Expectations

This week was an interesting one for sure. With my 5th grade class on Wednesday, I had to stop an activity and have a one-on-one with the class. This first half of the year has been hard, rough and frustrating. The 5th grade students are ill-behaved, not just in my class, but throughout the school. After trying to settle down the students for maybe the 5-6th time during the class, I stopped the class and asked them "Why do you think we learn English?" I got a wide range of responses:

"Because you are a teacher."
"You need money."
"Because we have to go to college and read English books."
"We need it to travel."
"We learn English so we can talk to other people."
"We have to take a test."

I told my students that all of these are correct answers, but then I rephrased the question to "Why do you think Lena (my co-teacher) and I want to teach you English?"

At this point, the students weren't sure how to answer, so I told them:

"I want to teach you English so you can have a better chance at doing other things and experience the world. You have a great opportunity to start a language at a young age. Most people in the world do not get this chance. So, I know that English is hard and I don't expect you to memorize 1,000 words and I'm not worried about your test scores. I just want you to be able to use English to enjoy your lives. Just try and learn at least one thing in English and I'll be very happy for you."

The class went silent and the message seemed to have gotten through to some students. Hopefully, it will stick to some students and help them focus a bit more in class. It was interesting the expectations for the teacher and student can get lost or not even established at all. In this case, it happened with me.

Pronunciation: Repeating (1st Grade Lesson on Weather)

This is was the first time that I taught 1st graders a lesson on weather, so I had to make sure that the first lesson used a lot of repetition. I didn't have time to find a video to elicit any schema, so I thought the best thing to do was to just think out loud and ponder the question "How's the weather?" and have the students repeat. Then continuing to the next slide, I would elicit and have the students ask me "Victor, how's the weather?". I would show the next slide and say "It's sunny". I would have the students repeat "How's the weather?" and "It's _______." for all different types of weather. After the repeating, I had the students finish a worksheet that linked the types of weather and pictures.

Looking back on this, I should have reviewed with a different and clearer schema. The repetition seemed successful at the start, but the follow up activity was extremely weak. The students didn't practice what they have just learned, so it didn't stick in their long-term memory. We basically just looked at pictures of the weather repeated and then moved on, never to speak what they just practiced. The follow up lesson to this should hopefully address all these problems.

Pronunciation: Chaining (First Attempt) (5th Grade Lesson on Time)

So I had a change two weeks ago and performed my first attempt at chaining (front and back). The unit was on telling time and then practicing the chunks "What time do you ____?" and "I _____ at [time]". I wasn't actually planning to do this with this particular lesson, but as I was introducing the new phrases, it seemed like a great chance to try it out. I didn't have a chance to practice, but I think that back-chaining produced a better flow for my students than front-chaining. Here's examples of how I did it:

T: Have breakfast.
S: Have breakfast.
T: What time do you.
S: What time do you.
T: What time do you have breakfast?
S: What time do you have breakfast?
T: Do homework.
S: Do homework.
T: What time do you homework?
S: What time do you homework?

During the chaining, a few of the students went off task and started talking. You can clearly see my frustration at around the ~6 minute mark. So, it was definitely not the smoothest, and I should had the students chain with hand motions. I really think it is something I have to start using this more, because it seemed to create a flow and rhythm with the students' pronunciation.

1st grade lesson on number + schema (animals)

This was a 1st grade lesson on numbers. After the warm-up songs I used common zoo animals to activate schema. I had six animals on a PPT slide and quickly showed students the pictures. I asked the students to talk in their groups and discuss what animals they saw on the slide. This worked out better than I thought. Even thought the majority of the language was in Korean, the students were interested in talking about what animals they saw. I asked the students what animals they saw and 'how many [animals] were there?' I then started to elicit where they can find all these animals, but that attempt failed. The students didn’t have the word ‘zoo’ in their vocabulary yet. The funny part was that the students knew the way it was supposed to be spelled. I proceeded to let the students know that we were counting animals. As we went through the PPT slides, the students repeated the numbers and animals:

T: “It’s a monkey.”
S: “It’s a monkey.”
T: “One monkey”
S: “One monkey”

Looking back on this part of the presentation, I think I may have confused the students going into the practice stage. That is where the lesson goes a bit south. In the practice stage, I had two students model a card matching game with me. The activity is to hand number cards for students (1-10) and have them mix the cards and lay them on their desks. The students have to turn two cards over attempting to find and match identical numbers. For example, as the students pick up and turn around each card they have to say “it’s one” or “it’s four”. I knew as the students started playing the game, many of the students were just saying the numbers without using “it’s”. My intent was to have students say a complete phrase instead of just the number. So, I’m going to count this as a learning lesson for next time. I need to be more consistent in what TLC I want and expect the students to say, and to scaffold the lesson a little more smoothly.

Week 13: I’m losing my passion for teaching…

Now heading into the 13^th week of my STG-TESOL course, it has been full of downs and only a few ups. My passion level for teaching is at an all time low. My students are sucking the life right out of me. I find myself wanting to quit the field of education (or at least teaching children) more and more.

I started the STG program with high enthusiasm. I decided months before the course that I wanted to dedicate and shift my career from elementary education to TESOL.  As the STG course started I learned quickly that the last 4 years of my ESL teaching was ineffective. When I dedicated my life to education, my biggest fear was letting students down.  I desperately wanted to change my teaching style and develop a new philosophy in my ESL instruction. With the help of the instructors I learned so many new things that I wanted to implement into my classroom and student discourse.

Here is where I hit a major roadblock. This semester I teach 1^st, 3^rd and 5^th graders. The students that I have are really giving me (and apparently every teacher in the school) problems. Many of the students in the school are ‘behavioral problems’ and can’t seem to focus during class. The school’s test scores are close to the bottom when it comes to elementary schools in Seoul. To add to the problems, a good amount of the students are from mixed ethnicities. And talking with a few teachers, I found that for some students, Korean is not their first language. Nothing seems to be working. I try to activate schema, use CI’s, MIC’s, talking in pairs, seating arrangements… nothing. Any ounce of freedom these students have and they go insane. I waste a lot of time trying to get them back into focus (And yes, I give them time limits). At some times I really think that a monologic teacher-centered dynamic is what will really work, but I know that is not the way I want to move forward. The students are used to teacher-centered classroom for years. I really wonder how much difference I am making by trying to create this student-centered discourse in my classroom. Every time I try, it feels like the students are fighting with me, almost taunting me to go back towards a teacher-centered role.

…Or maybe the problem isn’t the students, it’s me… I don’t have the time to plan lessons that I normally would anymore. Or maybe my expectations are too high for these students and they are shutting off. All I know is that some days I feel like a breakdown is coming soon.

ICC Cultural Lesson #2: Food and Countries

I taped this lesson about a week and a half ago as a test run. I wanted to use this lesson with two students so I could establish some sort of discourse. So, I totally failed to round-up two students for this lesson. I was stood-up at least twice by different students and couldn’t tape a new lesson.

This cultural lesson focused on learning about different countries and their foods. The lesson started out with learning the different countries; China, Korea, America, Spain, Italy, France, England, Australia, Russia, Mexico, Brazil, India and Canada. The student labeled the map as a review activity. If I had two students, I would have them review and work together to complete the map. The student then repeated the names of the countries as I showed PPT. Next the student was shown the flags and pictures and had to guess which country it was.

The next step was to introduce foods from some of the countries. The foods were kimchi, poutine, sushi, curry, pizza, hamburgers, fish and chips, egg noodles, croissants and tortillas. The student had to match up the foods with the country using the phrase “(food) + is/are from + (country)”. I have been working with this student before about singular and plural words, so he was able to link the foods with the correct form. If I had the correct number of students to perform this activity, I would have had them pair up to complete the matching by creating the phrases in singular or plural forms.

Going through each food, the student was able to create the correct form and match the food with their country. For example, the students would pick up a food card and then say “curry is from India” and “hamburgers are from America”. The last part of the lesson was to go over the foods and check if the student matched up the foods correctly. I had the student repeat the phrases and self-correct any mismatched items.

My goal will still be to find two students to try this out. I think that the overall plan for this lesson is a good way to incorporate foods and the use of singular and plural words. 

ICC Cultural Lesson #1: Emotions and Masks

My cultural lesson used masks to convey different types of emotions. My 3^rd grade class was leaning about different emotions in their TB. During the previous lessons, the students learned the phrases “Are you sick/sad/happy/angry/scared/hungry?” and “Yes, I am” and “No, I’m not”. At the end of the lesson, there is a section in the TB that introduces a cultural connection with the material. This time the lesson involved face masks from Korean and they showed different emotions. I decided to take one step future and create a game (Jeopardy style) where they had to describe the emotions of masks from different cultures.

If there was a lesson where things went wrong, it was surely this one. At the start of the class, the students came extremely late. Due to this, I had to try to push the lesson in. This was obviously a mistake, because the students are low-level young learners and they need time to process things a lot more. Also, in the middle of the lesson, my co-teacher was called for other duties, so I had to teach the lesson without any translator, so it proved to be rather challenging to get some of the instructions across.

The activity started with a short video clip from the book. It showed different masks from Korea and explained the emotions that showed. The students were able to answer and identify which emotions the masks were conveying.

I started the activity by introducing what the game was, but I’m not sure if the students understood my instructions. On my PPT, there were two columns, ‘Asia’ and ‘World’. I tried to explain to the students that the masks are grouped in this way. As we started to play the game by showing the first mask, I asked the students to talk with their team. I tried to create some type of discourse and asked them to find two things. First was the emotion the mask showed and second was where the mask was from. The students didn’t talk much the first time and just raised their hands individually. After I kept drilling them to talk with their friends and gave them a time limit, they started to speak more and more.

I tried my best to elicit the phrase “I’m _____.” Usually the students like to give only one word answers, so my goal for the lesson was to have them use the emotions they learned and say the phrase together as a team. The big problem with this activity was the fact that as I was going through each team and asking them for answers the other students was doing other things. Many times during the lesson I had to elicit answers and other students were just sitting around doing nothing.

With the cultural part of the activity, I wasn’t sure if I created a strong cultural awareness for the students. I should have put on the three countries on the PPT for the students to choose from. This would have made it clearer for the students. Instead I just threw the terms at them and didn’t have them create an entire sentence. I did my best to explain some directions to the students and it took some time for adjustments.

Overall, considering all the things that went wrong, the lesson was not all that bad. The students seemed genuinely interested in the activity and where the masks were from. I had a hard time creating a real discourse, but I think for these low-level learners it was good practice and wrap-up of the terms and phrases that we have learned.

Vocabulary Lesson of the Week

This week my my co-teacher and I taught our 5th grade students how to recognize plural and singular words using clothing items. We started out by having picture cards for each item of clothing, this helped activating schema and making input comprehensible from the previous lesson (individual clothing items). We set up a chart where all the clothes were in the singular and plural sections. We asked the Ss what the difference was between all the words. Ss finally said (after eliciting) it was because the -s was at the end of the words. We explained that the -s will usually create 'more than one things'. We repeated the words with the students and created an activity with the pictures on the board to focus on the new rule. The students had to change the clothing items into both singular and plural forms. We had the students work individually and check in pairs to figure out how to change the words. This is something that I have been trying to have my students do more and more. I usually wouldn't have them work in pairs, instead I would just ask the students to raise their hands and ask a question like "who knows how to spell the word in singular/plural?" This didn't help promote any type of productive discourse and certainly didn't help the quiet/shy students in my class. Overall, I think I have to keep trying and letting the students have a chance to speak and figure things out by themselves first, then engage them appropriately.

MT#2 Listening (Reflection)

(forgot to start video at the start of the lesson)

SELF-REFLECTION

My feeling about my MT:
1. I thought that the lesson was interesting for the students. The use of ‘real’ people is something different than characters they would hear from a book. I felt that the students could’ve spoken a lot more. I was in control of the conversation for most of the time.

Comparing with previous MT's, what style was positive?
2. I feel that I am starting to maximize the opportunities for students to speak English. Something simple like repeating instructions make a huge difference. I’m letting the students talk about the activity, instead of controlling all the discourse.

The classroom atmosphere:
3. I thought that the classroom felt relaxed and that the lesson was easy to follow. Although, I should have had the students work in pairs instead of individually. This way, students could help each other and focus on the conversation.

Did I use the WB as planned and MIC techniques?
4. Yes, I just wanted to show how to use the worksheet and to list instructions on what to do. I previewed the lesson that I was with my friends and I spoke to them about their week. I also used visuals to help back up the listening activity.

Did all the students have a chance to talk?
5. The students were able to talk to each other after each time they listened to the dialog. The students were able to discuss what they heard in each conversation.

Did I give the students a chance to speak?
6. No, actually I gave instructions for the listening activity only so the students were not asked questions at that point of the lesson. The students had to speak with one another after listening to each conversation.

Communicative T-Talk vs. Evaluative T-Talk:
7. The ratio didn’t really exist at that point of the lesson. The activity was a listening based, so the students were going to be asked questions at the end of the audio. 

What have I learned about myself as a person/teacher so far?
8. I learned that I could have had the students repeat and ask each other what were the instructions before they started listening to the audio. There are still many moments that I could have the students repeat and use English. It’s something that I have to get better working on. I am coming along slowly.