Found in Drafts...
I have been teaching this writing course and I realized that it has turned in to more of a grammar class conforming to the typical korean style classrooms we have heard plenty of disparaging remarks on over the last months. I had to pick the material for this class from a bigger book at the beginning of August and honestly have been mostly unhappy with my work. Not that I chose poorly, but considering what we talked about in terms of writing that should be useful and practical as a function of L2, it is miserable.
As the next session nears, I have luckily had some good student reviews, so have been asked to come up with some course ideas for our winter bonus classes, one of which needs to be writing. Last week's discussion has given me a lot of good direction in choosing material that is both useful and meaningful. As I spend the next couple hectic weeks picking through material, I think keeping that meaningful terminal objective as my primary goal will help immensely.
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Pardon me sir!
Found this in the draft pile. iPhone doesn't like to publish I suppose...
How to deal with disrespectful students.
What attitudes do we set up for out students to adhere to during class? A lot about what we assume our students will do based on cultural behavior towards teachers is true. Most are respectful, and treat us with as valuable source of knowledge. From time to time though, we get students that can cause some problems for us in the classroom, and I don't mean a normal kind of trouble maker. I mean the ones we create by trying to be more open and accessible with as both educators and friends.
For the most part, we experience quality relationships in classrooms where students feel more comfortable expressing themselves with an instructor that wants to help them through interaction. On occasion, I feel we can confuse the student by inadvertently eliminating their boundaries of respect toward us. Because they aren't used to a teacher that expects equal interaction from them, they can also avoid accepting us as a superior in the classroom. These situations a rare but also bring a challenge to the teacher in how to respond to a student and how to interpret whether their action is a purposeful dismissal of our authority or a mistake in understanding what they can get away with.
The end of the semester is nearing and I have started having a few issues with students that are a good example of this situation. I have a few that I have contacted initially through Kakao message that have responded with concern, and quickly tried to apologize and change their behavior. These students show a simple misunderstanding of the teacher student relationship, and that their real desire wasn't out of their normal disconcerting attitude. A few others are less apt to respond, so I have had to approach them in class, usually when they turn up 45 minutes late or more. I have been surprised to get a few students react very abrasive my and assume I owe them some courteous reception even after being warned on multiple occasions.
This is the real test for composure on my part, and I feel I have learned a little from both successes and failures. Remaining calm even with a student who is rude is normally the best bet. Being harsh has backfired too many times to make it effective. But there have been two extreme cases where sternness and an abrasive tone have really been beneficial. I think the best is to keep as much personal emotion out of it and realize that even with overtly verbose or reactive students, softly softly catchee monkey is best.
How to deal with disrespectful students.
What attitudes do we set up for out students to adhere to during class? A lot about what we assume our students will do based on cultural behavior towards teachers is true. Most are respectful, and treat us with as valuable source of knowledge. From time to time though, we get students that can cause some problems for us in the classroom, and I don't mean a normal kind of trouble maker. I mean the ones we create by trying to be more open and accessible with as both educators and friends.
For the most part, we experience quality relationships in classrooms where students feel more comfortable expressing themselves with an instructor that wants to help them through interaction. On occasion, I feel we can confuse the student by inadvertently eliminating their boundaries of respect toward us. Because they aren't used to a teacher that expects equal interaction from them, they can also avoid accepting us as a superior in the classroom. These situations a rare but also bring a challenge to the teacher in how to respond to a student and how to interpret whether their action is a purposeful dismissal of our authority or a mistake in understanding what they can get away with.
The end of the semester is nearing and I have started having a few issues with students that are a good example of this situation. I have a few that I have contacted initially through Kakao message that have responded with concern, and quickly tried to apologize and change their behavior. These students show a simple misunderstanding of the teacher student relationship, and that their real desire wasn't out of their normal disconcerting attitude. A few others are less apt to respond, so I have had to approach them in class, usually when they turn up 45 minutes late or more. I have been surprised to get a few students react very abrasive my and assume I owe them some courteous reception even after being warned on multiple occasions.
This is the real test for composure on my part, and I feel I have learned a little from both successes and failures. Remaining calm even with a student who is rude is normally the best bet. Being harsh has backfired too many times to make it effective. But there have been two extreme cases where sternness and an abrasive tone have really been beneficial. I think the best is to keep as much personal emotion out of it and realize that even with overtly verbose or reactive students, softly softly catchee monkey is best.
Friday, December 7, 2012
Cultural reflections
One of the challenges I have had in some of my classroom during this semester is finding ways to work in lessons for ICC. The material we have covered in class has been interesting as a way to better understand classrooms and potential issues we might have with understanding students, especially in a multicultural classroom. I really wish I could have taken this course before I taught my refugee classes in the states a few years back, but now I find myself in a place where I am the only foreigner, out often own country and culture and surrounded by students of common nationality, race, age, culture and quite often thought processes. This has been the challenge of trying to stimulate some useful reflective though for my students, and see some acknowledgement of unbiased opinions. To what effect this has happened, I cannot really be sure, but I think I haven't made a dent.
This particular lesson was built around a common theme for my classes over the last 2 years. Teaching in a beauty arts department has given me a lot of insight on how Koreans view outward appearance, beauty and acceptance based on looks as well as expectations for family and marriage relationships. As well, this lesson provides a mix of cultural practices that have spread or are spreading to other parts of the world that are synonymous with my own culture, unfortunately ones that I particularly loathe. In any case, I set the lesson up to trigger student responses on culture, in particular I wanted them to think about how behaviors in their home country might resemble or differ from the ones in the article. I wasn't sure how the would respond initially, or how the writing production might allow them to reflect on a given perspective.
This lesson had to take place over two classes, but I think that worked better because students only got half of the information to solve which country this might be, so they were at least interested to learn the source. They were very quick to decide that the images were Japanese and the story was either from America or England. The latter was set up because the article was printed originally in England then for online in America, so had currency values for both. This threw them off just a bit however they were quick to decide the woman in the picture was from Japan because she was ugly and for her eye shape. The second picture was a bit surprising as a lot if students said she wasn't attractive because of plastic surgery. That surprised me because of the massive amount of money that is spent in this country on cosmetic enhancements and how it should reflect a social view of appearance. I should say that a lot of students wouldn't admit to surgery in the first place donut is no surprise that they would lie about their expectations of beauty. A lot of their answers in the writing production were varied. Some took an overly harsh tone accusing the guilty party of wrongdoing.
I think the discussion stages of these lessons are the most difficult to achieve. Typically the students either don't share their honest opinion, or they sit back and just agree with the one or two people that tend to dominate the discussion. They only instances where good discussion has occurred is when I have had high level students that have spent time abroad. They tend to have a broader perspective and might disagree or at least question korean cultural norms. When none of them are in a class, it tends to be really weak participation and no strong opinions are given. I'm not sure how to go about directing lower level students in more productive cultural discussion, but I suppose if I did, I wouldn't be taking this course.
This particular lesson was built around a common theme for my classes over the last 2 years. Teaching in a beauty arts department has given me a lot of insight on how Koreans view outward appearance, beauty and acceptance based on looks as well as expectations for family and marriage relationships. As well, this lesson provides a mix of cultural practices that have spread or are spreading to other parts of the world that are synonymous with my own culture, unfortunately ones that I particularly loathe. In any case, I set the lesson up to trigger student responses on culture, in particular I wanted them to think about how behaviors in their home country might resemble or differ from the ones in the article. I wasn't sure how the would respond initially, or how the writing production might allow them to reflect on a given perspective.
This lesson had to take place over two classes, but I think that worked better because students only got half of the information to solve which country this might be, so they were at least interested to learn the source. They were very quick to decide that the images were Japanese and the story was either from America or England. The latter was set up because the article was printed originally in England then for online in America, so had currency values for both. This threw them off just a bit however they were quick to decide the woman in the picture was from Japan because she was ugly and for her eye shape. The second picture was a bit surprising as a lot if students said she wasn't attractive because of plastic surgery. That surprised me because of the massive amount of money that is spent in this country on cosmetic enhancements and how it should reflect a social view of appearance. I should say that a lot of students wouldn't admit to surgery in the first place donut is no surprise that they would lie about their expectations of beauty. A lot of their answers in the writing production were varied. Some took an overly harsh tone accusing the guilty party of wrongdoing.
I think the discussion stages of these lessons are the most difficult to achieve. Typically the students either don't share their honest opinion, or they sit back and just agree with the one or two people that tend to dominate the discussion. They only instances where good discussion has occurred is when I have had high level students that have spent time abroad. They tend to have a broader perspective and might disagree or at least question korean cultural norms. When none of them are in a class, it tends to be really weak participation and no strong opinions are given. I'm not sure how to go about directing lower level students in more productive cultural discussion, but I suppose if I did, I wouldn't be taking this course.
Saturday, November 24, 2012
Production what's your function?
This week I decided to approach my assigned production activity to get a feel for what changes might need to be made as far as what the blog question suggested. In general, example one could be applied to several situations and still be a success. My students are at a relatively high level, so to limit my input, I had them write questions pertaining to the previous days student presentation on supply and demand. I had each student make one question for a panel of three experts to answer. As the went through the questions, I had no real input, so I wrote their answers down on a hidden whiteboard. After we worked through the Qs I asked them a few comprehension Qs to see if they remembered answers and then we flipped the whiteboard to check both grammar and if the answers were successful.
Friday, November 16, 2012
ICC Lesson # 2 - All Families are Psychotic
Video Part 1 - http://youtu.be/_SlQBpVcNHA
Video Part 2 - http://youtu.be/F7PFboZT6jQ
Video Part 3 - http://youtu.be/zhTlyDtpeOM
Video Part 4 - http://youtu.be/JpiAC7Fn16o
This is a lesson I did about interacting with strangers and families with different values and behaviors.We did this lesson in one of our classes, but I think the use of it in this class worked out fairly well. I had some really enthusiastic students and some that took their roles really seriously.
Problems with the activity: I perhaps spent too much time in the initial activation stage. This left less time for students to really get into character, and other parts of the lesson. Perhaps the reflection at the end could have been more focused and I could have planned more specific questions for them to think about and answer. I should have written the instructions in Korean as well, because I think there might have been a few students who couldn't grasp what they were supposed to do during the activity.
Successes: Students got involved using English to role play. They came up with good individual responses and judgments about the opposing groups. Students could see and felt how uncomfortable it is to be in a situation with people having different cultural values and behaviors. They were able to form opinions and then reflect on how their opinion might be overly biased to their own ideologies.
This particular group of students are fairly competent at communicating their opinions about our subjects. For this lesson, they were very judgmental about the opposing family, but they tend to do this in a number of lessons we have had. We actually did a reading lesson, which I recorded for meth, that was interesting in talking about family interaction and norms. This activity would have been good to follow up that lesson and have students watch the video of themselves behaving in the awkward family situation. I think that would have allowed them to see how they physically display their own prejudices.
Video Part 2 - http://youtu.be/F7PFboZT6jQ
Video Part 3 - http://youtu.be/zhTlyDtpeOM
Video Part 4 - http://youtu.be/JpiAC7Fn16o
This is a lesson I did about interacting with strangers and families with different values and behaviors.We did this lesson in one of our classes, but I think the use of it in this class worked out fairly well. I had some really enthusiastic students and some that took their roles really seriously.
Problems with the activity: I perhaps spent too much time in the initial activation stage. This left less time for students to really get into character, and other parts of the lesson. Perhaps the reflection at the end could have been more focused and I could have planned more specific questions for them to think about and answer. I should have written the instructions in Korean as well, because I think there might have been a few students who couldn't grasp what they were supposed to do during the activity.
Successes: Students got involved using English to role play. They came up with good individual responses and judgments about the opposing groups. Students could see and felt how uncomfortable it is to be in a situation with people having different cultural values and behaviors. They were able to form opinions and then reflect on how their opinion might be overly biased to their own ideologies.
This particular group of students are fairly competent at communicating their opinions about our subjects. For this lesson, they were very judgmental about the opposing family, but they tend to do this in a number of lessons we have had. We actually did a reading lesson, which I recorded for meth, that was interesting in talking about family interaction and norms. This activity would have been good to follow up that lesson and have students watch the video of themselves behaving in the awkward family situation. I think that would have allowed them to see how they physically display their own prejudices.
ICC Lesson # 1 - A Good Man is Hard to Find
Video Pt 1 http://youtu.be/wgwOzN1bN_c
Video Pt 2 http://youtu.be/L23wSVj1Wjo
I took this activity from the DeCapua book pretty early in the semester. I did a little adaptation to it by adding some information to the job candidates, specifically giving them educational levels. I thought this would be interesting to see if that had a lot of effect on how they evaluated nationality. I did this for two classes at different levels, but the recording for the more advanced class was interrupted by a lovely gmarket text message, so it only recorded about 2 minutes.
Problems: There were a couple of things about this activity that I might change. Time limits were not planned well for this first class, as it took them a little longer to complete the initial step. Perhaps for their level, i could have used fewer options and positions to fill. This left less time for the final discussion of why certain people were chosen. Also, I could have added more CI's and whatnot to activate the students more. I think what they could say was pretty limited.
Successes: These were probably limited in this class because the time limitation issues. We did have a few good instances to communicate about some of their decisions in class, but I would have like to have more time. This was a writing class, so I adapted the activity to have a writing response. For homework they completed a writing task explaining their choices and how culture, sex or background influenced their decisions. We did reflect on these in the following class, but I didn't record it.
After seeing this activity in two classes, I think it would be a great activity in a number of business class settings. It is designed to have the students think critically, but leaves room for their own prejudices and stereotypes to interfere with their choices. Having them speak and write about it are both good opportunities for them to use English to explain their opinion, or summarize details. The difficulty is approaching or evaluating this activity from a neutral perspective as a teacher. It was difficult for me to limit my own moral attitudes from the lesson in order to avoid sending some moral message. But I think responding to some of their biased opinions with no emotion would betray my own beliefs.
Video Pt 2 http://youtu.be/L23wSVj1Wjo
I took this activity from the DeCapua book pretty early in the semester. I did a little adaptation to it by adding some information to the job candidates, specifically giving them educational levels. I thought this would be interesting to see if that had a lot of effect on how they evaluated nationality. I did this for two classes at different levels, but the recording for the more advanced class was interrupted by a lovely gmarket text message, so it only recorded about 2 minutes.
Problems: There were a couple of things about this activity that I might change. Time limits were not planned well for this first class, as it took them a little longer to complete the initial step. Perhaps for their level, i could have used fewer options and positions to fill. This left less time for the final discussion of why certain people were chosen. Also, I could have added more CI's and whatnot to activate the students more. I think what they could say was pretty limited.
Successes: These were probably limited in this class because the time limitation issues. We did have a few good instances to communicate about some of their decisions in class, but I would have like to have more time. This was a writing class, so I adapted the activity to have a writing response. For homework they completed a writing task explaining their choices and how culture, sex or background influenced their decisions. We did reflect on these in the following class, but I didn't record it.
After seeing this activity in two classes, I think it would be a great activity in a number of business class settings. It is designed to have the students think critically, but leaves room for their own prejudices and stereotypes to interfere with their choices. Having them speak and write about it are both good opportunities for them to use English to explain their opinion, or summarize details. The difficulty is approaching or evaluating this activity from a neutral perspective as a teacher. It was difficult for me to limit my own moral attitudes from the lesson in order to avoid sending some moral message. But I think responding to some of their biased opinions with no emotion would betray my own beliefs.
How do you say that again?
Pronunciation 1 Part 1 http://youtu.be/YTxIVMxr40M
Pronunciation 1 Part 2 http://youtu.be/L23wSVj1Wjo
Pronunciation 2 Part 1 http://youtu.be/VjYvcqBAGC0
Pronunciation 2 Part 2 http://youtu.be/Mj1AkaJDt14
Here is a pronunciation lesson I did for two classes back to back.... Practice makes perfect, and I need more of it.
Both of these classes use the same activity to work on similar pronunciation features. It is one I used from the Harmer book that I thought would be useful, but I think there are some changes to be made if I want this to work efficiently. As a way to apply this activity to something useful, I started with phrases on the WB that they have been using to prepare for their speech contest to model how we use stress in certain syllables. After going through those, I briefly explained the what they need to do on the activity page and let them work in pairs. The first class spent too much time in my first step, and perhaps too much time in their pair work as well, but I expected a bit of this as it was my first run going through the activity, and their level might be a little lower than this activity or my intro were planned. The second class got through the first part quickly enough, but had more difficulty with some of the pronunciations with contractions, or incorrectly assuming the wrong number of syllables.
Some Problems - I speak to fast on too many occasions, and say too much at times. I really need to work on slowing down when students need clear, understandable input. For this particular activity, I might explain some of the stresses too much when I should let the phrase said correctly be all the input i give.The activity itself need a little more concise setup that what I gave it in the first class. The second class was a bit better, but I think it can be improved.Having students mimic me might be a little touch of good old behaviorism techniques, but I think it is called for in this situation.
After watching these, I though I would check out a video on learning pronunciation in a language I haven't studied. I watched Chinese with Gloria to see how it would be taught in a tonal language. The goes along quite slow and is a little repetitive but I think does a really good job an being understood. Next time I will slow down and limit my speech a bit more, and work on having students lead the talk to discover certain features of this kind of lesson.
Pronunciation 1 Part 2 http://youtu.be/L23wSVj1Wjo
Pronunciation 2 Part 1 http://youtu.be/VjYvcqBAGC0
Pronunciation 2 Part 2 http://youtu.be/Mj1AkaJDt14
Here is a pronunciation lesson I did for two classes back to back.... Practice makes perfect, and I need more of it.
Both of these classes use the same activity to work on similar pronunciation features. It is one I used from the Harmer book that I thought would be useful, but I think there are some changes to be made if I want this to work efficiently. As a way to apply this activity to something useful, I started with phrases on the WB that they have been using to prepare for their speech contest to model how we use stress in certain syllables. After going through those, I briefly explained the what they need to do on the activity page and let them work in pairs. The first class spent too much time in my first step, and perhaps too much time in their pair work as well, but I expected a bit of this as it was my first run going through the activity, and their level might be a little lower than this activity or my intro were planned. The second class got through the first part quickly enough, but had more difficulty with some of the pronunciations with contractions, or incorrectly assuming the wrong number of syllables.
Some Problems - I speak to fast on too many occasions, and say too much at times. I really need to work on slowing down when students need clear, understandable input. For this particular activity, I might explain some of the stresses too much when I should let the phrase said correctly be all the input i give.The activity itself need a little more concise setup that what I gave it in the first class. The second class was a bit better, but I think it can be improved.Having students mimic me might be a little touch of good old behaviorism techniques, but I think it is called for in this situation.
After watching these, I though I would check out a video on learning pronunciation in a language I haven't studied. I watched Chinese with Gloria to see how it would be taught in a tonal language. The goes along quite slow and is a little repetitive but I think does a really good job an being understood. Next time I will slow down and limit my speech a bit more, and work on having students lead the talk to discover certain features of this kind of lesson.
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