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Yeong--
I'm having a little trouble in the other graduate class (초등영어 듣기말하기교육, for the 초등영어 전공) because they do the homework as if they were undergrads. That is, they do the work at the last possible minute, without reading any of the other work on the cafe (and sometimes without even reading my example) and then I have to GRADE it, with an A, or a B, or a C etc.
I guess just as being a successful high school student doesn't really equip you to be a successful undergraduate, being a good undergrad doesn't really help you much with grad school. Writing reports and getting grades on your reports isn't really what grad school is about, or anyway, it's not what this class is about.
You know (more or less) what your grade will be. If you are terribly lazy and behave exactly like an undergraduate, you might get a B. For the most part, graduate students get As, and for the most part they deserve to. That is because, as I said to Munjeong, they do the work not out of need, but out of genunine enthusiasm and interest.
So it always pains me a little to see that some of my grads consider my class to be a pain. But I think I understand. Mr. Bak, in the other class, remarks that students often PRETEND to understand when they do not REALLY understand. This is actually a pretty substantial research finding, you know; Rhonda Oliver discovered that quite unlike adults, children do NOT "negotiate for meaning". They just get on with language and try to do the best they can with the limited understanding that they have.
I argued that this wasn't NECESSARILY dishonest, or if it was dishonest it was only dishonest the way that taking out a large bank loan or doing a "leveraged" buy-out is dishonest: you are pretending to be richer than you really are, in the hope that doing so will offer opportunities to become genuinely rich. The child continues listening in the hope that SOMETIME (hopefully sometime soon) there will be some thing that the child can understand which will help him or her make sense of all the language he or she does NOT understand.
Of course, I do this too (especially during 논문심사, when I have to read a lot of Korean very quickly and I don't have time to look up every word). And I know that sometimes it works. But I also know that sometimes the information I understand comes a little too late, and though I CAN understand the new word or the new sentence, when I try to USE it to understand all the old information that I have NOT understood, I find that I have simply forgotten. So I get to the end of a sentence and I find I have quite forgotten the beginning. It's very frustrating, and so I know what you mean when you say it is a pain.
Now it seems to me that we can learn something from this for your homework. Since we don't want the children to get to the end of a turn and not be able to remember the beginning, we probably want to keep turns SHORT. I think that if you look at some of the homework that your classmates have done, you will see that for the most part that is what teachers do. In fact, we don't even need to look that far, because we've got some good examples right HERE!
(4th grade)
Julie: How's the weather?
Minsu: It's rainy. Do you like it?
Notice the difference:
sun sunny
rain rainy
Why? I don't really know, Yeong. But I know that there is a difference HERE, too:
fog foggy
snow snowy
And HERE too:
it's rainy. It's raining.
It's snowy.It's snowing.
It's sunny, but NOT *it's sunning (sic).
It's foggy, but NOT *it's fogging (sic).
Now it seems to me that your spelling problem has something to do with this GRAMMAR problem, and this GRAMMAR problem, like most grammar problems, has a SEMANTIC (meaningful) component. There is a good semantic reason for the difference between "it's raining" and "*it's sunning (sic)". and it was explained to me by a nine year old boy, like this:
BOY: Well, you know, if the weather is up there in the sky just being a sun or being a fog, then we say it's sunny but it's not doing anything down on the earth. So you can't say "*it's sunning (sic)" or "*it's fogging (sic)". But if it's doing something to people down here on the earth, then we say it's snowing and it's raining.
(Getting attention) OK Class. Now let's play the ping-pong game.
Notice the PERFECT use of articles. Also, very short utterances, and many of them: "OK, Class. NOW". Nice!
Even "pingpong" is a good vehicle for STRESS and INTONATION--it gets attention much more effectively than "table tennis", for example.
BUT "Pingpong" is a good ONE to ONE game. Can you think of a better example for a WHOLE CLASS (team) game?
a) Casting the Roles: "Over here, you are Minsu! Show me Minsu! Good! Now, over here, you are Julie. Who are you?" Yes, You're Julie.
Notice that we can see our three pedagogical functions here too:
Over here you are Minsu Show me Minsu! (Good)
ATTENTION INFORMATION CHECK UNDERSTANDING CONFIRM!ATION
Of course, the children will not know what "Show me Minsu" means unless you show them. That's a problem. But it's easily solved with a gesture.
Last class we discussed (all class long, actually) when the appropriate moment to introduce WRITTEN language might be. We also said that GESTURES really do count as a kind of visual language, a kind of prehistory of graphic language.
This morning, Dr. Li pointed out to me over breakfast that we didn't think of using NAME CARDS (perhaps a TRIANGLE of names, which you can twist to play the game:
The RABBIT
(sideways) The TURTLE (upside down) The KING
This card will work as a kind of gesture.
Now, when do you think the right moment to introduce the "show me Minsu" gesture might be?
b) Explaining the Rules:
"Julie serves first! Why?
Oh, because it's lady's first! Listen, Julie! "How's the weather?" Repeat, Julie!
Minsu, ANSWER!
Now, Julie. What do YOU say?
Notice how Yeong BREATHES OUT and then BREATHES IN. I said last week this is not just a metaphor for information. It's LITERALLY true, because in every short utterance that the teacher takes, there is ONE stress, ONE new piece of information, ONE kind of intonation. And then it is the children's turn.
This means that teacher talk is LITERALLY breathing out and breating in: not just information but also real, material, breathable oxygen, because with the new information we get a new stress and a new intonation contour. Good teacher talk is like BREATHING, and a good teacher does not make the children hold their breaths for too long.
Nothing! Nothing comes from nothing! No point for you. One point for Minsu. This time, Minsu serves. Listen, Minsu! "I like rainny (sic) day (sic), and you?"
Here, the children are holding their breaths for a little long, no?
There are also two mistakes here. Now, suppose the CHILDREN make these two mistakes, and not the teacher? Like this:
T: This time, Minsu serves.
Ss: I like *rainny (sic) *day (sic), and you?
Of course, the teacher doesn't hear "rainny" because it's only a spelling mistake. But the teacher DOES hear "rainy day" and knows that it is NOT plural.
Remember that we said that English uses the PLURAL to express the general concept. And the verb "like" expresses an attitude towards a general concept. So the teacher does this:
T: A point for Julie!
Ss: WHY?
What does the teacher say?
c) Putting the kids in pairs: "Now, YOU are Minsu. And YOU are...? Right! Julie! She is Julie, so he is...? Minsu! One person is Minsu, and the other person is Julie. Play *pinpong (sic). In five minutes, tell me the score! *winner (sic) can leave early!
I think that this method would be useful for 4th graders and even for 6th graders, too. When I taught 6th graders last year, I used to let the students listen and repeat in the way that is said to be depressing. i.e. before play a game (it could be a card game or whatever), I taught a pack of sample dialogue and then students played the game using those expression!!s and the expression!!s are almost always the same to the expression!!s they've learned in the sample dialogue.
I guess I did say it was depressing. I guess think it's depressing because the whole problem of English education cannot be reduced to our six hundred word vocabulary and our one hundred sentences. The children would have to WAIT for those specific situations to crop up in real life before they could ever use them, and for most of the children, many situations like "Excuse me, where's Namdaemun" or even "How's the weather?" probably never will. So the USE of language really boils down to the CREATIVE use of language, and when there is no CREATIVE use of language, I get depressed. But like Yeong, I am easily depressed!
They didn't use their IMAGINATON but they just recited what I had told them. As a result, they lost their interest in playing games in English Class and making students to be excited had been my concern stil now.
Yes, it's a good place to begin. But still only a beginning.
In my opinion, having student use their Imagination could be one of the answer of my question. If I use a turn that includes answering and asking at the same time within a turn, the game will be exciting.
Yes, the GAME will be exciting. I think this is an important point. It's the GAME that is exciting and not the text. The TALK is exciting, because it's not finished, it's ongoing and somewhat suspenseful--nobody really knows how it will come out.
That's what I'm trying to do HERE, Yeong. I want the class to be unfinished, ongoing and somewhat suspenseful, so that nobody really knows what is coming. That is the way that talk is after all.
The problem is that many grads want to know what the point is, where the payoff is, what the reward is. They want to know what the TEXT is. Well, the text is more or less in the book. But the text is really a starting point for the talk, not the ending piont of the talk.
I'm kind of frustrated because all of the discussions are too tough for me to catch up eventhough I've been trying to do my best-.- but I'm still trying and I just wanted to show you some of my understanding....
I am a little frustrated too. UNLESS I can make this class interesting FOR ITS OWN SAKE, interesting in just the way that you are trying to make YOUR classes interesting, it's going to be a lot of work. So I get a little frustrated when my poor grads talk about "home pain" and ask whether they HAVE to do this or NEED to do that.
Of course, I think that boredom IS very interesting. Not for kids, of course. But for teachers. However, it's interesting because of what it suggests about the ease or difficulty of what the children are doing, not for its own sake.
In some ways, though, I think the problem of making material "interesting" is not very interesting. Kids are, for the most part, interested in money and food (and violence and sex and bad language) just as adults are interested in these things. It's not that difficult to put these things into our teaching and get attention (e.g. the latest version of "Alice in Wonderland" with Tim Burton and Johnny Depp and Ann Hathaway and so on).
The problem is not getting attention. The problem is what we DO with attention after we've got it. At some point, it has to become self-sustaining, or we are not really teaching; just putting on a good show.
dk