Maybe Exactly or Exactly Maybe?

[kellogg]

Analyzing of how to create characters, how to set the scene and how to check students' understanding in "Look and Listen " part of the lesson.

I have chosen some data from my own lesson on last Wednesday morning, right after the lecture, because I have only 2 more “Look and listen” classes this week. (I can’t sure this is the perfect data for the questions, but I don’t have any other choices.)

When you take your 연구방법 class you will find out that there are two kinds of research METHODS: quantitative and qualitative.

You already know that APPROACHES (which involve THEORY) are different from METHODS (concerned with PRAXIS).

The approach that goes with quantitative methods is based on statistical generalization and having a typical or a random sample to work with. The approach that goes with qualitative methods is based on INTERPRETATION, HEURISTICS, HERMENEUTICS, and it’s based on having a sample that is in some way “telling”.

Either way, this is a good choice of data, Miyeong. It’s RANDOM and therefore probably quite TYPICAL. And as we will see, it’s very revealing about the characters—including the children and the teacher.

I have been teaching English for 7years out of my whole 10 years career. Almost 2/3 of my students have been attending an English 학원 for a long time but the other 1/3 are not very involved in English lesson. Two years ago, our school was a project school for English education so we had 3-4 English classes a week. This caused many students to focus more on English so we have some students who have experience of learning English in other countries. I chose my 5^th graders, learning unit 3 “It’s Under the Table” period 1 (out of 4). Below, I will explain how I set the scene using questions successfully or not, how I created the characters by showing the video, and finally how I checked understanding. Then I will discuss alternative ways of solving these problems.

  The teacher sets the scene and create the characters using a command ”Look at the picture” and closed-type questions and tried (Miyeong uses “I” in the metaparagraph and then changes to “the teacher” in her argument—of course, both are okay, but it’s best to stick to one. The same thing is true of tense, of course; she uses “sets” at the beginning of this sentence and then switches to past tense. Both are okay, but it’s best to stick to one.) to extend to open-type questions, but actually It was not enough.

Let’s wait and see, Miyeong! The hermeneutic, interpretive approach is really the approach that conversational analysts like Sacks, psychologists like Piaget, explorers and naturalists use. You gather the data and then you look at it very closely and try to figure out what it means.

Of course, it’s okay to have a hypotheses or guesses about what you are going to find. But in MY answer what I found was that the questions were if anything too open, and they appeared to work much better when the teacher closed them up.

Miyeong is hypothesizing that her data is the opposite: the questions are not open enough. If we were using a positivistic, quantitative, generalizing statistical approach, then we would have to say that one of us is probably wrong, at least from a theoretical point of view or that, as Miyeong says, the data is badly chosen.

But it’s quite possible that the data is simply different. Let’s find out!

T: OK, everybody please open your book to page 24

(sounds of CD title : Lesson 3. It's under the table)

T : OK, It is the very first time to learn lesson 3. so Shh.. and look at the picture.

Who can you see, What do you see in this picture?Whatdoyousee?Whatdoyousee?

S: ummm….Mina.

This kind of mistake is called a “palindrome”. A palindrome is a word which is another word BACKWARDS or REVERSED in some way, e.g.

kitchen/chicken

생선/선생

Palindromes can be very confusing—I used to have a terrible time trying to order fish in Korean restaurants.

T : Mina? Are you sure? Mina? What's her name? OK, Who is the girl who wear the cap?

S: Nami, Nami…(students open the book to page that shows the characters)

T: Nami. Yes, right. And… What else can you see? What else?

It often happens that the SECOND verb in a sentence has agreement problems. But this is not the best reason for keeping 교실 영어 very simple. The best reason is…children have to learn these verbs! So we have to stress them!

That means that one critical comment Yeongmi could make (at the end, of course!) is that she might want to stay with ONE verb per sentence. (This was actually a standard feature of early Direct Method teaching; ONE verb per sentence. Sometimes old ideas are not so bad.)

T: OK, Who else can you see?

S: One boy..

T : A boy. Yes, Maybe a boy. Maybe he is Nami’s brother.

S: yes.

T: Ok, who can you see? Who can you see?

Ss: mom

T: Mom… Whose mom?

Ss: Nami..

First of all , the teacher (Miyeong started out by saying “I” but now she is going to use “the teacher”. Both are okay, but that doesn’t mean we have to use both!) tried to ask about the characters. She started with “Who” question first. This is because she asked the character’s name first but she found out they are not familiar to this new characters name and also, she wanted to extend the questions about the place and any vocabulary from the picture.

Now, initially, Miyeong said that she began with a command, and then closed type questions, which she then opened up. But “What do you see?” is a pretty open question. Perhaps she was just referring to “who”?

When we analyze data, there is often a problem with REFERENCE, that is, with making it clear which part of the data you are referring to, which part of the data you are talking about.

I usually try to solve this by QUOTING the data fairly selectively in parentheses. Like this:

  The teacher sets the scene and create the characters using a command (”Look at the picture”) and closed-type questions (“Who can you see in the picture?”) and tries to extend to open-type questions (“What do you see in the picture? What do you see? What do you see?”).

 Students were hesitating to answer the questions because not only they didn’t know about the character’s name well but also they didn’t know how to express the complicated scene. Right. This suggests the question is too open. That’s what I found too.

There are several possibilities to keep in mind for the END of the essay, where you have to offer some alternatives:

a)     Ask a more closed question by varying the THEME: “Who do you see?”

b)    Ask a more closed question by varying the RHEME: “Who is this?”

c)     Ask a more closed question by varying the MOOD (statement-question): “Nami is at home. Who else do you see?”

d)    Vary the speaker by getting the kids to ask: “Who do you see? I know! ASK me!”

 So teachers asked same questions several times. Then some student said carefully, ”Mina” which was an incorrect answer. Teacher uptakes the wrong answer to give a chance to fix by themselves and some students opened the front pages to look at the names. At that moment the teacher still wants to talk about the place again, so she asked “What else can you see?” 2 times. But she changed her mind to focus on the characters first so she changed her questions to “Who”. Then students are easy to find them even though they don’t know their name but they noticed they are family from the picture.

As Miyeong points out, this is the THIRD lesson of a new cast of characters (because the characters all change in the fifth grade book). So it’s quite understandable that the kids are not familiar with the names. And since there was a very similar sounding character in the fourth grade book (who was also the central Korean female role) the confusion of the children is understandable.

The teacher’s response is, as Miyeong says, rather open-ended; she lets the kids find out Nami’s name for themselves, and that is a perfectly valid strategy, particularly at this point where this type of mistake is going to happen again and again. Of course, if we want to pre-empt (to prevent) this kind of confusion, we can use a retroleptic STATEMENT-QUESTION or even a proleptic COMMAND-STATEMENT-QUESTION (“It’s Nami! Who?” or “Look! This is Nami. And who is SHE? [Nami’s mother]”).

Now, from our point of view, STATEMENT-QUESTION and COMMAND-STATEMENT-QUESTION both obey the closed-open principle, because questions are often more open ended than statements, and statements are often more open to different interpretations than commands.

T: Nami’s mom. OK. And… OK, What do you think about the place?

Ss:…….

T : Where is it?

S: House.

S: Kitchen

T : Kitchen? Yes, I think so.. Why? Why do you think it is a kitchen?

Notice that the teacher says “Yes, I think so” but then switches to “Why do YOU think it is a kitchen?”

Compare:

a)     Yes, there are lots of dirty dishes! What else is there in the kitchen?

b)    Yes, I agree. But how do we know this?

c)     Yes, I think so. But why do we think it is a kitchen?

d)    A kitchen? Why? Why do you think it is a kitchen?

e)     Really? Are you sure?

You can see that a) is INCLUSIVE and it proceeds from the idea of agreement. But e) is EXCLUSIVE and it proceeds from the idea of DISAGREEMENT, and NEGATIVE EVIDENCE. Of course, teachers can play with this:

f) Really? Are you sure? Some people keep dirty dishes in the bathroom!

S: There is a refrigerator and some table.

T : A refrigerator and a table. OK. Good. And… Whose house is it?

Very good—remarkable, in fact. As Miyeong says, the kids know a lot of English, and they even get the articles right.

S: Nami..Mina..

T: Mina’s house?

S: No, Nami’s house.

T: Yes, it’s Nami’s house. And what do you think? What are they doing?

S: They found something?

T: OK, They are finding something. OK, And… What? What do they want to have? What are they looking for?

We often find that English words become “mapped” onto Korean word meanings. For example, we saw that children are not able to use “miss” to refer to their teachers. We also know that they have big problems with articles because they can’t very well associate general concepts with bare, singular nouns.

This is another excellent example. The word “find” does not mean the same thing as “look for”: unlike the Korean verb (and the Chinese one) “find” is the result of looking for something successfully and cannot refer to the actual process of looking for it. But here the child uses the word “find” to mean “look for”. And the teacher, who is also Korean, confirm‎s it, since she understands perfectly what she means (and also the picture does show them finding it).

The problem is that when we are doing Look and Listen, we are really looking for some problem which can only be solved through communication. Solving that problem through communication is precisely what gives the language its pragmatic meaning and the pragmatic meaning is precisely what we are supposed to be presenting.

So the picture doesn’t serve us very well, because what it presents is not the problem (“looking for”) but rather the solution (“finding”). No wonder the kids are confused.

S: Water?

S : Water bottle?

T: A water bottle? Maybe, yes. Or?

S: $%##%$

T: Or?

S:@##$%$%

T: The small things. Maybe, you can put some pencils inside it. Exactly it’s pencil case, maybe.

“Exactly maybe” is a little contradictory, of course. But humans are a little contradictory. That’s how pencil cases get left under the table and dishes get left in the sink!

One of the things we have to try to convey in this story is the ATMOSPHERE. Nami’s house is a strange place in many ways (one student asked the teacher why everybody speaks English there!). The dishes are unwashed, and there is a pencil case under the table, and another one in the living room. Nami’s clumsy father leaves his watch on the TV for some reason, and he is always tripping over things. The atmosphere is, to say the least, relaxed. Perhaps Nami’s mother is a little bit careless. Is she busy? Does she work? (Ah—that is a question for ANOTHER lesson.) Perhaps she is just distracted by having to speak English to her children all the time! Exactly--maybe!  

And so we see that it’s actually quite useful to connect lessons together into a single chronotope!

S:@@#$%

T: Right, So.. I think you are ready to listen to the dialog. Ok, Let’s listen one more time , (I mean) one time.

(Listen to the dialog)

Secondly, the teacher asked the place directly and asked another way like "where is it" which was familiar to them. And that suggests that overall the movement is from open to closed and not from closed to open. I think we can probably say that IN GENERAL the questions tend to go from open to closed if we look at DISCOURSE (the tall, thin, dialogue between teacher and student). That is partly, as Miyeong says, thanks to the CHILDREN, who tend to go from general, vague understandings to much more specific ones, like a game of 스무고개. One student said the general answer "house" and another student said the word kitchen right away. However, the kitchen is not proper setting to this story. The interesting thing is that "Kitchen" seems to be the right answers to the picture. Right. The writer might want to hide real informations in the picture or not anyway the picture and the story in not very relevant except the characters and pencil case. Right. The actual story was in the whole house. That's why the teacher asked "why do you think it's kitchen". Some students could explain why they thought it was a kitchen. A refrigerator and a table. Right. Then the teacher asked what they are doing. Students caught the idea from the picture but they couldn't think it was a pencil case. Also they thought that was a water bottle because they thought it related to the scene. Right. At this moment, the teacher should lead students to think about the thing and the scene more but the teacher was hurried to connect to real story. Of course, it’s possible to imagine a solution: Nami is poor. Her family lives in a one-room apartment. OR: Nami lives in 강남, and the 전세 is so expensive that the whole family has to live in a 고시원. That explains the chaos! Finally she gave some clues with explanation of the pencil case. This procedure is not very natural. Also, the teacher didn't talk about the time setting and didn't have enough talking about characters so students couldn't guess the story enough. Missing of creating chronotope caused not very successful making context before the listening.

  Miyeong is protecting the real culprit. The real culprit here is not the teacher or the children but the ARTIST. If you look in our book you will OFTEN find problems with the artwork. The reason is simple: the artists do NOT read or understand the English dialogue: they only work from Korean descriptions that we give them, and the descriptions are often vague, e.g. (“나미의 집”)

LOOK AND LISTEN

Mom : Nami, Hurry up!

Nami: What time is it, Mom?

Mom: It’s eight.

Nami: Eight?( The clock rings 8 times.) I’m late. (Students are laughing)

Where’s my pencil case?

Mom: Pencil case? Look! It’s under the table.

Notice that there is NO article—it’s a mistake in the textbook itself!

How did we make this mistake? Actually it sounds natural enough, because Mom’s utterance is not a grammatical sentence; she is only uptaking the last word that Nami said.

Namsoo: (Namsoo looks at it) This is my pencil case.

(When Nami’s father is leaving for work.)

Dad: (Touching his wrist) Honey, where’s my watch?

Mom: There! On the TV.

Dad: Thanks.,

Mom: Watch out! (Ss are laughing and saying (Ohh…)

(Father picks up the pencil case after he slipped on it)( Ahhh~)

Nami: That’s my pencil case. Sorry, Dad.(Laughing)

Dad: It’s OK. Here.(giving it to her)

Nami: Thank you, Dad.

Dad: Bye-bye

Mom. Nami, Namsoo: Bye (Dad shows his underwear through his ripped pants.)- (Ahhh! laughing)

T: (laughing) OK. Do you like this story? Do you like this story? Yes?

S:@##%^%

This is a good “global” question. But of course it doesn’t really tell us what the kids understood, does it?

Remember—this is from p. 41 of our book.

“’What do you notice about this object?’ This is the first and most basic analytical question that you are likely to be asked, or will ask yourself, when you really look at a particular Rembrandt painting for the first time, or hear a musical composition for the first time. Not ‘What is it?’; nor ‘Do you like it?’’ these are not truly analytical questions. But ‘What do you notice in this (from among, by implication, all the innumerable things you could notice here)?’” (1998: 3)

Michael Toolan calls this technique “Analytical Questions”, but in an important sense analysis is only half the story. Of course, we want the children to be able to pick and choose, to focus on setting, to foreground the hero, and to identify the central problem which gives the whole text its “pretext” or interest. We want to set the scene, create the characters, and situate them in some kind of question that needs to be resolved by reading on.

T:Shhh…….. OK. Where is it? Where is the place?

S: Nami.

S: Nami’s house.

T: Yes.. Nami’s house. And… What time? What time was it?

S: eight .

T: It was…

The past tense is not introduced until later on in fifth grade. But as Miyeong points out, some of the kids are advanced.

Actually, the past tense is not very useful here, though. When we are discussing pictures, movies, stories, artworks, the “narrative present tense” is used. This reflects the fact that tense is really NOT the means by which chronotopes are developed. Articles and prepositions turn out to be much more important!

This is especially true for us, because the world of our children is not empty space and time; it’s a rich, noun filled world where we are always tripping over articles (that is, things!).

And prepositions too! Notice the development of prepositions in the data. The teacher is able to develop them ALMOST PERFECTLY, just by uptaking and working on the (incorrect) prepositions the kids use. Bravo, Teacher!

S: Eight o’clock.

T: Yes, it was eight o’clock. Ok. So… Nami was…?

S: Late!

T: Yes, Nami was late for school. And… and… What is she looking for?

The teacher has now SOLVED the “finding” problem. Bravo, Teacher!

S: pencil case.

S: Her pencil case!

The CHILDREN have actually solved the 관사 problem. Even though the BOOK gets it wrong, the kids get it right. Bravo, kids!

T: Her pencil case, OK. And… Where was it?

S: living room

S: under the table.

T: It’s under the table? Are you sure?

S: No. #$@$%$

S: No, That is her younger brother’s.

T: UH? Yes, That’s her younger brother’s pencil case.

A masterful use of a very complex noun phrase. Bravo, Teacher!

S: (living room)

T: Where was it? In the living room, In the living room Good! And? In the living room..? On the sofa? Or…?

This, I think, is the really brilliant part of the data. Here the teacher lays out one complex adverbial of place after another: “in the” “on the”. The kids then have to choose. Will they choose correctly, or will the many choices simply confuse them?

Suspense!

S: On the ground/On the living room../ living room

Sure enough, one of the kids is confused. “On the living room”. So…

T: In the living room. Ah on the living room?(↑) (Nod her head and)

Oh, dear! This looks bad. It looks like the teacher is NODDING at the confused form “on the living room”. A disaster.

In the living room and where?

S: On the TV.

S: On the floor.

T: On the floor? Yes, you’re right.

Perfect. But what happened? How did the kids straighten it out? This, I think is the really telling moment in the data.

 Her pencil case was on the floor in the living room.(showing the motion). Right. And…. OK. How about Nami’s younger brother’s pencil case?

S: Under the table.

T: It was.. under the table. Good! And… who i.. OK. Who is he?(Pointing Nami’s father in the next picture on the screen)

S: Nami’s father.

T: Right. Nami’s father. What is he looking for?

Notice the switch in tenses. THAT’S a little confusing.

S: His watch!

T: Yes, his watch. Where was it?

Past tense.

S: On the TV.

T: On the TV. And… In the..?

S: In the living room.

T: In the living room. Good. Correct. And What happened to him?

S: Uhh he.. fall..

T: He fell down because of …?

S: Nami’s pencil case.

We can see that the kids are speaking one tense and the teacher is speaking another. What can we do about this?

T: Nami’s pencil case. Right. Yes. Some students said it was… It looks like a water bottle but actually it was her…?

Good! The teacher does the right thing. She knows the kids CANNOT come over to her tense. So she abandons the past tense (in the middle of a sentence!) and joins the kids in the present tense. Bravo, Teacher!

S: Pencil case.

T: Yes, her pencil case and he fell down because of the pencil case. And what happened to him?

S: 꽈당. Shoes.. Pants…!@#$

T: What happened to his pants?

S: Pants.@##$ tear..

T: His pants was(sic) ripped. Right? So we can see his underwear.(laughing)

Again, the teacher abandons her (too complex) passive voice and past tense and comes over to an English which will minimize the gap between the language of exposure and the language of use. Bravo, Teacher!

OK. Every body. Let’s look and listen to the dialog one more time. But this time you can see the script. OK?

(Video watching one more time.)

Finally, the teacher tried to check students' understanding by asking comprehension questions. Before that, the teacher noticed she didn't talk about the time setting. (At the beginning, the teacher didn't create rich characters and checked the time setting,) At first, the teacher tried to ask very open-type question such as how do you like it but she asked "Do you like this story?". Students answered very natural way, mumbling and the teacher very quickly narrow down her question for checking details. Exactly. She asked the place first and then checked the time setting. She used very direct skills to draw students vocabulary and comprehension. Good. She suggested incomplete sentence first to make her students can complete it. It worked not badly but students had not very high freedom of thinking.

If the teacher asked "Tell me about the story.", students could try to explain the situation and compare their guess to the story. She also introduced preposition of location by asking "Where is _____?". Some students had some difficulties to understand the question or the story(context) but soon they found the right place. The teacher tried to introduce preposition matters naturally and students finally found out the usage by teacher's uptaking and recasting skills. "On the floor.... In the living room"

Bravo, Miyeong! It’s not just a masterful lesson, it’s a very thorough and penetrating analysis.

There’s one point where I think I disagree, though.  I guess I disagree that narrowing down is somehow a more unfree act than generating hypotheses. It seems to me that BOTH of them are imaginative, and BOTH of them involve free thinking.

I think that “freedom” is not a moral value; it’s a pragmatic one. We NEED freedom to generate hypotheses. But we also need constraint to determine which hypothesis is the correct one. That is why, overall, the tendency is for problem-solving discourse to narrow down rather than to open up (and as we saw every picture has some kind of problem that requires English to solve). The tendency of human problem solving discourse is maybe exactly and not exactly maybe.

[이미영]

I really excited to record my lesson and enjoyed to analyz it. While i was writing my recording , I was so embarrased. however, it was so meaningful work to me. i didn't notice my certain habits and ways of leading students' thinking. Also, i found out my tense problem. i think i still have tense problems or at least strugging to fix my wrong tense so i always try to speak in the right tense even i'm teaching my student.
And I have to tell you I was confused the word nod and shake. In the text, actually i shaked my head but i was confused to write in English. ^^;;

[이미영]

I think i forgot to say thank you for your hard working of analyzing our all works. Thank you so much!

[꾸러기]

Wow, wonderful work !

[박아명]

I'm very impressed by not only your great work but also your analysis!^^