This week I think I am finally starting to understand what I am promoting in my classroom. I am promoting monologic discourse throughout the entire lesson. I really wonder when this change happened to me as I switched from an elementary school teacher to an ESL teacher. In elementary school (Philadelphia) I taught subjects by using minimal teacher centered lessons and gave a majority of the control to my students. The student-initiated interaction was exciting and meaningful to the students and myself. So, why have I not done this in Korea? Maybe in my mind I when I'm teaching low-level learners, I want to give them as much knowledge as possible. But by doing this, what kind of learning am I promoting? By now, I'm sure that many of the students expect the monologic discourse that is present in every lesson we will do. So, I am actually creating a group of robots that memorize phrases and not even know why they need it.
A lesson this week on numbers proves that my classroom is teacher dominated with little dialogic discourse. I taught my 5th graders numbers 1-30 this week with the phrases "How many ____ do you have?" and "I have # _______." Not once during the lesson did I initiate any referential questions to the students. The students all sat and made sure to memorize the key phrases on the board. I barely activated any type of schema for the students. I only showed slides that had numbers with objects (i.e. the number 1 with an apple picture) and then asked the students to repeat "one apple".
I realize now so many more things I could have done to help the students make a connection. The next lesson I will try a silent role playing to help activate students schema and promote student-initiated conversation.
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