to the wrong layer of organization.
Thirdly, it is a very clear example of "the belly button is bigger than the belly". The question "Guess whether it is a boy's name or a girl's name" is much more difficult than the answer.
But when we think for a minute we see that Ms. Ahn is right. We are going to give the children a new concept. As we saw in Mr. Park's homework, we cannot really teach concepts DIRECTLY, because when we do this we teach the word and not the concept. We must figure out some way to "work on them" with the children, as in playing a game or doing a task. But with a game or a task, the cildren have to know the ORIENTING AIM. In a game, it is to win. In this task, it is to guess.
So Ms. Ahn sets up the task as a kind of guessing game. To do it quickly, she makes it easy. AND she provides THREE examples! (The number three turns out to be important in various ways: we already saw it was useful in playing "Rock Paper Scissors"!)
As you guessed right, we can tell whether it's a boy's name or girl's name in English.
Expressions like "as", "if", "when", "whether" are called HYPOTACTIC in English. The idea is that one CLAUSE is placed BENEATH another, DEPENDENT on the other, OBEDIENT to the other. Like this:
a) We can tell (What can we tell?) Well, we can tell whether...
It's a boy's or a girl's name... (How do we know) Well, we know as...
we guessed right!
Notice that the grammatical SUBJECT "we" has to be the same throughout. But our teacher made a little mistake; she changes the lowest clause to "you", so it's not really clear WHO the sentence is about.
This mistake is understandable. Hypotaxis is complex. Hypotaxis is difficult. Hypotaxis is a big source of problems for the same reason that concepts are a big source of problems. When we use a concept, we are also creating a hierarchy like this:
Do you like dragons? (concept)
This is a dragon. (example)
The dragon's name is G-Dragon. (individual)
Of course, hypotaxis is a much more complex system than this. Now, let us say that the purpose of using this very complex, very difficult and very problematic set of hypotactic structures is to provide what Krashen likes to call "i +1", a kind of comprehensible input which is at the next level of difficulty for the child.
In this way the teacher hopes to provide a kind of bridge between the child's present and future abilities, a bridge between advanced exposure and less advanced use, a bridge between passive understanding and active expression. In this way, the child will be able to unconsciously acquire grammar instead of having to laboriously learn it.
It's a beautiful idea--like giving a child pain killer while we drill his teeth or using an anaesthetic when we give the child an endoscopy! Because the child is unconscious, the child will not feel any boredom or pain, and because the child is exposed to many many many examples of correct structures the child will acquire the structures correctly as well as painlessly.
But there are two problems worth thinking about. First of all, when we drill teeth or perform an endoscopy, the child's job is simply to sit still and not move. When we teach children language, we are asking the child to ACTIVELY understand and then CONSCIOUSLY and DELIBERATELY use it. We can't have meaning without INTENTION. And we can't have intention without VOLITION.
Secondly, if we really SERIOUSLY expect children to be able to use induction to create unconscious grammar rules from examples that we give them, we must give them "superior data", as Prabhu (who really created this whole idea of painless grammar learning and task based teaching in the first place, although Krashen is often given the credit) used to say.
That means that the examples we give the children to work with have to short, simple, and ONE HUNDRED PERCENT ACCURATE. But this is really NOT possible. First of all, even if we were able to use structures like this correctly one hundred percent of the time, there are lots of exceptions to deal with, and it's not even clear if the problem is at the level of GRAMMAR or MEANING:
As we guessed right, you got a good score. (??)
Secondly, it's quite impossible to provide correct data all the time. Nobody can do this, not even a professor.
And finally, even if we did do this, it seems VERY likely that the children would simply FORGET the beautiful examples we give before they were able to make the necessary deductions.
Perhaps we should seek another path!
Usually in English, the name which ends with a consonant is a boy's name.
By omitting the word "which", Ms. Ahn is trying to avoid hypotaxis and keep her sentence simple. But instead, she simply avoids hypotaxis and makes her sentence UNGRAMMATICAL.
This is a problem, or rather two problems. First of all, we are providing incorrect data for the children, because in this sentence the relative pronoun "which" cannot be omitted. But don't worry, Ms. Ahn! I think the children will not notice the mistake and will CERTAINLY not remember it, because they will be too puzzled by the word "consonant".
So the second problem is that it looks like all of Ms. Ahn's work is really WASTED. The children will NOT remember any of this, and the gap between the language of exposure and the language of use will simply grow.
On the other hand, the name ends with a vowel is a girl's name.
Teacher! What 's a vowel?
Let's ckeck them together.
Check what?
1. "Jacob" it ends with a consonant. So it's a ( boy's ) name. Right.
2. "Michael" ends with a what? Consonant. It's a Boy's name, too.
Christopher, Ryan, Benjamin.......etc.
1."Emma" ends with a vowel. So it's a (girl's) name.
2."Isabella" ends with a what? You're right. Vowel. It's a girl's name, too.
Sophia, Ella, Olivia....etc.
How do the children know what a vowel is and what a consonant is? Even if they KNOW the concept, how do they know the difference between vowels and consonants in English?
As we saw earlier, there are many Korean vowels which are consonants in English (e.g. 유, 여, 야, 워, 와, and even 우). There is also, as in English, a consonant which looks and sounds and even feels like a vowel (ㅎ, or /h/).
Ms. Ahn's great strength is her examples. The examples are extremely clear and well chosen. Notice that when she did the original example of the task using functional equivalents from Korean, she did not try to explain the concept; she simply gave the examples and had the children guess right.
But here she insists on giving the children the concept first. Perhaps she had the right idea the first time? As Vygotsky says, the word is ready when the concept is ready, but not vice versa.
"우리의 견해로는, 우리 가설의 타당성과 생산성을 판단하는 가장 중요한 지표는, 동시에 발달된 실험적 연구와 이론적 가설이 서로 조화를 이룰 뿐 아니라 완전히 동일한 발견으로 이끌었다는 사실에 있다. 그들은 우리의 전체 연구에 중점 사항 -주요 생각-을 잘 나타내 준다. 그들은 한 단어에 상응하는 개념의 발달은 그 단어를 새로 배울 때 완성되는 것이 아니라 겨우 시작되는 것이라는 점을 설명해 준다. 새로운 단어가 개념 발달의 정점이 아니라 시작점이라면 그것은 반드시 아직 성숙하지 않은 말일 것이다. 단어 의미의 점진적이고 내적인 발달은 단어 자체의 성숙을 의미한다. 여기서, 어디서나 그렇듯, 말의 유의미한 측면은 어린이 생각과 말의 발달에 있어 근본적이고 결정적인 과정이다. 비록 말이 준비되면 개념도 준비된 것으로 보통 여겨져 왔지만 톨스토이는 다음과 같이 정확히 말하였다. "개념이 준비되면 말은 거의 언제나 준비되어 있다.""And so we see the most convincing proof of the probability and fruitfulness of our hypothesis, in the fact that the combined action of the experimental study and the theoretical hypothesis have produced results which are not only concordant but entirely identical. They have demonstrated that which constitutes the nucleus, fundamental axis and principal idea of all our work, namely that at the moment when a new word is acquired, the process of development of the corresponding concept does not end, but is only beginning. At the moment of the initial acquisition, the new word is not at the end, but at the start of its development . At that stage it is always an undeveloped word. The gradual internal development of its meaning also results in the maturing of the word itself. Tolstoy says that 'the word is almost always ready when the concept is ready'; "whereas it was previously generally assumed that the concept is almost always ready when the word is ready. (Thinking and Speech, 6.8, translation by Kim Yongho)
b) Teach Family names / Given names
What's my name? Right. My name is Ahn Jung-hyun.
Ahn is my family name. Then Jung-hyun is my what? Given name.
In Korean, Family name go first, after that, put given name.
Careful! In English, the CONCEPT is plural. After that, the example is singular.
But we have said this many times. Perhaps, then, it is not enough to SAY it. It's not enough even to DO it many times, as we have done.
Perhaps what we need to do is to do it TOGETHER, to REDUCE the gap between exposure and use. I have tried to do this many times in class, of course; that is why I am always embarrassing you by asking you to stand up and teach. And of course when you are embarrassed it's very hard to pay attention to what you are doing. So the mistake does not go away:
*Family name (sic) *go (sic) first. After that, put *given name (sic).
"The family name goes first. After that, put the given name."
But simply uptaking and correcting this mistake does not work either. My students simply look at the example, understand what it means (which they understood in the first place since they actually created the meaning in the first place) and then forget the structure. As Widdowson says, "Learners do not very readily infer knowledge of the language system from their communicative activities".
I don't mean to embarrass you. But I DO want you to worry about this. Because it seems to me that if the method doesn't work very well with GRADUATE STUDENTS, then it is very unlikely to work with children, who in general are LESS CONSCIOUS (and less conscientious and also in many ways less motivated) than adults.
Let's see some English names.
Michael Jackson : What is family name? Michael or Jackson.? (Ss might think Micheal is family name.) Micheal is given name. So Jackson is family name.
So we can call him "Micheal". We CAN'T call him "Jackson". We can ask him/her
"How do I call you?" politely.
We saw that Ms. Ahn's great strength was her EXAMPLES. In the first part of her homework, she chose beautiful examples of boys and girls names that were very clear, and there was every reason to expect the children to make clear inferences about the underlying rule.
But it seems to me that this is NOT such a good example. There are seven letters in each name. "Michael" is exactly the same length as "Jackson". So this example doesn't really help us understand any RULE.
What is the rule? Well, IN GENERAL, the rule is that family names are LONG and given names are SHORT. In my own name, you can see this, although not very well.
David (five letters)
Kellogg (seven letters)
A better rule (a more powerful and a more reliable rule) would be to say that IN GENERAL, frequently used words, familiar words, are shorter words and rare words, unfamiliar words are longer words.
This rule is so powerful that when people DO disobey it, and have familiar (given) names which are longer than their unfamiliar (family) names, we tend to shorten the familiar names so that they are shorter than the family names.
Jennifer Aniston = Jen
William Clinton = Bill
It even applies to ordinary words. "Chair", for example, is shorter than "furniture" and "dog" is shorter than "animal". And of course it applies to numbers ("1, 2, 3, 4" are shorter than "eleven", "twelve", "thirteen" and of course both are much shorter than millions, billions, trillions, quadrillions, etc.)
Now, Ms. Ahn is not at all alone here. The truth is that our ENGLISH book does not have good examples either. The names "Smith" and "Brown" are not good examples, because they are TOO SHORT.
c) Teach Titles (Mr. Miss. Mrs. Ms)
After these titles , Mr, Miss, Mrs , put family name.
How do you call me? Ms. what? Right. Ms. Ahn.
How do you call the Class 3 teacher? Right. Mr. KIM.
Notice that "the" is a kind of title. "The" is the title for nouns that have no title. In the same way, "Mr", "Mrs", and "Ms" are articles for people who have surnames.