snueenglish

￭ From Minkyeong's Data ￭ 1) Compare the language the children are listening to with the language that    they are speaking. How are they different quantitatively? How are they different    qualitatively? T: Now look at the picture. What do you see? S3: A calendar! T: Yes, there is a calendar. (pointing) The boy and the girl are looking at the calendar. What is the month? Ss: May. T: Right. What else do you see? S4: A boy and a girl. T: A boy and a girl? (pointing) There is another boy here. There are TWO boys and a girl. What 's this girl's name? S4: Mmm...Nami? T: Nami? But she has dark hair. She's korean. Look! This girl is not korean. (Ss flipping through the book) T: Yeah. you can find her name in the front. (flipping the book) S5: Ann T: Yeah, she's Ann. Who is he? Ss: Jinho T: Jinho, And this boy is? Ss: Joon! T: Yes, Now look at Joon's face. He's smiling. How does he feel? Ss: Happy! T: Why is he happy? Can you guess? S6: His birthday is May fifth. T: Oh, yeah. Maybe his birthday is May fifth. Now look at Ann's face. How does she feel? Ss: Happy! T: Why is she happy? Can you guess? S7:Mmm.. Ann is going to Joon's birthday. T: Ah~! Ann is INVITED to Joon's birthday party. Now look at Jinho's face. How does he feel? S8: Very bad.... Sad! T: Yeah. he looks sad. WHY~do you think he is SAD? Why is he sad? Can you guess? S9: He's not....invited. T: Oh! He's NOT invited to Joon's birthday party. S10: Ann ate his birthday...cake. 케익을 T: Oh, Ann ate Jinho's birthday cake, so he's (in a different voice) "I am going to go to your party and eat your cake!" (Ss laugh) T: We'll find out as we watch the video. The language the children are listening to and the language that they are speaking are different. How? When the language the children are listening is the language the teacher is speaking. “When"? Why "when"? Don't begin with generalities, Sujin. Start with the question instead. Begin HERE, Let's compare teacher's speaking and students speaking in this data. First, while teacher (sic) is speaking more than 2 sentence (sic) (including many word [sic]) when she asked a question, students is answering almost only a few words. Jisu was rather offended the other day when Professor Yi suggested that our teachers lack confidence and lack speaking ability. I pointed out that Professor Yi's suggestion was really based on a well known study, which was in turn based on self-eval‎uation. Yuko Goto Butler found that Korean teachers tend to rate themselves rather low and rate the amount of speaking ability required to do their job rather high. If I remember correctly, Yuko found that Taiwanese teachers tend to do the opposite, particularly in the private sector. I think this says more about Korean and Taiwanese ATTITUDES (attitudes toward their job, attitudes toward themselves) than about Korean and Taiwanese ABILITIES. But it's worth thinking for a moment about how we could REALLY determine speaking ability. If we assume that teaching and learning are related, and we assume that children learn something from what teachers say, then we might try to compare the language that children use with the language that teachers use. This might tell us something REAL about the gap between the Korean teacher's ABILITIES and the requirements of our job, something that is quite independent of their ATTITUDES and even their feelings. I've been doing this for a few years now. The results are quite interesting. With some teachers (especially FOREIGN teachers and also SPECIALIST teachers) there is a very big gap indeed. But it's not what Yuko's work would lead us to expect. It's what our knowledge of Korea would lead us to expect. The teachers tend to use meta-language that is FAR MORE COMPLEX than the actual language used by the children. They are using good HIGH SCHOOL English. Or even good UNIVERSITY English. But they are trying to teach elementary school! In Chapter Three (Hyosun's study), this is called the "Belly Button Problem", because 배꼽이 배보다 커요: the language about the language is more difficult than the language itself. This is the key problem for this Midterm Question, because this Midterm Question is based on Chapter Three. For example the language used to check comprehension is more complex than the language which the children were supposed to comprehend. If the language of a question is more difficult than the language of the text that the question is about, then when the child cannot answer there is really no way to tell if it is whether they cannot understand the text or they cannot understand the question. In Kwon and Kellogg the same problem is referred to as "reversibility" or "uptakeablity" because foreign readers don't know the Korean proverb about the belly and the belly button. But wait a minute. If Korean teachers are using classroom English that is TOO ADVANCED, how can we explain Yoko Goto Butler's finding that they feel they are using English which is NOT SUFFICIENTLY advanced for the job? At first, I was very puzzled by this, and I even told Yuko that I thought her findings were wrong. Now I am not so sure. Sometimes the truth lies not in the middle but BEYOND BOTH EXTREMES. On the one hand, it seems to me, teachers DO use very complex sentences and fail to get even very simple answers, and I think this probably IS due to the "belly button problem", the terrific mismatch we see between the complexity of the question and the simplicity of the text. On the other hand, there are MANY very BASIC errors, which learners can easily see and hear for themselves, In particular, we see lots of problems with: a) ARTICLES! Children can see and hear this because of their developmental orientation to concrete objects. Of course, the rules of article use are unclear to them, so what they experience is complexity, inconsistency and incoherence about article use rather than error. But the teachers do realize that they are making errors, and this is why they report a lack of speaking ability, b) PLURAL and SINGULAR!  Again, children notice this because of a developmental orientation to concrete objects and the ways in which they are grouped. Again, I think they do not experience the teacher's errors as deficient teaching; they simply think that English is a very difficult language. But again, teachers know they are making mistakes, and this is why they think that the English required by their job is too much for them. (For example, if we look at the sentence Sujin wrote, we notice THREE mistakes, marked "sic"). That mean (sic) children listen far more than they speak in the classroom quantitatively. If we consider 1 teacher and more than 30 students, an amount of speaking of each student is much less.  Yes, but this says nothing about complexity, and as a result it tells us nothing about learning. It also says nothing about the data. I live in Seoul. There are 25 million other people in this city. The amount of Korean I hear is far more than I speak, and that is exactly as it should be. Remember that this is a class in INTEGRATING SKILLS and KNOWLEDGE. You have to make your analysis relevant to　that and to the data which you have chosen to analyze.　You can't just make general remarks that are true about every class situation a priori. Second, teacher always ask (sic) a question and students answer accordingly. And While teacher (sic) is asking a question with full sentence, students is (sic) answering almost only a word and small phrase qualitatively. But when teacher(sic) ask (sic)'why' question(sic), students try to create sentence. Look at the mistakes in plural-singular and articles above. I'm not picking on your English, Sujin (and in fact if you want to try to answer the question in Korean you are very welcome to do so, and I will do my best to correct it). I am showing you that there is a good reason for Yuko's finding and it's not necessarily incompatible with the finding that the level of English used by teachers in our classrooms is actually too high. It's possible for the English used by Korean teachers to be both TOO COMPLEX and TOO SIMPLE at one and the same time. What can we do about this? I think that whenever we have a key problem like this, it's very useful to look and see what parents, government officials, and private industry is doing to solve the problem. This will often help us to understand the WRONG way to approach the problem, the way in which people approach problems when they PANIC. What our government has chosen to do is to increase the general language skills of Korean teachers across the board and to introduce "experts", "native speakers", and "specialist conversation teachers"; in other words, our government has chosen to make teachers more like native speakers, and more like good high school teachers. It might be more efficient (not just in terms of our human resources but in terms of the actual problem we are trying to solve) to concentrate on what ONLY elementary school teachers do, to concentrate on SIMPLE, CLEAR examples that have ONE HUNDRED PERCENT accuracy. This makes good sense from an elementary education perspective. In elementary education, we often try to teach inductively, from examples, rather than deductively from general principles. But if we want the children to induce, for example, the plural/singular distinction from teacher sentences, then we have to use SIMPLE examples that the kids can fully understand. We also have to make sure they are 100% accurate, with no exceptions. For example, let's say that we want kids to understand that a NOUN which ends with an "s" is MANY nouns, a plural noun. We have to use many examples (because the concept of the "noun" is still a little abstract in the child's mind) and we have to get it right every single time. The same thing is true if we want the kids to understand that a VERB which ends with an "s" means a SINGULAR subject. We have to use many examples (because there are TWO abstract ideas here, the idea of the "verb" and the idea of the "subject of the verb") and we have to get it right every single time. Can we really say that we are doing that? Now, Sujin's answer is a good beginning. She understands that part of the reason for the QUALITATIVE differences we see between teacher talk and student talk is actually NOT a difference in language, or even language ability, but rather a difference in language role. This is a good place to start. Unfortunately, this is where Sujin chooses to end. 2) What can we do to integrate them?  Why does it matter? The teacher's  role is very important to integrate students' speaking and listening well. First, the teacher's questioning is important. It' sure teacher's speaking influence students speaking. We can see the change of students' answer according to teacher's question. specifically, when teacher ask the question which has only fixed answer like " what do you see in the picture?" "how does she feel?", students answered only a word, However, students made the answer creatively using sentence when teacher asked the "why" question. And after that, students started to uptake like "birthday, invited" continually. Teacher have to give various question to students properly, yes no question, choice question, open question and so on. This doesn't really answer the question, Sujin. In fact, I can't even tell if you are saying that the teacher's language and the children's language is integrated in this particular data or not. Second, the teacher has to help students understand well what he or she said through material, facial expression‎ because speaking is based on understanding. I don't understand this. Why does the fact that speaking depends on understanding mean that teachers have to use facial expressions? Isn't it possible to teach by telephone, or even through the internet, as I am doing right now? Third, children need more opportunities for output too. It's not enough to interact between 1 teacher and many students. The teacher has to organize the group timely Students have the more chance to speak through pair and group work. I don't understand this either. The data you've chosen is "Look and Listen", which is designed to introduce the WHOLE CLASS to a particular situation and a set of language exponents at once. How would you do "Look and Listen" as pair and group work? Can you show us?