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KT: It's very hot. Is it morning or afternoon? Ss: Morning/ Afternoon. KT: Morning or afternoon? Ss: Afternoon. |
Good. But another way to look at this method is to say the teacher is uptaking the VARIOUS answers and offering a choice.
In Ms. Park’s work, we called this SELECTION of COMPETING answers a way of making the “inter-mental” into the “intra-mental”. That is, what was BETWEEN minds then becomes something WITHIN minds.
You can see that this is COMPLETELY consistent with Mr. Park’s goal of providing guidance with PROCESS (understanding) and not simply evaluation of PRODUCTS (answers). The teacher does not give the answer. The teacher takes the answer and makes it into a choice. The children choose the right answer, and thus learn something about the general process by which right answers can be obtained (by restating, refining, and narrowing down the question, as Mr. Park says).
b) Provide some clues or hints to the student to solve the problem.
KT: They are ... ? S: Go home. KT: Yeah, leaving school ... to go back ... S: home. KT: home ... to go home. |
Here it is not so clear to me that the child solves the problem, Mr. Park! In fact, it’s not that clear to me what the problem is. The teacher does not like the child’s tense. But what the teacher adds is really complexity and not clarity. This is really the opposite of what she was doing earlier.
c) Lead and guide the student to answer. What does “lead” or “guide” mean?
d) Ask the question again in an easy way.
KT: 다영? One more time? Ok. 다영, please, tell me one more time. S: 아아 ... (gesturing "no") KT: One thing. Ok. One thing. One thing not everything. |
When we quote from the data, we need to make sure to quote enough. Actually, the data shows that KT is asking Dayeong for the WHOLE STORY! That’s why Dayeong gestures “no”.
e) Correct the students answer into the right form.
f) Direct way
KT: Go! Go! KT: Does she say "Fighting"? Ss: No! No! KT: "Fighting" is konglish. Maybe ... Ann says ... ? Like Chris, "Go, go, go, go". FT: Cheering. KT: Cheering. Yes, she is cheering. (replaying the video) |
As I said, I don’t really understand this. Why is “fighting” wrong? It seems perfectly okay to me. But I also don’t understand why Mr. Park thinks that “Does she say ‘fighting’?” is a direct way of correction.
Early on, Mr. Park made the point that teachers need to use correction sparingly, because:
a) We risk hurting the children’s feelings
b) We risk focusing the children’s attention on PRODUCT rather than PROCESS, on TESTING rather than TEACHING
c) We turn learning into a matter of guessing and good luck rather than thinking and sound reasons.
I am not sure about a). The children know they are children; they know that they are not expected to speak fluently or correctly all the time, and sometimes they actually get attention and even admiration for incorrect and amusing answers. So I am not sure if correction really damages children’s feelings as much as we think.
But it seems to me that there is ONE kind of correction that probably DOES damage feelings, and that is the sense that somehow Korean English is inferior, not as good as Chinglish or Japglish or Singlish, or for that matter American, British and Australian English. According to Yuko Goto Butler, Korean teachers tend to be rather better qualified and more capable than other teachers of English. On the other hand, they tend to FEEL less qualified and less capable. At least some of this is due to mistaken beliefs about the inferiority of Konglish.
On the other hand, if the purpose of questions is mainly on the testing (assessing / evaluating), teacher's reply might be simple as right or wrong.
Of course, even THIS is not necessary. When we really DO evaluate, and assess, the English proficiency of learners we do NOT do this. When the child is taking a written test, we do not say after each question whether the child has done it correctly or incorrectly.
In general, Mr. Park has a very good grasp of the issues: he understands the distinction between process and product that is at the heart of this question and his answers show that the teacher can give varying amounts of attention to either. His selections from the data are very good.
However, I sometimes feel that there are only TWO people in his classroom: a teacher and a monster that has fifty or sixty bodies but only one head, called S. In Ms. Park’s analysis we can see that this really isn’t true: there are MANY different children, and the ability to create MANY answers is crucial to teaching process. That is because the process of understanding must exist first BETWEEN heads and only then WITHIN them.
2. How does the teacher go from just looking to really listening?
Unlike reality, during the look and listen part, looking does not tell the truth nor everything. What looking gives us are some pieces of information guessed. If a student depends on looking the pictures on the textbook or watching video clips without sound, he/she can get limited informations, and there are potential possibilities of having misconcepts (오개념).
Bruner, who also writes a lot about the “scaffolding” techniques that Mr. Park discussed in the first question, calls this “going beyond the information given”. Going beyond the information given is key to resolving Plato’s problem.
So we teachers need to help students focus more on the sounds of the video clip. Sometimes students are focusing on unnecessary information and asking silly questions or answers. But it makes clear to provide them with the context via listening.
What is “it”? Questions, presumably. But what kinds of questions? That is the question!
A context is not simply a set of nouns. So they can’t simply be “what” questions. A context is not simply a set of characters. So they can’t simply be “who” questions either.
In fact, the question we want is ALL of these:
“Who says what to whom, when and how do they say it, and why?”
You can see that the teachers uptake is ALMOST (but not quite) the plaything of the children; she lets them lead the discussion merrily away from the text.
It is possible that students can guess in a false way, because they did not get enough information needed. Guessing what (What is it? / What is going to happen next?) questions are useful to predict and to imagine the story. But by listening, students can check whether their guesses are right.
It’s not clear if Mr. Park is describing what happens in the class or what SHOULD happen. Are there any “predictive questions” in this data? Where?
If Mr. Park is providing a critique of the teacher, where should the predictive questions go and what should they be?
Remember that it’s also possible that the teacher and the students have DIFFERENT PURPOSES in listening—the children are really uninterested in the language point and instead want to make comments about clothes and characters, while the teacher is mostly interested in what the children SAY and not in what they UNDERSTAND.
The FT does have a function here; he provides a lot of the information.
A specific strategy of asking questions is required. To focus on the types of questions, teacher (sic) starts with opened questions, and the questions transfer to closed questions. And sometimes vice versa.
a) Opened question ⇒ Closed questions
b) closed question ⇒ opened questions
Good. Which set of questions is most useful in the process of understanding? Why?
During the English class, almost all the activities, directions, questions are dome by the verbal language. This means that students are required to concentrate on listening, not looking. Looking can cause some critical(sometimes trivial) errors in understandings.
True! And even when they do not, looking only gives a very GLOBAL understanding; it doesn’t help us answer the key question of who says WHAT to whom!
Is it a good guess?
3. What does the teacher do about wild answers?
When the teacher encountered wild answers, KT ignored the wild answers and waited for the rational answers. It is not important whether the answer is correct or not. But there should be some reasons for the answer. Students are required to think in a rational way.
Very well put. I think this is why Jeonghyeon’s work is so interesting; she shows the value of “why”. But unfortunately, she abandons her own data precisely where “why” is most useful, on the THIRD question—the wild answer question.
S: Go home. KT: Yeah, leaving school ... to go back ... S: home. KT: home ... to go home. S: They go 찜질방. KT: It's very hot like today. Too hot. |
Does the teacher IGNORE the answer? Isn’t the teacher responding to the answer here?
Yura decided that her teacher asked questions from CLOSED to OPEN (by which she really meant that the teacher began with questions based on the text and ended with questions based on personal experience). She then IGNORED a lot of data that contradicted this decision.
I’m afraid that Mr. Park might be doing the same thing. He has decided that the teacher ignores wild answers. But that’s not what the data shows, Mr. Park!
Let's try to imagine that the teacher replied the wild answers. That will bring another wild answers and the situation goes onto the wrong way. And it also takes time waste as well.
Good. Very true. At least in theory. But isn’t that exactly what the teacher DOES do here? Do the children go the wrong way?
노래방 and 찜질방 are not the right term for elementary school students in a pedagogical viewpoint. Students are not allowed to go there without adults' care. They are really wild answers.
Again, I don’t see that this is wild. First of all, it’s quite possible that Ann, whose mother does not work, would agree to take them there, or Jinho’s brother, who is a rock and roll star, might go.
But suppose it is wild. The 찜질방 might have a swimming pool. After all most saunas do have some kind of swimming pool, and swimming in cold water can be very refreshing on a cold day. How about a cold swimming pool—with a karaoke machine?
Teachers cannot have a list of wild answers, but they can have the standards to sort them. Which answers are acceptable? And which are not? The answer for these questions must be based on the teachers outlook on the education.
Yes, but we can be much more specific than that; we have very specific goals in this lesson having to do with understanding words like swimming pool, swimming suit, hot weather, “You swim well”, etc.
Actually, Jinho is very disappointed that he cannot go swimming with Ann. Joon turns out to be a very good swimmer and admires Jinho in his swimming suit. These are all slightly surprising facts: Is Jinho attracted to Ann? Is Joon gay? Perhaps we do not want to suggest these things to the children—they are very wild speculations indeed. But they are wild speculations that serve as explanations—they do explain the “why” of Jinho and Joon feel and say.