tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-64178804422856826692024-02-20T17:59:15.424-08:00pjstandleeAn ESL practicum journal for the Monterey Institute of International Studies.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-79252607571616335862011-03-17T22:44:00.000-07:002011-03-17T22:45:28.352-07:00LoyalDog waits by<br />friend,who<br />whimpers as dust blows.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-3631492802100512082011-03-16T13:22:00.000-07:002011-03-16T14:27:13.846-07:00Last week with KandaBackground<br /><br />This is the last week of the Kanda program. Wow, time really flew and I have to say that it really felt like I taught this class by the seat of my pants. If it wasn't for this action research, I think that I would have been lost in my own teaching. Having a focus of raising students WTC and understanding and its relationship with L2 Self gave me a focus when I normally would have skidded off track. I think that teachers do action research a lot but not formally. We think about our practice and sometimes we take notes and write down what happens. But then the focus, the problem posing part of action research, gets lost somewhere in all of the daily stuff that we have to juggle. Working to answer a question does help not only to become aware of what we are doing, but also become aware of what we are not doing.<br /><br />This is my second action research study, and I feel that there was so much that I didn't do right. At times, I felt that I didn't let students have enough control, at other times, I felt that I wasn't properly scaffolding my lessons. At different points of the process, I noticed that my students' intrinsic/l2 self/investment whatever you want to call, would fall only to rise unexpectedly somewhere else. If I were to do this all over again, I would try not to pay attention to what other teachers were doing in their classrooms. Worrying about what others did decreased the options available to me. Also, I would give students a menu of choices so they could chose what they wanted to do. Allowing students to choose is basic needs assessment, but it surprising that we just overlook it and jump right into lesson planning without consulting the students. Lately, I feel that I have a hard time thinking of fun and creative things to do. I need to pay attention more to where I get my ideas, what works, and what can be reused or recycled from different courses or materials.<br /><br />Last week our class visited Whole Foods where they researched different foods in order to create a healthy menu. This Monday, the students will create their new menus and present them to the class. On Wednesday, we've reserved time to complete the class' post-questionniare and gave students time to work on their final presentations, which they will show people at a trade fair on Friday. This final presentation will culminate a lot of work by the students through the program and is the reason why so much of the teaching work was integrated.<br /><br />Again, I'll give just a brief summary of the classes and a reflection.<br /><br />Narration<br /><br />On Monday, I began the lesson by asking the students to discuss what they saw at Whole Foods and what surprised them, and what the learned. After pair discussion, I one person from the pair to report what their partner had said. Then, I organized the class into their teams. I gave each team member an evaluation sheet and distributed some supplies and paper. Before letting them begin on their project, I showed a video of Chef Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmare show where he visits a restaurant to help them reorganize a new menu. After the video, I checked with each team to make sure they understood the assignment, and then I let them begin work on the project for approximately 40 minutes. After a class break, I asked each team to elect two captains who would present their team's menu. I explained that the rest of the class would now become judges based on presentation, healthiness, taste (imagined), creativity, and price. Each group came up and gave 10 minute presentation. I asked questions after each presentation and then allowed other students to ask questions, which one or two did. We then wrapped up the class. Wednesday followed the same format. We opened by talking about our experiences as a class and what we learned and what activities we liked. Then I gave the students most of the hour to complete their final presentations. When we were thirty minutes from the end of class, I asked the student to put away their stuff and take the post-questionnaire. I also had to ask some students from Jame's class to take the post-questionnaire as they had taken the pre-questionnaire.<br /><br />Reflection<br /><br />I used Bloom's taxonomy to carefully plan my lesson activities this time. As usual, I opened up the class by having the student talk about a topic that would help them Remember the content of the project from last week. Then I had them work on Comprehension by having them share their partner's story. Then we used a video to Apply the menu to a real world event, and then we had the students Create their presentation. Finally, students Synthesized by giving a small presentation and Evaluated it using the rubric. It's rare that a lesson can cover all of Bloom's taxonomy, and granted that some are loosely based or out of order, but it did help me plan and helped the students understand the usefulness of the project by having all of the elements there. However, I did notice that some students were not participating in creating the final project as much as I liked, so I gave them seperate tasks and stopped by to check on their work. Also, there was a low amount of speaking in English. I think that the problem with project based lessons is that students revert to their first language in order to complete the project.<br /><br />In order to gather more information on the students' I decided that the weekly student reflections just were not working right. I think that the students might have responded better with a different format than the Google site. Voxopop which allows students to record their responses would have been better as it would have let them focus on their speaking and listening skills. So instead of relying on their reflections I decided to interview four students who I felt represented the range of proficiency in class and also had different levels of WTC.<br /><br />Kenji is very proficient but has low WTC inside of class and low WTC during assignments but high WTC when speaking with people one on one.<br /><br />Kanari has an intermediate proficiency but she states that she doesn't enjoy speaking and she might be more motivated by her Ought than L2 self.<br /><br />Miko is intermediate speaker and has a high WTC and she seems to be highly motivated by her L2 Self but has some Ought Self motivation too.<br /><br />Minami is a lower intermediate speaker who has low WTC during class but high WTC away from class. She is more motivated by her ought self.<br /><br />Interviews with these students helped me understand how the students saw themselves in terms of their motivation but also how they viewed their experience, which is also a component of the L2 Self motivation construct as argued by Dornyei.<br /><br />With the data from the questionnairs, the interview data, and my own blogs, I hope to answer the main research questions posed at the beginning of week three.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-50240698408495104172011-03-05T21:14:00.000-08:002011-03-15T23:21:04.190-07:00Third week with KandaBackground<br /><br />In week two our students studied education in the U.S. They visited two schools, a high school on Monday and a middle school on Wednesday. On Friday, for our site visit, we took the students to Monterey Peninsula College. The idea was to have them mix with other students and ask them questions. However, most of the campus was closed down on Friday and there were very few students on class. During the week, I noticed that my students were motivated to speak with native and non-native speakers in public, but in class they their WTC was very low and I returned to the old habit of talking to much when the students should be doing the talking. Also, I felt that my lesson planning really suffered because I didn't have enough time to prepare more interesting activities involving native speakers. For example, on Wednesday, I had students do a discourse completion activity in which they asked people on campus what they would say in a given social situation. For the students with high ability, this activity didn't seem to interest them much and my feeling was that they felt it was busy work, while the lower level students may not have understood the task. I thought the activity might have been better if the students choose the discourse completion task, but part of me is afraid that in doing so, I give up too much control, but I have to remember van Lier (2010) in which he states that scaffolding is only effective when it involves the learner's sense of agency and autonomy. When learners feel that they the task is taking them to new ground and they feel they have some investment in seeing where the learning takes them, then the scaffolding creates higher motivation and learning proceeds development.<br /><br />This week, I began by trying to scaffold the tasks so students will have more classroom interaction time before going out. James and I decided that the second part of the fourth week should be devoted to the students' final projects, so we are combining the third and fourth weeks' activities. For our site visit this week, we had students visit Whole Foods to create an original menu. By giving students a mini project to accomplish, I hoped that the higher level students would be able to take the reins of their project and make the most of it, while the lower level students would find ways to contribute. On Wednesday, I assigned students into groups to prepare for the project and we visited the local library where they looked up recipes.<br /><br />For the sake of brevity, I will quickly outline the lessons from Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and then give a general reflections on the events.<br /><br />Narration<br /><br />Monday<br />On Monday, I began the class by asking students to discuss what sports or activities they participated in Junior High School. Then I had the students play a vocabulary game in which the students were given a worksheet with different slang words and played charades in order to guess the word. Then I had the students watch a video of different extreme sports in the U.S. Next we read about places around Monterey where people could learn different outdoor activities such as scuba diving, hiking, and Zumba. The students discussed these in groups and then using a worksheet, they went to different locations near the school to gather more information. However, some places were not open or didn't actually have the activity located at the store so I had to modify those activities.<br /><br />Wednesday<br />We began the lesson with a short conversation about what the students typically eat or cook during their stay. We took a short tour of the garden, and then came back to the classroom. I then loaded a the beginning of "Super Size Me." Then I asked the students to discuss in pairs if they believed people or the restaurant is responsible for people gaining weight and finalized with s a short class discussion. Then I explained the menu project in which the students were going to build a healthy, tasty, cheap, and attractive menu. I showed them another clip of Hell's Kitchen to demonstrate how menus could be brainstormed in groups and that "Chef Ramsey" would come and critique their menu. We then walked to the Monterey library where the students spent an hour planing their resume with the help of a rubric that I gave them.<br /><br />Friday<br />Friday James and my classes met at the transit plaza. We took the students to Whole Foods where they were given a tour of the store. It was so crowded and fast that I couldn't notice if the students were engaged or asking questions. However, they did eat a lot and took their time exploring the different foods. Some students reported later that they did indeed ask some questions. When the tour was over and the students finished researching their menu, they were free to go. James left before I did.<br /><br />Reflection<br />The week began pretty awful as the students didn't understand the slang vocabulary game and the outing to the stores went bad as some stores were close. Also, there was almost no volunteer talking in English and I could that student discussions soon slipped into Japanese between and during activities. Wednesday was much better. I began the class by taking the students outside and during class, even though I talked a lot, I felt the students were much more engaged in the activities. I think the difference was having something to work towards instead of just going through unrelated activities. Friday, the students enjoyed the walk through Whole Foods, but I noticed that some students just were not into it and I feared that they totally lost any investment in learning English. I began to think that students who experience an immersion context and don't feel like their personality or that their hard work slip from being influenced by the L2 Self to the Ought Self, which is much like being motivated by intrinsic factors and external factors. I can see now why Yashima deployed her L2 self questionnaire along those lines although I still feel that they are two different conceptions of motivation. I'd like to track two students who I feel have low WTC and low L2 self and see if I am right.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-36902160359782000602011-02-25T20:22:00.000-08:002011-03-15T21:14:03.459-07:00Second week with KandaBackground<br /><br />Last week I was a bit surprised that my students seemed really motivated to talk out of class but didn't really want to talk in class. My two attempts to build negotiation skills when speaking with native speakers seemed to fall flat on their face. Are my students WTC and self confidence higher than I think. The other community interaction teachers seem to think that sending the students off to talk to native speakers right off the bat is fine. I've voiced my concerns but then on Friday my warm up activity disintegrated as students rushed off to complete an activity that James created where groups of students asked the public about sustainable fishing. In one week the students have talked to professors at school, went out to talk to professionals at a non-profit, talked to native English speakers in panel discussions, and completed two scavenger hunt type activities. I'm wondering what is left for the students to do in my class. There goes my idea of social scaffolding too as students have willingly jumped into the deep end of the pool. Good for them, but that means I have to re-evaluate my entire action research study. Yet, as I noted above, the students seem to be reluctant to talk in class.<br /><br />However, this week on Wednesday, our class completed a discourse completion task and on Friday they went out to Monterey Peninsula College to complete a survey and walking activity there. This journal will briefly narrate the events of both classes and then reflect on the events and plan for next week.<br /><br />Narration<br /><br />Wednesday<br />1) At the beginning of the class I outlined the menu for the days events. Then I asked students to find a speaking partner and told them that today's topic would be about their experiences at Stevenson's Middle School. I asked the students to talk about what they learned there and what they will do for their next visit later in the week. Sekiya sensei also announced to the class that there might not be computers and profectors for PowerPoint presentations, so they may have to think of some other strategies for giving a lesson. I asked the students if they would like part of my class period to work on their projects, and they said yes.<br /><br />2) After the warm up conversation, I gave students hand outs to students who could not complete their online reflections. I then told them that they are expected to complete the online journal and if they can't log in, then they should come to the workshop next week.<br /><br />3) Then I told the students a story about how I poured soy sauce on my rice during breakfast at my host mother's house in Japan and how I offended her accidentally. I told them that in language, we should think about culture when we speak to other people. Then I played a clip from Mr. Baseball where the pitcher accidentally doesn't tip his hat to Tom Selleck and causes a fight between both teams.<br /><br />4) Next I divided the teams by their closest class members and handed out a worksheet with examples of pragmatic problems between a teacher and a student that I made up. I asked each team to read the discussions and then discuss what they noticed about the discussions.<br /><br />5) After the students had a brief discussion about the made up pragmatics. I asked them to turn the sheet over. On the other side I wrote down some pragmatic problems and asked each group to write four different answers to the situation. 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mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal">Pay a complement: You want to give someone a complement for losing a lot of weight without hurting their feelings.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Furthermore, I told the students that they should write four answers with one being a really good answer, two being not so good, and one being bad. After the students wrote their answers, I asked them to find four people on campus and ask them to tell you which is the best way answer they were most likely to say. Sekiya sensei also said to ask the person if they would say something in a different way. I gave the students 15 minutes to complete the survey.</p><p class="MsoNormal">6) After the students were finished, I asked them to share their answers with the class. </p><p class="MsoNormal">7) I gave the students the remaining time to work on their presentations.<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">At MPC</p><p class="MsoNormal">1) James and I met all of the students at the bus stop at the transit plaza. We took the bus to MPC and got off at the lower stop.</p><p class="MsoNormal">2) When we reached the main campus, James gave the students direction to complete the survey that was given to them in the survey class. I also gave them a map and a "scavenger" hunt task to visit different places on campus and find different information. I told the students that the first team to come back with all the information would win a souvenir from me (four kitchen magnets about Monterey).<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">3) The students then went off to complete the task while we waited. A group from James' class was the first to finish my scavenger hunt task. I also stuck around to update students and help them figure out what they wanted to do after the class while James left back to school early.<br /></p>Reflection<br /><br />Wednesday's class sounds good on paper, but there seemed to be a disconnect between what I had planned the students to do by warming them up in with partners, working in groups through reading and discussion, and then sending them out to survey students around campus. I was in a rush to complete the lesson plan earlier that day, and despite repeated vows, I wasn't able to plan ahead as early as I would like. However, I don't think the lesson was as bad all that. My impression is that the students didn't find the task useful and were not invested in it. The students who had higher abilities didn't care and the student with lower abilities were confused. Sekiya sensei and I seemed to be the only ones who cared. So, indeed, the end was very anti climatic, but I do think that the students learned how to do a discourse completion task correctly, and maybe if I had more time to think of better situation, or better yet, if I asked the students to create their own discourse task, they would have felt more involved. So this class, I definitely didn't do a good job in maximizing learning opportunities.<br /><br />The trip to MPC was a disaster. I think the survey that the students were given didn't interest them, my task was perceived as busy work, and the campus didn't have any classes so there weren't many college students for our students to talk to. We definitely should have had them do something else.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-57932894171136516462011-02-21T22:54:00.000-08:002011-02-22T00:32:13.855-08:00First Week with KandaThis past week marks the beginning of another intensive English program. Twenty one students from the University of Kanda are visiting Monterey Institute of International Studies for four weeks. My class, and research, will be very similar to that of the Osaka Science program. I will be studying ways in to raise students' WTC and increase their motivation while at the same time going out and contacting members of the community. I'll be collecting data through a pre and post questionnaire and reflecting in this blog each week about problems that arise during the previous week. Students will also be writing their reflections on a class blog and I'll use that data to qualitatively analyze the validity of the finding for this research project. In the mean time, I hope the students will have learn to build their communication skills, their confidence, and proficiency while they are here. The following are the research questions for my study:<br /><br />1. What are students' self-perceptions of their WTC?<br /><br />2. What are the teachers' perceptions of the students' WTC?<br /><br />3. How can we raise our student's WTC in authentic speaking situations?<br /><br />4. Does explicit conversation instruction influence students WTC in non-classroom settings? If so, how?<br /><br />5. Are students’ self-perceptions as a member of an L2 community related to their WTC?<br /><br />Background<br /><br />As mentioned before 21 students from the University of Kanda are visiting our program from Feb. 14 until March 11. Most of the students are female (only two male students), and their English proficiency ranges from advance to lower intermediate. The students major in a variety of subjects, including English at their university. The purpose of the program is to immerse the students into a content based course with different themes throughout the week. The classes, include presentation skills, data collection, American culture, and community interaction. I'm teaching the community interaction class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The sister class is being taught by James Atcheson. James is not participating in the action research, although he is helping by having his students contribute to the questionnaire and weekly reflection assignments on the class blog. In addition, Tony Kazanjian also ran a learner training workshop during the program orientation and two computer development workshops to help students learn how to go online and use Google Sites and to learn how to use Excel for their data collection and presentation classes. At the end of the program the students will create a presentation on a topic of their choice. In addition, I've asked the students in my class to collect photos and music to create a memory slideshow that they can feature during their graduation class. The mood of the class is very energetic and the students seem willing to interact with us and to learn about American culture while some students are more motivated to use English in and out of the class than others. Some teachers have also reported that students were unwilling to talk during whole class discussions, which matches me and Wing's data from the Osaka action research project. It will be interesting to see how this group matches up with the previous group.<br /><br />Narration<br />My first class was on Monday, but the teachers started planning for the first class on Sunday. Because of the way the classes are set up, lesson plans from earlier classes, such as presentation skills, can effect my class as students will need to practice those skills in public. Also, students are expected to learn how to engage native and non-native speakers so my first class focused on building awareness in engaging interlocutors and selecting a pragmatically appropriate approach to engaging their interlocutor.<br /><br />I began the class by showing a video about surfing and having the students to a warm up speaking task and introduced the class syllabus and the assignments for the class. Then I gave the students the pre-questionnaire for my study. We then shared pictures that they took form the previous class. Because the students were in another community interaction class on the previous day with different groups and different instructors, some of the students didn't have access to their partner's camera because those students were now in the sister class. I asked the students a number of questions, but as expected, they seemed reluctant to answer questions in a whole group. Their reaction was important to see how much willingness to communicate there was even among the proficient students (later I learned in the teacher meeting that students who were expected to lead were not and students were unexpected to lead were leading, according to Sukiya sensei).<br /><br />I then ran another activity where students talked to partners using "roles" given to them on cards. The idea of the role play was to test how students would navigate different pragmatic situations so they could anticipate different reactions in conversations in public. However, it was very difficult to model and explain the purpose of the role play and my impressions were that the students didn't understand. My last activity of the day was for them to go out and perform a "Mission Impossible" where they asked people questions and gathered information. We finished the lesson with a "whole group" discussion in which students seemed to be more relaxed and willing to supply answers, but not in whole sentences. Usually their answers were in one word sentences.<br /><br />Reflection<br />What a week. I was really frustrated because I felt like my lesson plans were being soaked up by other classes who needed by do finish lessons or recap important activities that they should have finished in their class. Also, I felt like I was a mile behind in my lessons because most of the teachers had already had one or two lessons by the time I saw the students and that their Friday community site visit (where the whole group goes out and visits a location) was already planned without my knowing. That made me really angry, and I kind of confronted James about it and I definately complained to Kaite (the coordinator about it).<br /><br />As for the students, they seem very capable to communicate in English. I thought only a few seemed overwhelmed by being away from their homes or that they felt uncertain about communicating. In fact, my impression was that each student could communicate at at least a very basic level and that they were more than willing to strike up conversations with people in the public. In class though, they do have reluctance to answer questions as a whole group and I think I'll try to stick to my usual write/think, pair, share when doing class activities or tasks. Also, I really felt like my lesson planning has been lacking because I've been split between teaching Sattar and my portfolio and Kanda. Though the students' WTC hasn't been so much an issue, I think that my lesson planning has been sub par compared to the other people.<br /><br />So far this week, I think students appreciated the pragmatic approach to the community interaction class but the lack of scaffolding in the task set up and during the task itself has left them wondering what the point is. I want to set or prime them more with some stimulating listening, reading, or even writing exercise and then send them out to a specific location on Wednesday to do something cool. It's a little late in the planning, but I wonder if I can set up a visit to the art museum. This coming week's theme is education, so I'm wondering what approach I can use? Perhaps capturing something about American education? Students studying, people reading, signs, affordances? And then have them come back and report what they learned? Sounds fun.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-85752006458604424692010-11-04T11:59:00.000-07:002010-11-04T12:31:02.872-07:00Writing my CV<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>JA</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:splitpgbreakandparamark/> <w:dontvertaligncellwithsp/> <w:dontbreakconstrainedforcedtables/> <w:dontvertalignintxbx/> <w:word11kerningpairs/> 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mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:200%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormal">Writing a Resume, CV, or cover letter, whatever you may call it, is the thing I hate most. Hands down, no contest. It's pithy, irritating, tedious, pretentious, callous, overrated, and probably no matter what you do, misleading. Think about it. You're resume typically has one page to summarize why you should be hired, why you want to work, what you can accomplish. All of your relevant experience (or lack of), all of your time, commitment, work, progress (or lack of) put all on one page.<br /><br />Resumes are the what, when, where, and why but not necessarily the who. Every time I sit down to write a resume, I always think, "This is not me." I'm more, can offer more, than what these tiny little terse statements say. I'm more than problem, action, results. I'm all in favor of trashing the whole system. It's more likely that workers are hired through networks or in house where resumes are nothing more than ceremony anyways. But yet, we must go on and play the game. The following is what I learned when revising my resume this time around:<br /><br />1) Language, in particular nouns, are very important. I understand what I do, but its hard putting a label on what you do: curriculum development, authentic materials, communicative learning, needs-based assessment, computer integrated classrooms, ESL writing, teacher training. The list goes on and on. The trick is finding the right words that will get you the right job, sometimes regardless of whether you actually believe in the meaning behind the words, which leads me to my next point.<br /><br />2) Matching the job description, I used to think, was a tedious task. Why couldn't I make one resume and cover letter about myself and send it out to all of those interested in hiring me based on my qualifications. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. Employers think of their need first and who can best fill it second. This time round, I paid a lot of attention to the job description and integrated the wording and phrases into my own resume and cover letter. It surprised me how much easier it was to tailor my experiences and skills to their pre-defined needs. Of course it helped that I am applying to the same position that I previously worked at, but I think part of the trick to speed up the process and get to the relevant information is to go from the job description and any other information you can gain on company or organization.<br /><br />3) Likewise, writing a cover letter based on the job description is much easier than a generic cover letter. I picked out words such as "project," "assessment," and "culture" and weaved them into my cover letter to highlight my relevant experience. Previously, I had the problem of not being confident about my experience, but once I got in the job, I realized how important any previous experience is and how to work and build off of what you've already done. Being aware of your own development as a professional will give you more insights on what to mention in your cover letter. Also, I wasn't shy about talking about things that I wanted to bring to the table. I think learner training is really important, so I mentioned that I could help improve their learner training program. I couldn't have pulled off that move as a newcomer to the field, but now that I have some experience, I can identify weak points and exploit them. I wish someone would have told me that years ago.<br /><br />4) Writing a CV is much more difficult than a resume because a CV lists everything you've done and must be more detailed in periphery activities such as publications, affiliations, volunteer work, etc. But after writing a CV, you can skim down the content to create a resume. Thus it’s much easier to customize from more complete information than incomplete.<br /><br />5) No matter how hard I try, I can never get all of the errors out of my own resume. It really does require another set of ideas. Before I was shy about not being able to edit my own resume, but as Vygotsky says, we learn by interacting with others.<br /><br />This resume/CV is still in the workshop and may never leave, but as I gain more experience, thank god, it gets easier to write about my experiences, skills, and accomplishments. Having professionals, such as the guys and gals in the career service department, helped me gain more confidence in my own writing. I think that the resume/CVshould be glorious and an all out attempt by you to show your very best. Anything less might not get you the job that you really want.</p>SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-16815522421279314522010-10-27T00:15:00.001-07:002010-10-27T00:15:57.690-07:00Journal on my classroom observations<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml> <w:worddocument> <w:view>Normal</w:View> <w:zoom>0</w:Zoom> <w:trackmoves/> <w:trackformatting/> <w:punctuationkerning/> <w:validateagainstschemas/> <w:saveifxmlinvalid>false</w:SaveIfXMLInvalid> <w:ignoremixedcontent>false</w:IgnoreMixedContent> <w:alwaysshowplaceholdertext>false</w:AlwaysShowPlaceholderText> <w:donotpromoteqf/> <w:lidthemeother>EN-US</w:LidThemeOther> <w:lidthemeasian>JA</w:LidThemeAsian> <w:lidthemecomplexscript>X-NONE</w:LidThemeComplexScript> <w:compatibility> <w:breakwrappedtables/> <w:snaptogridincell/> <w:wraptextwithpunct/> <w:useasianbreakrules/> <w:dontgrowautofit/> <w:splitpgbreakandparamark/> <w:dontvertaligncellwithsp/> 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mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:200%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} </style> <![endif]--> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpFirst"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">It’s amazing what we learn and the turn right around and forget. At first I thought that looking back at my classroom observations from my first semester would be like beating a dead horse. I’ve learned so much since those observations. The memories are of a somewhat overwhelmed student making the task at hand more difficult than it had to be. I fumbled threw the first few observations. In the next two, I tried to observe <i style="">everything</i> in the classroom and therefore failed to capture anything substantially. I often made fairly bold claims in the inferencing sections. In fact, looking back I’m not really sure if I understood what the inferencing section was for. However, I did manage to capture some interesting thoughts, and unknowingly, the observations seemed to have a profound effect on my teaching. This journal will survey the six most important observations that I made and relate them back to my own understanding of language teaching, language learning, and language itself.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><b style=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Background</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In the fall of 2009, I took Classroom Observations with Professor Peter Shaw. This class was held every Friday from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. at Casa Fuente room, which has since been dubbed, “Peter’s Room.” This class, I realize now, had a profound effect on my teaching not only because I really enjoyed Peter’s inductive, hands off, storytelling style to teaching, but because the observations that I made gave me an opportunity to see firsthand both good and bad classrooms, both of which were equally instructive experiences. One of the first lessons in Peter’s Class, a Total Physical Response, class in which teacher taught me and my classmates who were true beginning Spanish learners. In pairs, we took turns observing the actions and instructions of the teacher. Then we learned how to capture what we saw “objectively” for our observations. Based on the observations, we learned how to draw inferences, information about the students that couldn’t be learned told through objective descriptions, and finally, we were allowed to write a “reflection” or “inference” section. </span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><b style=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Narration</span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">In the following weeks after the Peter’s “Mock” Spanish class, we went out to the school and community to observe classes. My first classroom observation was a class at the Intensive ESL class on campus. The title of the class was “International Politics.” I then observed an English for Academic Purposes class, then I went outside the school to observe two adult school English as a Secondary Language class. I also had the chance to observe an Arabic class at the Defense Language Institute and finally, I returned to write my final observation of Peter’s Spanish class. Through the course of the class, we also had other opportunities to observe “classes.” One was a display of the Audio Lingual Method on Saturday Night Live. There was also a Greek BBC lesson and a Japanese clip on how to eat ramen. Peter also demonstrated multi-level and multi-station lessons, he told us how observation relates to principles and practices, theory, linguistics, and research, and he had us go to an elementary school where we taught third graders how lessons in foreign languages. Looking back, I can say that this might have been one of the richest classes at the institute so far.</span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><b style=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Reflections</span></b></p><p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">As I stated above, my first two observations were of ESL and EAP classes here at the institute. The observation notes from these events are plentiful and sporadic, but they do have some interesting comments. Reflecting back, I can see that I learned a lot about effective teaching by watching and then tying the information back to my reading. For example, in my first observation, I identify that the “content” of the class is based on authentic materials, interaction, and meaningful instruction. It appears to me now that I was struggling to describe the pedagogical components of Content Based Instruction (CBI). In the next observation, I note that the class Douglas Brown’s (2007) <i style="">Principals and Practices</i> book and labeling the learning experience as “cooperative” and “autonomous” and “authentic.” I also note that the lesson took advantage of several Macrostrategies discussed in B. Kumaravadivelu (2003) in his book <i style="">Beyond Methods</i>. Both of these experiences provided ideas that I would later use in my own teaching over the summer and in my Curriculum Design class. In fact, the second class was taught by the same instructor who we later collaborated with to design the “TEDx Curriculum.”</span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Eventhough the next three observation experiences were not as good as the previous two, I still learned quite a bit. The third observation was at the DLI. This was an observation of an Arabic class, and instead of concentrating on something that I could observe, I spend a lot of effort trying to write down student and teacher interaction. My partner said this was helpful for him because he knew Arabic, and I remember that other students said that the foreign language observations helped them concentrate more on student and teacher interaction, but for me, I spend too much time trying to capture what I couldn’t understand. This observation taught me the lesson of focusing on other classroom elements. One idea is that I could have observed physical behavior. Often times the students were slouching or looked tired. Targeting physical behavior would have helped me focus my observations. In the next observation at the Monterey adult school, I made the same mistake. Plus I gave a favorable conclusion to a lesson, which Peter was “Less than happy about.” Through this observation, I learned from him the importance of meaningful communication and interaction in the classroom. It wasn’t until the fifth observation, the adult ESL school in Pacific Grove, that I learned to concentrate my observational focus. In this observation, I focused on how students used the textbook. From my notes, it seems that I was less than fond of the faux authentic materials and the grueling vocabulary review lead by the instructor. Last, I decided to go back and look at Peter’s “Mock” Spanish lesson in which he taught us zero Spanish speakers an incredible amount of vocabulary without us having to speak a word. First he used simple nouns such as stand up (<i>lavantanse</i>) and sit down (<i>siéntate) </i><span style="">and then using motions, pictures, and scaffolding,</span></span><i> </i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">he taught us “</span><i style=""><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">es un tigre, es una elefante”</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";"> meaning “this is a tiger; this is an elephant.”</span></p>SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-29317249555290718452010-09-25T14:23:00.000-07:002010-09-28T15:19:07.325-07:00Week 4: Team Exploration PresentationsI can't believe its the last week of the Osaka Science program. It seems like they just got here. However, after seeing all of the effort, learning, homework, and general elbow grease that has gone into the class by the students and teachers, I feel that we can all be happy with the way things turned out.<br /><br />At the beginning of my class, my students were very shy and exhibited low amounts of WTC even though their motivation levels might have been high. By carefully controlling the sequence of the tasks, group activities, and monitoring the students WTC level, my personal observation is that students' anxiety decreased and their WTC increased as well as their perceived competence, which was a result from some successful encounters with native speakers and classroom work.<br /><br />This week, we want to know if the survey work from the previous week left our students more poised to communicate, or if it had made them more anxious or scarred. We became concerned with actually decreasing students' WTC after the survey class last Thursday. Also that night I received the following email from one of my students lamenting is inability to conduct the full survey.<br /><br />Subject: I have to apologize to you...<br /><br />Message:<br /><div>"Sorry, I tried to ask questions to someone but then suddenly I felt badly nervous and I couldn't ask anyone...</div> <div>So I will ask someone in this weekend, or at least next Monday, and I can't post reflection to class blog until I can ask someone.</div> <div>But I promise that I make presentation by due.</div> <div>Would it be OK?</div> <div> </div> <div>Please forgive this incompetent man!"<br /><br />In order to see what our students thought about their survey experience, we asked them to reflect about it in their week 3 reflection blog. Most students reported being nervous, but overall, students reported success and happiness in being able to conduct their survey.<br /><br />One student writes:<br /><br />1) I felt a little nervous when I approached people, because they looked like busy. It was more difficult to talk to people on the street than I had expected. But they were very kind, and answered our questions politely. And I should have more knowledge. When I was asked “What is California Condor?”, I couldn't explain well. I felt the necessity for the preparation before the survey.<br /><br />2) I asked 4 people. Through the survey, I thought that most of the people don't know much about California Condors. Some people don't like birds, but all of the people strongly agreed or agreed with the protection of the wild animals.<br /><br />As you can see there may be a discrepancy between the teachers' perception that the students' WTC increased and what the students really feel. In our qualitative analysis of the student journals, we will have to closely examine what the students wrote and compare it to their behaviors in and out of the class.<br /><br />We would also like to know how the students' opinions on their own success and how the tasks that we created helped raise their WTC. So instead of the final team exploration reflection assignment, we placed a final assessment of their reflections of their experience as a whole. This information will be used to triangulate our data on raising our WTC.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Background</span><br /><br />As noted above, Thursday's class was devoted to creating and completing a public survey related to the students' final team exploration presentation. Students were asked to survey at least 4 people with 6 to 10 questions. Some students needed extra time to revise their survey during class and then spent the second half of the class outside class surveying native and non-native speakers near the Fisherman's Wharf area. Students who had trouble creating a cohesive and coherant survey used the class to finish the survey and were asked to complete the survey as homework. Over the weekend, the students also worked on completing their team exploration presentation, which they created in PowerPoint. Students visited places like the aquarium, museums, local shops, and other places around town.<br /><br />In this class, students will complete some scaffolding tasks that will allow them to share their ideas about their presentations and then have some time to work on the presentation. We will also, finally, get to the scientific experiment activity that I had planned to do in the second week. Both the students and I are looking forward to it.<br /></div><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Narration</span><br /><br />Warm-up Writing and Speaking (10 minutes)<br /><br />I began the class by telling the students that they will have some extra time today to prepare their presentations. Also, I told them they will have a choice later on as to whether they would like to work on their presentations in class or try the Myth Busters' experiment. I then passed out a worksheet that asked the students to write down three facts that they will include in their presentation on Thursday. After the students wrote down their facts, I asked them to share their information with a random partner for a two minute timed conversation.<br /><br />Pre-task Writing and Speaking (10 minutes)<br /><br />Next, I asked the students to look at the other side of the handout and together with their team exploration partner, fill in information on six slides that they have made or plan to make. When the students finished this activity, I asked them to share the information with another random partner. I then explained that its important to take this opportunity to learn from the people they talked to and see what ideas they could incorporate into their presentation.<br /><br />Main-task Writing (20 minutes)<br /><br />Using the information form their worksheet, I asked students to begin working on their presentations. I encouraged them to use the ideas they learned form their classmates and to check the grading rubric handed out in a previous class.<br /><br />Post-task Speaking (10 minutes)<br /><br />After the time allocated for the main task was over, I asked students to pick a random partner and to explain how they build their presentation, what the roles of the speakers will be, and to review an certain strengths and weaknesses.<br /><br />Myth-Busters Experiment (1 hour)<br /><br />After a short break, we began the students chose to try the Myth Busters experiment. I asked the students to take out the worksheets that I gave to them in week four. Then I divided the class into two teams by counting off from one to two. We then divided the teams into two groups. The first group in each team would be the builders and would need to read the instructions and build the air powered balloon rocket. The other team would think of a research question, hypothesis, and identify the independent variables and the dependent variables. Finally, I assigned captains to the team and told them that the first team to complete the experiment and turn in their handout would win. It might be important to note that the students were engaged in this task 20 minutes after the class had officially ended.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Reflection</span><br /><br />First, I'd like to say that the Myth Buster's experiment was a big success. The students were highly motivated to complete the project. They worked well as a team, and they used English most of the time. The only time they began speaking Japanese was when the task became more difficult and frustrating for them. However, they engaged me in questions and listened to my suggestion in English, and at this time, I think all thoughts of anxiety were out the door. The relevance and fun of the task seemed to highly motivate my student and allowed them to communicate on the meaning of their communication rather than on whether they could communicate.<br /><br />Second, time was very limited during this class. Students had a lot of homework to complete in our class and in other classes, so there was a lot of anxiety, but not enough anxiety placed on themselves. I think this is a big difference for Japanese students who tend to place the focus of their anxiety on whether they can communicate on themselves and do not allow themselves to shift their focus to actual communication.<br /><br />I was impressed with my students' willingness to help each other and to stay in English even between tasks. The close community that had developed in and out of class allowed the students to trust and work with each other closely.<br /><br />In all, I think a lot of the worries that we had about our students becoming more discouraged by the survey were found to be incorrect, but only because we were attentive to their needs and their WTC and anxiety levels were in the forefront of our mind. The student who had written the despairing email to me from above, was able to finish his survey and complete his presentation. Similarly, were successful in completing their presentations and fulfilling the requirements of the project. Plus, they used the presentation experience in this class to help prepare for their symposium presentations on Friday in which they gave a larger more technical presentation on a topic of their choice. These presentations will be given again in Osaka, and we're thankful that they could practice them here in front of native and non-native English speakers.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-4546580471555155232010-09-16T16:08:00.000-07:002010-09-28T11:57:27.731-07:00Osaka Week 3: Public SurveyWe're back from our second round of class and field trips. Last Thursday our class visited the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History. We met the students at the Monterey transit center, but because of confusion with the bus schedule, we ended up taking a bus that arrived much later at the museum. Also, it turns out that the staff at the museum forgot we were coming and that parts of the museum were under renovation. However, the staff at the school was gracious and flexible enough take our classes on separate tours through the museum. Before the tour I reminded the students that our goal is to ask two questions to the tour guide.<br /><br />Our tour started with a large piece of Jade that had been extracted from Lobos Point, a survey of the local indigenous wildlife, the different butterflies --including the Monarch Butterfly-- and the large collection of birds, including a stuffed California Condor.<br /><br />During the tour I carefully monitored the students interaction with the tour guide and each other and operationalized WTC as the following: Student response to NS initiated questions, student initiated comment, student initiated questions, students assisting classmates, and other.<br /><br />I observed only three students asking questions directly to the tour guide, however, students reported that they asked questions after the tour. They explained that during the tour they could not process the listening information while trying to think of questions. Also, the majority of students took notes, and seemed generally interested in the exhibits.<br /><br />Because of the timing of the tour and the schedule of the bus, I left home with some students at the end of class. Wing and members of my class and her class decided to stay longer and ask questions or look around. I think its unfortunately that I didn't get to see the less formal time where students were looking around and exploring by themselves. Observing their behavior would have given me more insight toward their intrinsic motivation, WTC, and autonomous learning skills.<br /><br />This week we are continuing with our Action Research Cycle by increasing the speaking activities, sequencing speaking activities earlier in the lesson, and experimenting with random seating. Wing will mirror these treatments except she will allow student to choose their own seating.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Background</span><br /><br />In the previous week, as mentioned above, we focused students attentions on increasing their WTC through structured tasks and speaking activities. We also prepare the students for their field trip to the PG Museum of Natural History through extensive jigsaw reading, question and answer practice, and schemata building. On Thursday we visited the museum and afterwords concluded that in order to increase students WTC and speaking production there needs to be more speaking opportunities and that interaction activities should come sooner in the activity sequence.<br /><br />There are some important developments not related to the class instruction too. We are continuing to video record the Tuesday classes, and the class will be observed by a fellow student and by my practicum teacher, Professor Heekyeong Lee.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Narration</span><br /><br />Warm-up (10 minutes)<br /><br />I began the class by hinting to the different between two types of questions. What is the difference between "Do" questions and "Wh-" questions. Then in their present groups, I handed out a worksheet with different questions based on general science and from their trip to the museum. I asked the students to ask each other different questions to elicit their opinions and knowledge, and also to pay attention to the different types of questions on the list. Finally, we reviewed the answer to some of these questions in a whole group and asked the students the difference in the answers they will get form "Do" vs. "Wh-" questions.<br /><br />Pre-task Speaking and Listening (15 minutes)<br /><br />In the next activity, I handed out a model survey and explained that the students will answer the questions from the survey. Then, I assigned students to random pairs by using a lottery numbers. In partners, the students asked and answered the questions to the survey. When the students were done asking questions to each other, we reviewed their answers as a group.<br /><br />Before the break, I put up blank paper on the walls around the classroom with different heading: location, science, and personal. I explained that after the break, the students will write example questions.<br /><br />Main Task Writing Questions (30 minutes)<br /><br />When the students were ready to begin again, I explained that students will write questions to create their own survey. I asked the students to write example questions on the paper that I placed on the walls around the classroom. Because students were having a hard time writing questions, I asked if they would rather continue with this task or begin writing with their partner. Some students said they would rather write with a partner, so I discontinued the group brainstorming activity. I monitored the class for questions and allowed some extra time for the groups to finish this task. Also, it should be noted that there was no random assignment in this activity because students needed to work with their team exploration partner for their final project, which this survey will be used towards.<br /><br />Post Task Speaking (15 minutes)<br /><br />Last, I asked the students to pilot their survey with each other by finding a partner and asking them the questions form their survey and then revise the survey from any problems they found. We finished this task in whole group where students asked each other questions using the ball game from the previous class.<br /><br />Wrap-up<br /><br />Before leaving, I assigned the students an informal homework asking them to update me on what actions they took on their team exploration project and to confirm the location and topic of their project.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Reflections</span><br /><br />I think I took much more risks in this class in trying to improve students' WTC and lowering their anxiety. First, I modified the format of the lesson plan by raising student's awareness of different types of questions before conducing the warm up task. I think this helped to raise student awareness of the form and meaning of the language they were expected to use. At the end of the warm up, I assessed students understanding by asking them what the different type of answers they received for the different type of questions.<br /><br />Second, I decided in the class that students should brainstorm their questions as a class rather than just their team. That way they could see the different types of questions that are possible. However, I underestimated the difficulty of composing questions quickly regarding their different subjects and the anxiety that might be raised in writing questions in front of their peers. Instead of continuing with the activity, I decided to ask the students what they thought was useful. They decided they would rather work with their partners, so I change the course of the activity based on their feedback.<br /><br />Last, at the end of the class, I wanted to pull the students together for a group pilot of their survey. It seemed that a lot of the groups were still struggling to write their questions. I concluded that the class work was still valuable and that we might be able to be more productive using the ball game, which they already knew how to play.<br /><br />Furthermore, I received some great feedback from my practicum instructor. She noted that the transitions between tasks needed to become more explicit and smoother, and that I needed be conscious of being polite in directing the class activities.<br /><br />During Thursday's class the students continued to work on their survey and then go out to the community to ask native speakers their questions. Based on the reaction of the students to their experience writing and asking survey questions, Wing and I were concerned if this week's assignment had proved too difficult. In other words, we wondered if the anxiety in some students rose too far in trying to perform the survey. We also noted that students didn't understand the purpose of the survey and were confused about the team exploration assignment, even though we introduced the assignment at the beginning of the second week.<br /><br />Therefore our research question for week four are:<br /><br />1) How can we make sure the students are fully prepared for their oral presentation on their topic and have the necessary WTC to be successful?<br /><br />2) Do students feel that their perceived confidence and motivation, overall, increased?<br /><br />3) Given a similar situation, would the students choose to communicate outside the classroom?<br /><br />Our plan of action is:<br /><br />1) Give more time to prepare for their presentation.<br /><br />2) Before giving their final presentations, students will read and reflect on their blog posts.<br /><br />3) We will ask them to reflect on their experience as a whole, and write about their attitudes toward speaking with native speakers and going out into the community.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-68346067980459282722010-09-08T20:02:00.000-07:002010-09-27T20:06:57.751-07:00Osaka Week 2: PG Museum of Natural HistoryIf you're studying English for specific purposes--in this case science--and you're visiting and studying in an ESL setting, what kind of activities would you want to do? Would you want to review grammar? Not likely. How about converse over different topics? It might depend on the topic. Would you want to learn how to notional and functional skills? That's certainly useful, but also limiting. One of the additional concerns for me this week was planning tasks that were relevant to the students and were structured for their success to increase their WTC.<br /><br />What I think my students want as ESP students studying science is a chance to study their chosen fields in English. After all, they are intrinsically interested in science because they are all studying science in school (at least we hope). Having lived only a few days in a foreign country, they should be bursting at the seems to explore and investigate different topics of interest and waiting to apply their observational skills to the test.<br /><br />This is the hope and aspirations of our Community Language Skills class. We want to give our students the language skills to go out into the real world and explore it using their English. Therefore, this week we will be preparing out students for their next field trip and shaping the lessons and activities so that they naturally appeal to the students. We will also be deliberately promoting group and whole class work to increase students' Willingness to Communicate.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Background</span><br /><br />Last Thursday the students prepared for and accomplished a scavenger hunt around the Monterey Fisherman's Wharf area. The scavanger hunt asked the students to talk with people on the street, store owners, gather information, take pictures, identify wildlife, and locate certain landmarks. After completing the scavenger hunt, the students reported that they were very nervous about speaking with native speakers of English and non-native speakers of English, but that they felt excited about the task and appreciative to those who spoke to them.<br /><br />One student writes, "Before Scavenger Hunt, I thought it's difficult to talk with local people.It's because local people looks enjoying their time. However, when I began to talk to them, they kindly answered my questions. And I felt what a beautiful Monterey is! It has beautiful sea,buildings and many kind people! My hometown, Kanazawa, is also beautiful city, but it's different from Monterey. I think it's because thier historic backgrounds are different.<br />Anyway, I love both!"<br /><br />Another student writes, "I enjoyed the field work. I got a little nervous when I talked with people in English but all people I spoke to were very kind. I like the weather in Monterey because it is sunny and warm in the daytime. But extreme temperature changes in a day worry me every day. In Yokohama, my hometown, temperature changes is not as extreme as in Monterey."<br /><br />The experiences from our students reveals that although they felt nervous in communicating in English to strangers, they felt that people were approachable and kind enough to answer their questions. Also, the students were observant of their surroundings, which is important as they will have to complete their own Team Exploration project in the future in which they will explore a location and make a presentation on that location.<br /><br />Furthermore, for this lesson, we've adapted a jigsaw reading based on the exhibits the students will visit at the Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History. I have also added my own activity in which students will use a science kit to build an air powered rocket. This activity, I hope, will allow students to explore the basic features of the scientific method in English.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Narration</span><br /><br />Warm-up (10 minutes)<br /><br />At the beginning of class, I took role call and then began a warm-up game in which I wrote down three scientific categories on the board. I then divided the class into three groups and told the class that each team must think of any words associated with their scientific category. For example, words associated with the field of Astronomy could be "universe." The students had four minutes to think of all the words. After the four minutes, I asked that a team member from each group write their words on the board. For each team, I assigned another team to review the words on the board. If the peer review team could find any mistakes, they could erase one of the words on the other team. Mistakes could include spelling. At the end of the warm-up, I counted the words for each group and announced the winner.<br /><br />Main Task Pre-reading and Reading (45 minutes)<br /><br />I then asked the students to form new groups according to the number of exhibits in the jigsaw reading handout. I explained that each group should read their handouts and then together answer each each of the pre-reading questions. Then the students conduced a more extensive reading and answered the questions following the main reading.<br /><br />Then I told the students that they will become experts in their groups and will explain their exhibits to the other groups. I gave them some extra time for them to plan in groups what they will report to the other groups.<br /><br />Post Task Speaking/Listening (15 minutes)<br /><br />For the post task, I asked each student to count to eight around the room. The students rearranged their groups according to the numbers said. Then they began discussion on each group's exhibits. Because of the small number of students some groups had two students from one exhibit.<br /><br />Post Task 2 Whole Class Speaking (10 minutes)<br /><br />Next, I asked the students to clear the middle of the room and place their chairs in a circle. I showed the students a bouncy ball that I had brought to class and explained that I would ask the students a question about the Natural History Museum and then pass the ball to a student. The student with the ball would answer the question and then ask a question and pass the ball to another student and so on.<br /><br />New Task Science Experiment (10 minutes)<br /><br />Finally, in the group formation, I passed out another handout that illustrated the scientific method to the students. I asked several students display questions without using the ball. Each question targeted a vocabulary word highlighted in the scientific method. At the end of the class period, I told the students that we might have time to conduct an experiement from a Myth Buster's experiment kit that I bought for the class.<br /><br />We then wrapped up by going over some business for the field trip to the museum, collecting email, reviewing the homework assignments for the class, and introducing the Team Exploration final presentation assignment handout.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Reflection</span><br /><br />After reviewing this lesson and the tasks and student groups formed in the class, we both concluded that the students WTC improved. The tasks were much more structured and scaffolded so that the students' could transition form one task to another. There was also more time spent in each task that allowed the students to progress and help each other. I noticed that students spoke in English even outside of the tasks while switching seats, small talking with their friends, and asking me questions. Plus, at then end of the class, students were motivated to participate in whole group discussions through the ball game. Whole group discussions were the group size that students reported that made them the most anxious. Training them to form the whole group discussion and participating will be an important step in their success to increase their WTC.<br /><br />However, because the pre-reading and reading task took up a great deal of class times, we both concluded that there was not enough interaction opportunities for our students. The speaking activities came too late in the class. While I used a warm-up, the activity didn't necessitate speaking. I think that future speaking task must come quicker at the beginning of the class and there must be more speaking task than other types of tasks to allow students the necessary practice time to increase the WTC.<br /><br />Our new Action Research questions for the next cycle is, "After discussing our students’ behaviors in class and out of class, we asked ourselves how we could elicit more spoken production and interaction earlier in the lesson."<br /><br />Our planned is to:<br /><br />1) Increasing speaking activities<br /><br />2) Sequence speaking activities sooner<br /><br />3) Experiment with random versus chosen seating<br /><br />By increasing the speaking tasks in the lesson we hope to allow students more time for structured interaction. Learning from our lessons in the first week, we must be careful in crafting a lesson plan that carefully structures and scaffolds the tasks so students do not feel we are asking too much of them and thereby increasing their anxiety. We also planned to observe the behavior of the students at the museum this Thursday by counting the number of student elicited questions and comments or other communicative acts to determine their WTC in a public setting with native speakers. We are looking forward to the next set of challenges.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-67326242646799742392010-08-30T14:24:00.000-07:002010-09-27T20:12:55.634-07:00Osaka Week 1: Scavanger HuntToday is the first class of the Osaka Science Community Language Skills class. Because I have already written about the drop back of this class and the focus of these blogs in the previous blog post (see Aug. 30), I won't go too much into the who and what. However, it is important to mention the <span style="font-style: italic;">how</span> as it applies to the main focus of this weeks lesson and our Action Research goals of this class. As I mentioned before, in addition to the instructional requirements of this class, I and the other instructor (Wing Cheung) will be conducting an Action Research on the SLA theory of Willingness to Communicate as it applies to our teaching situation.<br /><br />From our teaching experiences, classroom research, and antidotes, we chose WTC as an appropriate research approach for an Action Research project for our Applied Linguistics Class because Japanese English Language students are notoriously shy and interactively evasive in class. We believe this is because of several factors. First, Japanese classrooms are typically teacher-centered and transmission or knowledge oriented. This pedagogical orientation also applies to English classes in Japan although there seems to be changing slightly. Second, there are culturally acceptable times for students to speak in certain social situations; thereby limiting the role of spoken interaction opportunities in class and in society. This observation is based on my previous teaching experience and I need to follow up on research to back-up this claim, but I assert here that this is a common assertion from foreign English language teachers who have worked in Japan. Third, Japanese students are also considered to be shy and prefer individual work compared to pair, group, or whole class work. All of these factors conspire against the use of the necessary element of interaction and communication in and out of the classroom when Japanese students are concerned.<br /><br />This, and the following, journals will focus on the challenge of WTC in as it pertains to my teaching situation and the Action Research and intervention that we will undergo.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Background</span><br /><br />The students arrived Sunday and after a brief stay were whisked to Monterey where they met their host families and stayed their first full night in the U.S. The next day, the students were given an orientation complete with immigration paperwork, course expectations, learner training, safety and awareness video, needs assessment, and lunch.<br /><br />Tuesday, Aug. 31, is the first full day of class and the first day of our Action Research cycle. As mentioned before our cycle stars with noticing a problem, asking questions, planning an intervention, monitoring the class, and reflecting on the outcome, which will lead to the next cycle. In order to plan our first cycle, we met with Professor Kathi Bailey in which we discussed giving the students a questionnaire to discover their attitudes and beliefs about speaking English and their position toward WTC in English. We also gave them a handout in which they filled out their best and worst experiences as a language learner.<br /><br />In addition to the WTC work, we planned for students to prepare for their upcoming scavenger hunt/field trip, we collected issues of the Monterey Weekly, tourist maps of Monterey, and created a video asking people on the street directions to different locations.<br /><br />These materials can be found on our class website under the "Lesson Plans" and "Show and Tell" pages.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Narration</span><br /><br />I began the class by introducing myself including my history as a teacher and as a language learner and explaining some information about the course and the syllabus. I told the students about a particularly difficult experience that I had learning Japanese, and some of the learning strategies that I used to learn Japanese.<br /><br />We then segued into our first activity. I handed out the "Best and Worst Learning Experiences" worksheet, which had been given to us by Professor Kathi Bailey. I asked the students to take five minutes to write about their experiences. When they were finished, I asked the students to discuss with each other for three minutes their best and worst experiences. We did this speaking activity twice. After the students were finished, I asked each pair to introduce their partner and to tell us about their partner's worst and best language experiences.<br /><br />After the preliminary speaking activity, I asked the students to find a new partner. I handed out a worksheet that Wing and I created, which asked the students to scan a map for different locations around town. Then using a newspaper, I asked students to identify and write down different events reported in the Montery Weekly newspaper. This activity lasted approximately 30 minutes.<br /><br />In the post activity, I asked students to identity the location of several places on the map using verbal instructions that I gave. Finally, I played a the "Asking for Instructions" video that I made and asked the students to write down key words that they heard.<br /><br />We then wrapped up the class by explaining to the students the objectives and procedures for Thursday's scavenger hunt.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Reflections</span><br /><br />What's not apparent from the narration of the lesson is the high anxiety and lack of interaction that spanned the entirety of the class. Looking back on the video recording of this class, it is apparent that WTC is definitely a problem for this class even though individually most of the students are capable of holding short conversation, and a few students are capable of holding longer, discourse length conversations. Even during the planned speaking activities, students seemed reticent to talk to their classmates.<br /><br />After reviewing the lesson, I concluded that there were three problems with my instruction and the lesson:<br /><br />1) The majority of the lesson was teacher-centered with me standing in front of the class transmitting instructions and information. I was actually horse by the end of the class and the students looked exhausted from boredom.<br /><br />2) The activities for this lesson were not properly scaffolded to allow students to work from easier tasks to more difficult tasks, and the instructions for the lessons were not properly worked out or transitioned, leaving an impression that the activities were unrelated to each other and that the lesson lacked clear objectives.<br /><br />3) The students were not working as hard as the teacher, and they did not experience any team building work that would help them work together and lower their anxiety.<br /><br />As a result of this lesson, we concluded that the students definitely showed low signs of WTC in group and whole class settings. The low amount of WTC may have been contributed to the lesson structure, group dynamics, or individual anxiety and perceived speaking competence.<br /><br />Our Action Research Question for the following week is, "How do we set up and manage activities to encourage WTC among students in four different activity-settings: whole-class discussions, small group work, partner work, and individual work?"<br /><br />Our plan of action for the next week is to:<br /><br />1) Organize tasks into pair/groups<br /><br />2) Call on specific students<br /><br />3) Arrange learning spaces to group stations instead of facing the teacher<br /><br />4) Include post-task with whole group discussionSakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-40683307688757445942010-08-30T03:05:00.000-07:002010-09-27T14:24:18.756-07:00My New Osaka ClassHi, it's a fresh start with a new class and I'm really motivated to make this class a very productive one. This class is titled "Community Language Skills" and the students are from the University of Osaka. Almost all of the students are Japanese--there is one Korean student. However, I will teach only the B section which consists of 14 students.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Student background</span><br /><br />The students are ages 19 to 20 and are in their freshmen or sophomore year in the Osaka school of Science, and all of them have pretty much the same primary and secondary school English education. Some students have traveled outside of Japan to places like England and other Asian countries, and their proficiency level ranges from an high beginner to a high intermediate. The majority of the students can write and read well in English but speaking is a concern, as is typical for most Japanese students. I'll talk more about this subject when I describe the research component of this class.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">About the Course</span><br /><br />The focus of this class is science, which means it's an English for Specific Purposes class. The class is titled, "Community Language Skills." The goal of this class is to improve students’ speaking fluency and provide opportunities for students to practice their language outside of class.<br /><br />The following are course goals for the Community Language Skills class: Improve your speaking, listening, reading and writing skills in English<ul><li>Build speaking confidence through interactions with English speakers</li><li>Understand and explore features of the local community</li><li>Practice teamwork and cooperation by working and communicating with team members</li></ul><span style="font-weight: bold;">Action Research</span><br /><br />On-going Research: This class and its sister class, which is taught at the same time but in a separate classroom, are being studied through an action research assignment in connection to the instructors’ Applied Linguistic Research class at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. We have identified Willingness to Communicate (WTC) as the construct for the study and have asked the following research questions:<br /><br />1) What are the students’ self-perceptions of their WTC?<br /><br />2) What are the teachers’ perceptions of the students’ WTC?<br /><br />3) How do we plan activities to encourage WTC among students in four different activity-settings: whole-class discussions, small group work, partner work, and individual work?<br /><br />4) How do we manage activities to encourage WTC among students in four different activity-settings: whole-class discussions, small group work, partner work, and individual work?<br /><br />5) What is the students’ apparent WTC in non-classroom settings?<br /><br />6) Does student work appear to affect their WTC in non-classroom settings? If so, how?<br /><br />7) Do students’ self-perceptions of their WTC correspond to the teachers’ perception of their communicative behavior inside of class?<br /><br />8) Do students’ self-perceptions of their WTC correspond to the teachers’ perception of their communicative behavior outside of class?<br /><br />In accordance with these research questions, we have created a research procedure established within the action research framework which cycles each week a set of procedures for identifying, improving, implementing, and reflecting on student performance, classroom environment, and teaching procedures that will improve upon the WTC. Therefore, WTC will also be the focus of the four teaching journal blogs I will write for my experiences in teaching this class and for the requirements of my class assignments.<br /><br />To inform our research we are collecting data through needs analysis, a questionnaire, video recordings, student reflection blogs, teaching journals, and observations during field trips. The students have agreed to participate in this study and have each signed a consent form.<br />Please visit our class website to for a copy of the syllabus, student sample writing, and other interesting stuff:<br /><a href="https://sites.google.com/site/dropscienceosaka/home"><br />https://sites.google.com/site/dropscienceosaka/home</a><br /><img src="file:///C:/Users/SakeSam/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot.png" alt="" /><img src="file:///C:/Users/SakeSam/AppData/Local/Temp/moz-screenshot-1.png" alt="" />SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-22740293711605847752010-08-05T15:00:00.000-07:002010-08-18T13:03:45.006-07:00The Everything DoldrumsWell, we finally made it. We are approaching the end of the class, and all we have left to accomplish is the final presentations. The students must also conduct a "exit" interview that place students into classes for the next term or will give them an idea of their level of proficiency in terms of the ACTFL speaking guidelines. As a student, I know that the final days of a class are critical in terms of the level of satisfaction and the quality of information that students retain.<br /><br />In this class, I hope to create a fun and interesting class by having students do a fun listening and speaking exercise using clips from a movie, and then have them review and discuss presentations through the lens of delivering a speech. We will also look at a TED presentation that has a lot of content that must be squeezed into a small time frame so students can see how information can be organized and condensed. At this point, the big question for me is whether further review of the traits of a good presentation/speech and a critique of a professional presentation help my students revisit and revise their presentations before the present and will it help them give better peer-review feedback?<br /><br />Background<br /><br />In the previous class, we focused on using comparative and superlative words in our speaking and in general, when to use "-er" versus "more." Using Cowan (2002) as a guide to developing the focus on form lesson, I structured the lesson so that students could find comparative words in a authentic news article. Students wrote the sentences on the board and then we evaluated the sentences and discussed the different conditions for using "-er" vs. "more." From the discussion, we could found that the length of the syllables in the comparative word influences the whether "-er" or "more" is used. We also discovered that some words ending in "y" could take both: i.e., more friendly vs. friendlier. For the main, productive task students compared cell phone to each other and created a short "advertisement" in which they compared one cell phone over another. I also insisted that students write their advertisement speech down before the presented in order for them to give a focused and accurate speech. I also had to direct on team to do this several times, and although they presented an accurate advertisement, I felt that the students did not understand the purpose for writing down the speech before delivering it. Also, the mood at the end of this class was terrible and the students seemed bored, irritated, and ready be done with my class. The bored and somber attitude from the last class spilled into today's class, creating a terrible atmosphere for both learners and teacher.<br /><br />Narration<br /><br />At the beginning of class, I decided to rearrange the lesson plan so that the students' news summaries were presented at the beginning rather than at the end. Nuria's news summary was on English instruction in countries at the Elementary level. The students were engaged in the discussion, which lasted for several minutes, but involved only a few students. I then played a TED video that related to the topic of the English and demonstrated a concise and persuasive presentation. The class then discussed the content and structure of the TED video for another five to seven minutes.<br /><br />Because of time limitations, I decided to skip the warm-up listening and speaking game and to begin the reading jigsaw task in which students read different sections on an academic article discussing how to deliver a speech.<span style="font-size:130%;"><br /><a href="http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/speeches.html"><span style="line-height: 200%;font-family:";font-size:12pt;" >http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/speeches.html</span></a></span><br /><br />Each group read a section of the handout and then reported on the key parts of the article to the class. The students also compared and contrasted this handout with the "Zen" presentation article given a few classes earlier. We also discussed the difference between a presentation and a speech and concluded that speeches are more formal and may have a specific persuasive purpose, and sometimes lack the visual elements that come with presentations.<br /><br />After the reading, I handed out a worksheet for the next task. I asked the students to watch the next TED video and use the worksheet to identify the position taken by the presenter, the supporting evidence she gave, and the organizing structure of the presentation.<br /><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE1DuBesGYM&feature=player_embedded"><br />http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE1DuBesGYM&feature=player_embedded</a><br /><br />The students watched the video but some did not take careful notes or were looking at their computers. After watching the video, I asked the students to compare their notes with a partner and prepare to discuss the presentation as a group. When we discussed the structure of the TED presentation, some students focused on the content of the TED presentation rather than on the organization of the video. For example, one student said that she didn't agree with the premise of the presentation but could not identify the position being taken by the presenter.<br /><br />At the end the class, I asked the student why they thought their motivation for performing tasks, completing assignments, and participating in class had fallen so low. We had run out of class time but one student said we should stay and discuss the class even though I told the students they should go to their next class. One student said he didn't like the structure or content of the class and did not understand why they had to do writing and noticing assignments for an Oral Communication class. Another student said that they needed more time having open discussion.<br /><br />We then wrapped up the class.<br /><br />Reflection<br /><br />I'm so frustrated that my class ended on such a terrible note. I'm angry that one of my students basically said that he hated the way I ran my class and the content. I'm disappointed that other students didn't have an opportunity to say what they wanted to say about the class and that other students were preventing them from giving their opinions. Mostly, though, I'm disappointed in myself and have serious doubts in the way I organized my class, the content of the class, the way I conducted activities, and basically my existence on the planet. This class was a huge shock and am in the doldrums. Whatever I tried to attempt to teach today was overshadowed by a general dissatisfaction with the class.<br /><br />Regardless of the mood in the class and my limitations as a teacher, I wanted to ask myself which of the lesson goals were accomplished:<br /><br />1) SWBT listen to a movie sound track and describe what they hear and try to guess what the title of the movie.<br /><br />We skipped this lesson goals because I decided to keep the normal format of the lesson by allowing the students to give their news summaries first.<br /><br />2) SWBT identify, analyze, and apply the principles of rhetoric that might help create a clear, concise, and informative speech.<br /><br />Students were able to summarize and discuss the traits of an effective speech. In the end though, it will depend upon them to retain this information and incorporate it into their final presentation goals.<br /><br />3) SWBT talk discuss with their classmates how they will attract the audience’s attention and organize their presentation to get to focus their energy.<br /><br />Students discussed the different aspects of the video but focused on the content rather then the structure and organization of the presentation even with the guidance of the listening worksheet. I'm wondering if I selected the the correct pre-task to introduce this main task.<br /><br />4) SWBT summarize information from an article and present five new vocabulary words.<br />The student was able to deliver an informative summary of the article but paid only minimal attention to introducing the vocabulary words. In the end, I think this task needs to be changed so that there is inherent need to introduce the vocabulary and a purpose for presenting the article for both the presenter and the listeners.<br /><br />In the end, I can see that only 2, 3, and 4 of the class goals were attempted and it is not clear whether the students could demonstrate their knowledge or skills with of these goals in class. If I were to revise this lesson, I'd make sure that the lessons goals matched the tasks and that each task had a in class assessment opportunity to demonstrate student knowledge and skills. An effective revision would also include a more focused sequence of tasks.<br /><br />Although it was difficult to face the mood of the students, their criticisms, and the failed structure of the lesson tasks and goals, this lesson provided me with some important pedagogical insight. By focusing on the problems, I hope to overcome weaknesses in my lessons. Here is what I identified for improving the general instructional practices.<br /><ul><li>Focus students peer-review efforts on incorporating feedback into drafts in order to incorporate changes and improve the final product.</li><li>Allow the students to voice their opinions and knowledge and become the knowledge bearers.</li><li>Find a way to judicially give students equal opportunity to speak in class and develop their own ideas.</li><li>Give more time for students to focus on one topic instead of giving different tasks with multiple topics in one class.<br /></li><li>Incorporate research and theory into the development of specific areas of teaching in order to support or revise teaching practices.</li><li>Follow through with circular needs analysis and allows students a say in the content and direction of the class.</li><li>Reflect on how to improve on a lesson and not obsess with what went wrong.</li><li>Let the students do the work.<br /></li></ul>SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-46983602163911886332010-08-03T15:27:00.001-07:002010-08-18T11:04:10.629-07:00Running out of steamToday was a difficult class. Difficult for me because the students completed my class evaluation, and difficult for the students because they have a lot of assignments to complete and its at the end of the semester when we don't have a lot of steam. I noticed this problem today in class when one of my students was literally falling asleep. I don't think I handled it so well. The first time, I ask the student if she was OK; the second time I told her that it was to leave if she wanted to sleep. I immediately felt terrible about what I said.<br /><br />I'm wondering how I can keep my class moving forward, keep the students engaged, and also not let them take advantage of me. Also today in class, I noticed that one of my top students wasn't talking, another wouldn't look at the information I was giving, and another student was working on a project for the class and not paying attention to what was going on. At this point, I have a lot of self doubts about my ability to manage the class, the student's efforts, and the time available to us.<br /><br />We also continued on peer editing, and because the class time was filled with student presentations, two evaluation, and a short introduction to a technology tool, I didn't have time to properly give my students peer review instructions and practice. In the theme of classroom management, I'm wondering how I can effectively lead peer evaluations, especially when there is limited time.<br /><br />Background<br />In the previous class, we finally finished the last timed conversation, which was in the form of a debate on the role of women in the work force. I framed the debate using the "ping pong" format in which students presented their argument and the opposing speaking partner summarized the previous partner's points and the countered with their own position and points. It was necessary to practice this format before the actual presentation. We also recorded the presentation and the students will do a self-evaluation and a peer evaluation of their speaking partners and hand these evaluations in on Thursday, Aug. 5.<br /><br />Having completed the last timed conversation, we then had a little time to turn our attention to the final presentation. I asked the students to take large paper and brainstorm their ideas for their presentation. Some students created formal outlines while other students simply wrote down their ideas as they came to them. My plan was to follow-up with this activity in a speaking/peer evaluation task for the main activity for today's class.<br /><br />Narration<br />I began the class by telling the students the agenda for the days work. Then I asked/told a student that she would be in charge of the course and program evaluations, explained their purpose, set a 20 minute timer, and then left the classroom.<br /><br />When we returned to class, we began the student news summaries for the day, and I recorded some mistakes from their speech, which I will provide feedback through an email. There was some student lead discussion after the first presentation regarding the cause of immigration and how it is viewed in America. The second presentation was on the rights of Afghanistan women and the student compared how women are in her home country and Afghanistan.<br /><br />After the student presentations, I opened my Prezi website and used a self-made tutorial to introduce the different features of Prezi. There were some questions regarding the different features of Prezi. Some students had their heads on the table, were working on their computers, and were not looking at the presentation. Other students asked questions about how to import videos and adjust the starting point of the video.<br /><br />With 20 minutes in the class, I directed the students to share the brainstorm/outlines they generated in the previous class with a partner. Some students discussed their project without looking at their paper, and some discussed the topic only briefly and then waited. I walked around the room and asked students about their projects and answered questions. At the end of class, I quickly summarized some points that I noticed about the students' outlines and their brainstorming and potential areas of concern.<br /><br />We then wrapped up the class.<br /><br />Reflection<br />I feel that I have more disaster classes than I have successful classes. I think that from the reactions and behaviors of my students today, that lack of interest or motivation has finally reared its ugly head. The problem, then, is what is the cause of the lack of motivation for my students? Why do they appear so disconnected from the lesson?<br /><br />This problem began when I gave a short tutorial on how to use Prezi, which is an online program similar to PowerPoint. Prezi could be an important tool for students and in the last class, I had a student ask me how to use it. So I thought it would be a good idea to take some time to introduce the technology to the class. However, the students seemed really board (e.g., student falling asleep or checking Facebook in class). One immediate glaring reason for the lack of interest, it seems, is that students have already decided on the platform for their presentations. Thus, the presentation had little relevance to either their final project or to their real lives and so it failed to be relevant or informative.<br /><br />Second, I see that despite my attempts to train peer reviewing by discussing the need for peer review, the benefits of noticing and giving information, and the large amount of peer review practicing that we do, my students are not getting any better at it. In class my students exchanged very little relevant ideas on their projects without prompting. For example, two students were not discussing their projects when I approached them. I asked the first student if he understood his partner's presentation, and he said, "yes." Then I asked him if he thought it was well organized, and he said, "no." But the two students didn't seem to care that it wasn't well organized until I stared asking more questions. Another pair had discussed the wording in a presentation, but it wasn't until I began asking questions that the student's self-diagnosed a potential problem in her own presentation: her bias for Korean food over U.S. food on a presentation discussing the effects of U.S. food on Koreans who move to the U.S.<br /><br />I'm see now at the end of class that I needed to do a better job in giving examples of peer reviewing and taking a class time to devote to peer review. Also, I regret not conducting the ALR research on peer-review for this class because reading about the literature, studies, and theories behind noticing and peer-review would have helped. In all, I think my efforts to integrate peer review to help my students target specific grammatical problems has been inadequate.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-25292683503097598462010-07-27T17:00:00.000-07:002010-08-18T22:05:03.540-07:00Debate Topic: Should women try to be Superwomen?Having received some mid-term feedback from my students, I decided to change the final timed-conversation quiz from a person to person discussion to an in class debate. A debate has the following advantages over a timed conversation:<br /><br /><ul><li> Students must use a different genre/register of speaking particular to persuasive speaking</li><li> Students must listen carefully to their opposition, react to what the hear and give counter arguments and examples</li><li> Students must be confident and speak spontaneously</li><li> Students can effectively use their planning and writing work into their speaking</li><li> Accuracy and meaning are more important than fluency. Speaking fast won't persuade your audience</li><li> It gives students opportunity to research, state a position, and then build an argument from that position</li><li> Its more authentic/authenticated conversation and engaging for the student</li></ul><br />Finally, I think the debate format also coincides with my built in goals for my students: autonomy, peer-review, and noticing. My questions raised from this lesson are 1) whether or not I'm sequencing the unit/lesson in an effective manner, and 2) if the activities are being fully utilized by the students.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Background</span><br /><br />In the previous class, we wrapped up the traveling unit in which we reviewed some of the important traits of a presentation according to content. In particular, we looked a Presentation website and blog by Zen Presentation Sensei and ex-patriot Garr Reynolds. We then watched and commented on our presentations in terms of content and speaking. At the end of this lesson, I handed out an article from the Atlantic magazine titled "The End of Men: How Women are Taking Over Everything. Having a class made up of mostly female students and having a sort of barn-burning article, I decided to focus our energy for the next unit on presentation skills, find and focusing on a position, and defending a position. The debate format would help the students focus on building their vocabulary, develop clear and concise arguments, and produce accurate dialogue.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Narration</span><br /><br />We began the class in the usual fashion with the student news summaries. Two students summarized the news articles that they read and then introduced five new words to the class. After each presentation there was a brief round table discussion. Because this was a timed class, I used an online "time bomb" to count down the time we could allow for the news summaries and the timed conversations.<br /><br />After the news summaries, I asked the students what the thought of the reading assignment from last night. The students summarized what they had learned from the article. One student mentioned the term "Superwomen," which became the keyword for the debate. After a brief group discussion, I asked the students to have a five minute time conversation about their own mothers experiences trying to raise a family, work, and keep her own life. Students spoke for five minutes about their mothers, or in some cases, other members of their family. After they were finished, I asked them to tell the class about their partners' conversation.<br /><br />Next, the students handed out the a questionnaire that I had developed from the homework assignment. The aim of these questions were to raise their opinions on the subject and give a common provide a common schemata for the debate topic.<br /><br />For example:<br />Directions: Read the following statements below. On a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being strongly agree and 1 being strongly disagree) how would your rank these statements?<br /><br />1. Women and men are generally treated as equals.<br />1 2 3 4 5<br /><br />2. I believe that women must make a choice between career and family.<br />1 2 3 4 5<br /><br />3. Currently, women do not have the necessary resources to raise a family and peruse a career.<br />1 2 3 4 5<br /><br />We then watched a short clip from a movie called Tootsie, in which Dustin Hoffman a character who must pretend to be a women in order to get an acting job. We then had a short discussion on whether women are treated as equals in the work place and whether women should try to be the "superwoman" by raising their families and a pursuing a career.<br /><br />Finally, the students were placed into their debate teams and allowed time to work together to research four questions and then build an argument based on their in class research. At the end of the class, we opened the floor for questions and comments from the students and invited the observers to give their opinions on whether women should be expected to be both mother and professional.<br /><br />We then wrapped up the class<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Reflections</span><br /><br />In planning for this unit, my first thought was to use this topic for a timed-conversation, but as mentioned above, having received some feedback from students on the class and their requests for activities like debates, I thought this topic lent itself to a debate. The most important part of this lesson and the unit, was the article that stimulated the class discussion and giving students an opportunity to research information on the topic and then provide them with some in -class time to practice the ping-pong debate format.<br /><br />I also used the debate as an opportunity for the students to analyze their own speaking and perform a self-evaluation and a peer-evaluation. In order to set up the debate, I provided students with a questionnaire to raise their awareness of their opinions on the subject and some guided questions from the reading. By allowing the students to write and produce their ideas before talking, I tried to show them how writing could capture and produce ideas before the speaking event, which I hoped would allow them to speak more accurately and fluently.<br /><br />Also, in planning the two main lesson plans for this unit, I consciously followed Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain (Anderson et al., 2001). and Crabbe's (2003) task types. By developing a detailed unit plan and lesson plans, I could felt more confident on the quality of the tasks, the relationship between the tasks, and the task culminating in completing the unit goals. However, planning out the unit after the course began took time from the lesson planning and gave an uneven feel to the class that came before this unit.<br /><br />Having taught this lesson I could really see the value an a well planned unit and lesson plan and the need for goals to answer to both the unit and the lesson. I also learned how important sequencing the tasks according to Bloom's Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain and Crabbe's task types, but I also felt that the students' roles in the lesson planning should not be underestimated when creating a lesson plan and that the goals and task need to make sense to the students, which requires a careful forethought.<br /><br />Anderson, L., D. Krathwohl, P. Airasian, K. Cruikshank, R. Mayer, P. Pintrich, J. Raths, and M. Wittrock (Eds.). (2001). A taxonomy for learning and assessing. New York: Longman<br /><br />Crabbe, D. (2003). The quality of language learning opportunities. TESOL Quarterly, 37(1), 9-34.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-66587490862369410222010-07-26T14:47:00.000-07:002010-08-18T14:17:53.872-07:00Why do my students look so tired?Do I give a lot of homework? Do my students hate me because of it? Will the rebel and just not participate in class? Why can't I get them to take peer editing seriously? All of these questions are related to each other. All of these questions point to one ongoing problem in my class...noticing. How can I get my students to notice, be aware of, and investigate language for themselves? I was a believer in noticing, which is why I tried to integrate a lot of peer review into my class, but somewhere, somehow, something went wrong. This dilemma leads to only more questions: Did I properly train my students in peer review? Do they even know how to notice their own errors? Are the task that I'm using providing the proper opportunities for noticing? Am I confusing these two issues. The difficulty of teaching effective peer review techniques and noticing errors is a topic that I'm interested in exploring more for my ALR project.<br /><br />Background<br />Today, Monday, July 26, is the first day back from the weekend. In our previous class on Friday, we took a field trip to Cannery Row and visited a culinary institute, where we talked to a manager about the program, the students, food, and especially fresh and organic produce. For today's class, we began to peer evaluate the students' projects in which they created a 2 to 3 minute Photostory 3 or iMovie presentation on a destination they would like to visit. To help them frame their conversation, I gave them a handout with four topic areas from which they could chose from. We also reached the end of the "travel" topic and began our new topic: Is this a Women's world in which we will focus our discussion around women in the workforce and an article from the Atlantic titled: The End of Men: How Women are Taking Control of Everything.<br /><br />Narration<br />We started the class off with student news summaries. Nuria brought in a particularly interesting article on the legalization of marijuana and the arguments against and for legalization. The students liked this topic and we were able to hold some spontaneous conversation even though it took us over the allotted time for the activity. Next, I introduced some principals of giving presentations form the Zen Presentation website, which is often used by other teachers for the Fullbright and ESP programs.<br /><br />I handed out a peer evaluation worksheet and went over the worksheet and asked if they had any questions. Some students asked how "position" statements are used in presentations and if their final project should be persuasive, and how stories can be effectively used in more formal presentations. We watched the first presentation and then discussed what we liked about that presentation. I forgot to make enough copies so during the next presentation, I had to run upstairs and make more copies. While the students filled out their evaluation, I watched the presentation again. We did this process one more time for the final presentation and then began work on the vocabulary building exercise that I had originally planned for the beginning of class but had left for the presentations to finish so that we weren't switching back and forth from topics. This jigsaw puzzle task had the students looking for specific word definitions by skimming the article and then sharing their answers with their classmates.<br /><br />We then wrapped up class.<br /><br />Reflections<br />The main event/task for this class period was the student projects. There were two main objectives for the lesson and for the unit that I was trying to accomplish with the travel presentations.<br /><br />1) I wanted students to have practice time with technology that they might be able to utilize for their final presentation.<br /><br />2) I wanted give students a chance to peer review eachother's presentations for content.<br /><br />In setting up the peer review lesson, I remembered two important points that I had discovered while writing my research proposal on peer editing. One, students needed some type of training to be effective peer editors, and two, they needed to know the rubric or traits in which they were being evaluated on. The previous Friday I had been in the Digital Media Commons helping my students with iMovie and at the same time, Bob Cole was giving Fullbright students a class on developing effective presentations. Bob shared a website with some resources and also suggested that students checkout the blog called Zen Presentations by Garr Reynolds (<a href="http://www.presentationzen.com/">http://www.presentationzen.com/</a>). I also developed a rubric similar to the one that we used for our Timed Conversation, but used the categories from Reynold's website to build the evaluation criteria.<br /><br />I noticed that some students, during the presentation, just weren't using he rubric or even looking at it, and I think that's because I had too many criteria listed. I'm also skeptical that the Lykard Scale that I'm using for students to give an evaluation just isn't working and that a proper Holistic Scale rubric might be better suited, especially when their peer reviews count for grades. One student, who I won't name here, put all five's for her evaluation marks. When I asked her if she really thought that the presentation deserved all top marks, she said, "Yea, it was really good." I really think that I have to find a new way to train students to give effective feedback and usefulness of giving feedback in order to avoid this blase evaluation of their peers' presentations, especially if I'm trying to get them to notice grammatical errors or ways that they can improve their speaking performance.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-32775195656099202742010-07-21T14:51:00.000-07:002010-07-27T14:49:47.587-07:00Focus on Form: Does it work?Structure of English was an excruciatingly painful class for me. You see, I'm a native speaker of English, and I've studied English and Journalism as an undergraduate student. I've written for newspapers and I've also written some short stories, but I've never been good at grammar. In fact, I'm always making mistakes in my own writing. So, learning all of the metalinguistic labels, syntax, semantics, phonology, phonetics, and especially the sentence trees was a painful experience for me.<br /><br />At first I thought that English could be taught without teaching grammar. Students could pick up language just by taking in the language and repeating it (input and output), but I've learned through my own experiences in learning Japanese and through teaching students from both low and high communicative and grammatical competencies, that students need to know how to focus/notice and overcome the problems that keep them from progressing in their studies, or else they will fossilize or become frustrated.<br /><br />Also, teachers need to be competent in the language they are teaching. In my opinion, there is just no way around it. How can we expect our students to understand the language they are trying to speak if we are unable to describe it.<br /><br />Background<br />I'm continuing to build lessons that allow students to focus on the grammatical problems they are showing in their speaking. This focus on form lesson is centered on relative clauses and is designed to allow students to notice the form, meaning, and use of the relative clauses by first noticing the form, talking about the form and meaning, and then using authentic reading materials to give us some practice time. Last, we used some pictures to produce the "necessary" language of the grammatical structure we are studying. Please take a look at my lesson plan.<br /><br />Narration<br />Today, Mike observed my class, so I'm looking forward to his observation report and will compare it to this blog. We began the class with some house keeping. I asked students if they had copies of their evaluation for Matias' timed conversation. I'm missing one evaluation. I may have accidentally lost her evaluation.<br /><br />Then I asked student to chose a partner and have a timed conversation using the questions that I have them for their mini-project which is due Sunday at 10 p.m. They said they hadn't looked at the assignment yet, so I wrote three conversation questions on the board and the students conducted a three minute timed conversation. At the end of the conversation, I pointed out that they were all using "follow-up" questions to help expand the conversation, and I then asked the students for the other two strategies that we had used in class: negotiating meaning and shadowing.<br /><br />Then I explained to the students that we will be working on a grammar point that they all had some difficulty with during their last timed conversation: relative clauses. I handed out a worksheet that asked students to match the main clause with the relative clause. Then, when they finished, I asked the students to read the question and then tell me what noun in the main clause was being modified by the relative clause. There was a brief comical moment when one of the students answered that "The students that I slept on are tired." The student who was responsible for this sentence laughed so hard that she had to leave the room.<br /><br />Then I asked the students to choose one of three news stories being passed around and to find four examples of the relative clause in the stories. When they finished, I asked the students to write their sentences on the board. After they were finished, I asked the student to tell me if the relative clause was modifying a subject, object, or indirect object. Then I asked if the trace word was a subject, object, or indirect object etc...<br /><br />When we finished with the noticing the form and meaning of the relative clauses, I asked the students to produce sentences and showed them several pictures that I had found on the LA Times of people vacationing in the Gulf region despite the oil spill, and had some unusual features such as people in hazard suites or tar balls nearby. I asked each student to produce one sentences using relative clauses from different positions in the sentences.<br /><br />We then wrapped up the class.<br /><br />Reflection<br />Planning for this class took a lot of time, and I was very worried about whether I would actually be using Focus on Form attributes:<br /><ul><li>Providing students with opportunities to notice and create hypotheses on the form, meaning, and use of the targeted form</li><li>Using authentic materials as data samples</li><li>Encourage students to conduct inductive reasoning to understand the form, meaning, and use of the target structure</li><li>Give students opportunities to produce the language that necessitates the target form</li><li>Build in a way to assess the students' understanding in the post-task phase<br /></li></ul>I think my lesson, for the most part, follows the focus on form structure, although I'm not sure on the sequencing and formal introduction of the rules that help guide the students understanding of the target language. I began the focus on form lesson by priming the students knowledge of relative clauses and bring to their attention the part of speech and role of the noun being modified. I think that by actually telling them explicitly that the some relative clauses were modifying subjects, that I may have short changed my students inductive reasoning process. Also, I'm worried that the I presented the target language reasons to soon in the lesson and it may have been better to present those reasons after the students wrote their example sentences from the reading practice.<br /><br />However, I think the students did a great job in identifying relative clauses (even reduced relative clauses) and understanding the basic grammatical structure of the clauses. A question came up during this stage on when it was ok to delete the relative pronoun. One student said it was alright if it was the object of the sentence, but I said I would have to look it up. I'm so angry at myself that I couldn't remember this rule, because I remember covering it a billion times when we went over tree structures in Language Analysis and Structure of English. I looked up the rule in Cowan (2008, p. 432) and it states: Omission of a non-subject relative pronouns is possible in all O and OC relatives and in IO, OP and of which POS relatives that have a stranded preposition.<br />E.g., We just met the woman Alan likes so much.<br />We know the student the dean sent the message to.<br /><br />Cowan, R. (2008). <span style="font-style: italic;">The teacher's grammar of english: A course book and reference guide</span>. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-80998983414371301002010-07-20T16:42:00.000-07:002010-07-20T17:39:23.863-07:00What happens when students don't like your style?This week I've started student teacher conferences. It's often hard to hear criticism, especially when you're only paid for 80 minutes, and you spend the majority of your day preparing for the class and grading homework. When I ask for students feedback, I keep eye contact with them and then I try to paraphrase their criticism in the most mutually understandable way possible.<br /><br />For example:<br /><br />Student:<br />I really enjoy your class and the topics are interesting, BUT (and here it comes) I feel like you let some people talk too much. You have a lot of things planned and you don't get through your lesson plan because you let people talk too much.<br /><br />Me:<br />I understand. You want me to be more careful with managing time in the classroom, right?<br /><br />Student:<br />Yes, because I feel that some students talk too much and that its boring for the rest of us.<br /><br />(I'm trying to be like Bonny-Norton and realize that these students need time to establish identity and investment, but this student is highly fluent, accurate, and she's a bit lazy turning in her assignments, plus my class is Oral Communication. The whole point is allowing interaction and class discussion).<br /><br />Me:<br />I see what you are saying, but that's a problem because I need to allow other students time to talk.<br /><br />Student:<br />But you allow them to take up all of the time.<br /><br />Clearly, the student doesn't think I'm in control of the class. I thank her for her input write down her comments.<br /><br />The next student comes, and I ask the same question. Do you have any suggestions? This student is a little more frank.<br /><br />Student:<br />I like your class and its interesting, but the way you teach is a problem for me. I don't think writing in blogs is helping me. This is Oral Communication class, we should be talking.<br /><br />Me:<br />So you don't think there is a relationship between writing and speaking?<br /><br />Student:<br />No, because how is it helping me? Last session, in Oral Communication class we were discussing articles, debating, and talking. For me, I don't like writing and I don't think we need to for Oral Communication class.<br /><br />I swallow the pain and anger down. I try to explain that writing helps us organize our thoughts, practice vocabulary words before we use them, and afterwords, helps us notice how we use phrases. Writing reinforces speaking and speaking reinforces writing. He doesn't buy it, and there is really tense moment. We backtrack, retract, try to see it from different sides, but in the end he leaves with his opinion and I'm left wondering if I'm doing the right thing for my students. Is my class even effective? How come I can't convince my own students that the major skills are all related to each other? I have 20 minutes to prepare for my class, and I'm just a little upset. I wonder if I can keep my cool, can I be professional? Can I manage all of the "perceived" needs of my students?<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Background</span><br />For today's class we are continuing on with the travel topic, and I've prepared a model of a Photostory 3 presentation to show the students. I also prepared a handout with different questions about destinations around the U.S. The previous day, we worked on pronunciation and practicing noticing work with our homemade podcasts that were posted on the website over the weekend. Also, today I've handed back the grades and feedback for their first timed conversation. I thought to myself that student 1 from above said she really liked my feedback when I handed back her papers. Also, today we are catching up on our news summary assignments where students introduce five words and give a summary of a news article to the class. I'm especially proud of this assignment as it allows students to feel what its like to lead a class and direct their own learning efforts.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Narration</span><br />I started the class by giving back their timed-conversation work, and talking a little bit about the student feedback. I told the students that I would be trying to adjust to some of their requests, but I wouldn't be changing the format of the class. (Students look disappointed or bored.) I then ask if the students who will be giving their timed conversations are ready to begin. One of the students is missing, one is not prepared, but two others are. I hand it over to the first student. We have 20 minutes of news summaries to do in one class because I ran out of time in the last class and its already 8 minutes in. The topics are interesting, especially the topics on gay marriage laws in Argentina and the U.S. and on Alzheimer disease. By the time we finish, we have burned away most of the class time and I only have 20 minutes left.<br /><br />I have to radically change my plans and do a on the fly introduction of the task, which I had wanted them to do in class but have now assigned as homework. I handout the worksheet and tell ask them to cover two of the four topics and then introduce Photostory 3. The students are patient as a fumble with the Internet connections. Finally, I show them OWL, an online writing resources by the University of Purdue, which shows students how to provide citations to any information that they may use. I wrap up the class and let the students leave five minutes early.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Reflections</span><br />I want to talk a little bit about speaking and writing because I do believe speaking and writing are related, and it frustrates me that I can't explain it to my students and that I even up doubting myself. First, speaking and writing are productive tasks. Productive tasks are much more difficult to teach, I think, because they 1) require more energy from the students, 2) they can be frustrating because students tend to obsesses about their "mistakes," and 3) they require us to demonstrate our knowledge. It's not easy for us to face criticism when we speak or when we have a paper returned in red ink with obscure remarks and blotted out ideas. Because they are so hard to master, they are worth investing time into practicing. I believe that students who write first can organize their ideas, their vocabulary, phrases, and information so when they are asked to speak, they have resources to draw upon. If you are giving a presentation, you prepare by reading, then you write an outline or a full speech, then you put it aside and see what you can produce. Production, communication, interaction, noticing, speaking, and writing.<br /><br />Questions:<br />How can I better explain to my students the relationship between speaking and writing?<br />How can I show students how to capitalize on their noticing opportunities with speaking and writing?<br />Should I just ditch the twice weekly blogs? Is that too much to ask?<br /><br />I'm exhausted. Time to sleep.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-66140205964030084912010-07-14T16:13:00.000-07:002010-07-14T17:23:56.108-07:00Seat of the pants technology classBackground (July, 8, 2010)<br />In the previous class we watched video on food from Anthony Bourdain's show No Reservation on the Travel Channel. I selected the episode that had to do with Chile and we discussed as a class the different foods from our countries and how they are tied to our culture. We got half way through this lesson and did not get to the information gap exercise and writing revision tasks that I had planned.<br /><br />For this class, however, I had planned for us to make a field trip to a non-profit organization to talk with them on the different issues. My vague plan was to have us visit the aquarium so we could talk about the effects of the oil spill in the gulf, however, after calling them I found that there was nobody who could talk to us and I had to cancel the field trip because I hadn't made other arrangements in time. So instead, we went to the Digital Media Commons for our class in order for the students to receive training in some technology that would help them build their final project. I experienced several problems in that I wasn't fully prepared to model the technology iMovie, so I asked Mike Garnett, to step in and help me with a lesson that he had developed in his own class. The second problem is that I had trouble managing the classroom and getting students to work in groups.<br /><br />Narrative<br />I began planning this class the night before, and I developed full lesson plan, but now after reviewing my lesson plan, I noticed that I failed to put in the necessary time to make a comprehensive lesson plan and goals, and I had merely listed the different points that I wanted to cover in the lesson: brainstorming different tools using Typewith.me as a class, taking a tour of audacity and flickr, and then letting Mike make his iMovie presentation.<br /><br />However, the actual class progressed much different from my outline. First, I walked with the students over to the DMC and met Mike along the way. We went up to the main commons room and then took a quick survey of the students who had Macs and PC. We then loaded the Typewith.me page on the main computer screen the students could log in and begin the first task. The link to the Typewith.me page is written below. I gave a short introduction to how to think of technology in terms of situation, challenge, and tool, which I and Sarah Springer had used in the CALL 500 weekend workshop and in the CALL Curriculum Design class. In the typewith.me pad, I gave the students three different situations in which to think of a tool that might help. For example:<br /><br /><div style="font-style: italic;" class="" id="magicdomid11"><span class="">Situation 1: You are at a business meeting you need to present information on a new product with data and graphs.</span></div><div style="font-style: italic;" class="" id="magicdomid12"><br /></div><div style="font-style: italic;" class="" id="magicdomid13"><span class="author-g-43ul69ot3m36pg7d">Challenge: You have to find tools that can build graphs and charts. You have to deliver the presentation in person.</span></div><div style="font-style: italic;" class="" id="magicdomid15"><br /></div><div style="font-style: italic;" class="" id="magicdomid16"><span class="author-g-e394gggxn1z122z2z122zsrg">PowerPoint</span><span class="author-g-491sy5aw9n7h7yol"> (Trang) (Trang) </span><span class="author-g-x3ud7wyz122zpyjotejd">ccartoon,cartoon,cartoon,cartoon,cartoon,</span><span class="author-g-491sy5aw9n7h7yol"> </span><span class="author-g-x3ud7wyz122zpyjotejd"> annie annie annie annie annie</span><span class="author-g-491sy5aw9n7h7yol"> </span></div><div style="font-style: italic;" class="" id="magicdomid17"><span class="author-g-88yqz122zrbqihr9qx3g">Powerpoint as well, yes, you are right, PJ! Nataliya.</span></div><div style="font-style: italic;" class="" id="magicdomid18"><span class="author-g-5csz122zg4jee0w09p4g">Nuria</span></div><div style="font-style: italic;" class="" id="magicdomid19"><span class="author-g-u0wwk85uyoynods0">Photo Stories, Matias</span></div><div style="font-style: italic;" class="" id="magicdomid20"><span class="author-g-e394gggxn1z122z2z122zsrg">Prezi (like powerpoint)</span></div><br />In pairs or as individuals, the students wrote names of tools or they attempted to describe the materials or tools needed for different situations, E.g., "photos form the Internet." Some of the students didn't list tools at all and just watched while some students listed actually tools for each situation.<br /><br />The brainstorming task lasted for approximately 15 minutes as we had to repeat instructions or help students log onto the page and then wait for them to list different tools. So, I decided to ask Mike to make his iMovie presentation first and to skip the audacity and the flickr presentations until later because I realized that it would take us much longer to work on iMovie than anticipated. We first grouped students into pairs for students who had PC, but after we decided to put the students on the DMC Macs. After everyone was logged on and had iMovie open, Mike passed out a handout that explained the basics. Mike began to introduce the iMovie while the students followed along on their computers. He then gave the students a task of importing pictures and copying background music to the iMovie project folder. We then assisted students individually to help them set up the iMovie files and import their files. This took approximately 35 minutes. Then I asked Mike to show the students how video was imported. Mike then showed the class how to import and edit video and audio.<br /><br />I wrapped up the class by handing out the final project description and requirements hand out. I read the description of the final presentation, the step by step process for completing the presentation, grading guide, and the checklist. After some student questions, we adjourned for the day.<br /><br /><br />Reflections<br />The problems with the tasks and the classroom management, I think, began with the lack of preparation. I'm beginning to realize how difficult it is to plan a content rich class that incorporates technology, peer editing, and class projects threads into one class. I began the class preparation the night before but only completed the final project presentation paper and didn't have time to get to the computer lab to create a model for the iMovie, Audacity, or Flickr. Plus, as I said before, my lesson plan consisted of a list of things that I wanted to accomplish but lacked a list of goals and completed materials for the class. Without the help of Mike, I wonder what I would have done in the class with iMovie. Also, I think that brainstorming, I'm learning, requires physical objects that can be moved, removed, or added. In the previous CALL sessions, we began the brainstorming with large blank pieces of paper and post-it notes. We could write, edit, and manipulate the post its together, and it was easy for the students to see the structure of the exercise. I'm slowly moving away from having Typewith.me as a class sharing tool even though it is a powerful tool and really fun to use.<br /><br />Also, students notice and respond to disorganization. If the students see teachers struggling to set up a computer program, or if the teacher has divided attention between what they are trying to teach and the technology that they are trying to deliver the content with, then students respond by not taking the lesson seriously or tuning out. This problem can create serious damage to our reputation as competent teachers.<br /><br />Finally, I'd like to mention that focused goals help keep not only the students on target, but they also help keep our teaching efforts on target by targeting our teaching energy into the most important aspects of the lesson. Even though I hadn't written out my goals in my lesson plan for this day, it didn't take me long to realize that the most important thing my students needed was some time-on-task with the iMovie learning environment, and that, in order for them to maximize their time in the class, they had to accomplish several tasks that Mike was asking them to perform. If I had thought about the days' lessons in tasks and then written them out, I would have noticed that a more targeted class with task-based instruction and assessment would be ideal in checking students' progress and learning experience.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-84089922879007361292010-07-07T14:51:00.000-07:002010-07-07T15:19:06.265-07:00July 7, 2010: Timed Conversations & Peer ReviewBackground<br /><br />Today we continued the practice timed conversations and began work on introducing the topic of Food: Is it Good for You? In the previous two classes we have been practicing a timed conversation for five minutes and peer reviewing each other's conversations. The peer review process is, I think, critical for advanced level students who are looking to refine their own speaking skills.<br /><br /><br />Narrative<br />I started the class with a trivia game that was based off of a vocabulary game that we played last week. I divided the class into three teams and asked each team a trivia question. If they couldn't get the answer, then the next team was allowed to answer. I noticed that some students enjoyed the friendly competition and other did not.<br /><br />Next, Nuria and Claire did presented their news summaries. I reminded each student to hand out copies of their article and introduce five words. Nuria used an article on China and spoke without notes or cues. She sometimes wandered in the topic, but she received constructive feedback from her peers on the topic and her speaking performance. Claire was next and although she used notes to guide her speaking, she also wrote the words she wanted to introduce to her classmates and used them to guide her speaking. She also received constructive criticism on her speaking performance and there was a lot of generous talk on her subject as it had to do with food.<br /><br />We then started the timed conversations. I handed out fresh evaluation sheets to the groups and reminded them to be vigilant in their comments and scoring. There were some questions raised in exactly what some of the terms, such as "fluency" and "accuracy" means, and some students suggested that the scale wasn't sufficient enough to rate the students performance. I reminded the students that this was a practice and that we should notice what each person's speaking level might be and then used that as a gauge to evaluate them in their final speaking performance.<br /><br />Ximena and Trang was first. Trang started the conversation with questions and seemed to be leading the conversation but then Ximena dominated the conversation with a long story about the earthquake in Chili. After the conversation, students mentioned the fact that Ximena had not given Trang ample opportunity to talk and that Trang had asked too many conversations.<br /><br />Then, Claire went with the help of Annie. Annie led the conversation by mentioning a death of a famous actor in Korea, which showed that Annie was aware of her partner and was engaging her to allow Claire to speak. Claire gave a great description of the economic crisis and how it was affecting Korean society, especially with the rise in suicides. She also self-corrected many of her own mistakes.<br /><br />After the 5 minute timed conversation, our class watched a video from the Anthony Bourdain show. I warned the students that Bourdain might be difficult to understand at times, but I wanted them to concentrate on how he presented his trip to Chili and the food he ate. Afterwords, we had a round table discussion on food and places.<br /><br />Reflection<br /><br />We were only able to finish half of the lesson today, and I'm wondering if I haven't packed too much into my lessons and that we could spend more quality time on aspects like peer review. At first I thought since my students were at such a high level and that they must have done peer review previously that they didn't need a lot of time on training, but after the previous classes in which we peered reviewed each other's speaking, I found think that peer review training is essential and that a rubric should be given to the students right away. I knew this from my peer review research proposal that I wrote from Research Methods, and from Language Assessment, so I don't know why I haven't been more careful.<br /><br />Things I need to do:<br />1) Find how I want to measure speaking and develop an easy to use and comprehensive rubric that can be used for peer review.<br /><br />2) A lot more time to training and practicing peer review. This means doing some research on peer review training. John Hedgcock's book on writing may be a good source as well as the speaking documents in Kathy Bailey's assessment class.<br /><br />3) Next week, we tape record the timed conversations so I have to remember to bring a tape recorder too. This is also a good opportunity to record for practicum.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-83551032143812484652010-06-30T17:00:00.000-07:002010-08-19T15:57:28.455-07:00Setting Goals: You can do it!My oral communication class has seven high-level English learners who are very smart, very fluent, and--for the most part--very accurate. The problem with teaching students with a high level of proficiency for me became, what do I teach? So I searched around in the Principles and Practices textbooks for clues and re-read my initial position statement for this class. The following is some of the guiding ideas that I collected for instructing high-level students.<br /><br />Brown (2007) states that teaching such high level learners can be very difficult, especially given the temptation to just hand over a topic and letting the students speak without purpose or goal. At this level students need targeted goals in order to overcome the hurdles that prevent them from improving their accuracy and to find some kind of progress. For many students at such a high level, “plateauing” becomes a problem in which students struggle to make progress in improving for long stretches of time.<br /><br />Consider the following quote from Brown on strategic learning:<br /><br />"All too often, language teachers are so consumed with the 'delivery' of language to their students that they neglect to spend some effort preparing learners to 'receive' the language. And students, mostly unaware of the tricks of successful language, simply do whatever the teacher tells them to do, having no means to question the wisdom thereof. In an effort to fill class hours with fascinating material, teachers might overlook their mission of enabling learners to eventually become independent of classrooms--that is, to become autonomous learners" (p. 258-259).<br /><br />Brown also states in teaching advanced level students:<br /><br />"Some aspects of language, of course, need focal attention for minor corrections, refinement, and other 'tinkering'; otherwise, teachers would almost be unnecessary. So your task at this level is to assist in the ongoing attempt to automatize language and in the delicate interplay between focal and peripheral attention to selected aspects of language" (p. 127-128).<br /><br />Kumaravadivelu (2003) relates that self-directed or self-access learning contains a narrow view, a view that focuses on how learners can become self-learners through critical thinking, decision making, independent action, gathering knowledge, taking responsibility or initiative, confront weaknesses or failures, develop self-control or self-discipline, stop relying on instruction for learning, and realize that autonomy relates to interacting between the learner, the teacher, and the educational environment.<br /><br />By combining psychological/cognitive strategies with learning strategies students can become more autonomous and productive learners. This includes using a wide variety of learning strategies, choosing the best strategy for the task, and how to monitor their performance, and how to access the outcome (Kumaravadivelu, 2003).<br /><br />Taking these ideas together, we can see that despite creating a rich, well directed, and assessable lesson plan, students must be prepared to receive the information from the lesson and utilize the information in producing language and learning to stretch their language learning development. By having students take steps to identify their language learning goals and to self-correct them through classroom or non-classroom learning, we are maximizing the potential for each student to become self-directed and motivated learners. Students who are prepared with the proper and wide ranging learning strategies and are capable of critically thinking, noticing, internalizing, and producing language in their L2 without direct instruction or hand holding.<br /><br />Moreover, students who have identified the grammatical, social, or cognitive hurdles that prevent them from learning a second language will be much more capable of overcoming these obstacles and adapt their learning from their experiences and capable of measuring their own progress.<br />Therefore, knowing what our language learning goals and the strategies to overcome them are critical for our students.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Background</span><br /><br />In the previous lesson we began to cover the topic of the global economy as stimulus material for students' timed conversations. I also asked student to write three learning goals in their blogs that were 1) explicitly stated, 2) achievable, and 3) tractable or assessable. In today's lesson, we will review the goals from their blogs and use a worksheet to narrow details about what they would like to learn.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Narration</span><br /><br />We began class by reviewing several example sentences from the students' blogs that from the a previous assignment to identify basic grammatical problems. The problems included tense agreement, modifying compound nouns, relative clauses, and use of quantifiers such as "a lot." When asked, students were able to correct most of the errors but they did not understand why. In some cases, I was unable to provide an explanation for an error and its correction.<br /><br />Next, we reviewed a students' blogs and examples of the goals written in the blog:<br /><br /><a href="http://bit.ly/9Q3l3A"><span style="font-weight: bold;">http://bit.ly/9Q3l3A</span></a><br /><br />I also decided to show some examples of broad, incomplete, or non-assessable goals so students and then model a learning goal that I created for my Japanese studies. I copied these goals and produced them on a "typewith.me.com" page.<br /><br /><a href="http://typewith.me/oralcommunicationd"><span style="font-weight: bold;">http://typewith.me/oralcommunicationd</span></a><br /><br />After reviewing the student goals and the model goals, the students were given a handout in order to revise their goals. The remaining time of the period was used to complete the goal sheet although few students could revise more than one goal. Some students also said that they did not feel that setting goals was useful for their learning style or had experience in setting goals before.<br /><br />Finally, toward the end of the class, I directed student to discuss with a partner their language learning history through a timed conversation. Students asked their partner how they learned English, if they thought it was effective, and what comments they received on their initial goal. Each person then reported how their language partner learned English and their opinions on effective ways to learn languages. By the time this conversation was complete, we had run out of time and only half of the lesson plan was completed.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Reflections</span><br /><br />This was a discouraging lesson as a teacher because not only did the students not understand the purpose of writing goals but they also didn’t see the usefulness in doing so. After the final timed conversation, several students related that they didn’t understand why they were being asked to set goals and also stated that they felt goal setting didn’t fit into their learning style. At this point, I had to explain some of my rationale for the class set up, and I think having to explain the rationale dissuaded students from the usefulness of the class.<br /><br />I have to ask myself, should I have been more discrete in what I was trying to ask my students to accomplish? Should I have asked my students first whether they thought setting goals was useful, or was I correct in pushing for this element of the class curriculum? In retrospect, I can see now that the students were unable to relate the goals they set to their real-world and their learning practices and that they were also unable to maintain or track their progress. However, I still believe that goal setting is a vital key for a class with highly proficient language learners who are struggling to refine their accuracy, and I hope to improve this aspect of the class so students can learn to set and track their own goals in the future.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-51118623866912718732010-06-29T12:43:00.000-07:002010-08-25T10:12:52.999-07:00My first day June 23, 2010Today is my first independently taught ESL class at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. I’ve studied a lot about teaching and learning, so I’m anxious to get back into the classroom and test out some of the ideas that I’ve developed over the last two semesters. I’ve brought several important “principals” and “macrostrategies” to my classroom.<br /><br />Principals:<br />First, I’d like my students to develop their learning skills and become self-directed/autonomous learners.<br /><br />Second, I would like my students to grow in their accuracy by concentrating on noticing and progressing in their inter language.<br /><br />Third, I would like my students to collaborate and interact in groups and pairs, but I would also like them to develop peer-editing and self-evaluation techniques that match the goal of learning autonomy.<br /><br />Macrostrategies:<br /><br />First, I want to be conscious of maximizing learning by giving students opportunities to share and explore relevant and interesting topics.<br /><br />Second, I’d like them to develop a language awareness of different socio, cultural, and political influence that influence language discourse.<br /><br />Third, I’d like to focus on using student writing to capture and complement my students speaking so that they can become more conscious speakers and thus more accurate.<br /><br />Background<br /><br />Today is the first lesson. Even though my syllabus is complete and I have a website that all the students can use and refer to, I didn’t have a chance to complete my lesson plan as fully as I would have like to. In preparation for this class I created a class website where students can view the class syllabus, a class calendar, assignments, and resources. There is also a class blog site where students will post blogs for other students to read. I also have plans for students to create their own blogs using blogger.com where they can reflect on their speaking. I think these two spaces will be important for students to formally post their ideas and to internally reflect on their own learning process. The first step before finalizing the class syllabus and developing lesson plans will be to handout a student questionnaire to self-assess their own learning background and goals and to gather data for their interests, needs, and weaknesses and strengths.<br /><br />Narration<br /><br />I began the class by giving the students a self-introduction on myself including my teaching experience, my studies, my travels to Japan etc. Then I began the ice breaker activity by asking each student to take some candy from a bag. When everyone had a piece, I asked them to tell us something about themselves that no one else knows for every piece of candy they took. Students shared where they were from, what foods they liked, what sports they liked, where they have traveled and lived before, and why they were studying at the MIIS IESL program. <br /><br />Next I played a video of an interview on TV of a movie star and asked the students to notice speaking strategies such as follow up questions, repeating/shadowing, and storytelling. Students watched the video and then we discussed the actor and the interview. <br /><br />Then, I explained that in this class we would be having timed conversations in which students must hold a conversation for a certain amount of minutes. In this case, we chose 2.5 minutes. I asked the students to talk about a place they recommended their speaking partners should visit. All the students made it to the 2.5 minutes and some past the time marker. Next, the students related what they learned from their partner by summarizing where their speaking partner suggested that they visit. <br /><br />Finally, I handed out a self-evaluation and questionnaire that asked students to give their opinion on their own language learning abilities and history. For homework, I asked the student to begin a blog in which they will write a brief language learning history about themselves and what they thought was good and or bad about it.<br /><br />Reflections<br /><br />Well, it’s the beginning of the ESL session, and this class is my first official/solo class that I’ve taught since 2002. It’s great to be in control of my own class and set the syllabus agenda, assignments, materials, and lessons. I hope my students feel energetic about the class, that the assignments are useful, and that they learn something, of course. In considering what I want to focus on in this semester, I revisited some of my earlier work from the past two semesters. I’m definitely interested in peer-editing as a tool for noticing and correcting mistakes and I’m interested in building strong learning habits so students can become independent learners. <br /><br />Today, I think the timed-conversations worked really well in helping the students break the ice with each other and to become conditioned to the tasks that I will ask them to complete for this class. Eventually, I hope to capture students’ timed conversations by recording themselves using tools such as Audacity or Garage Band so they can reflect on their own speaking performance. I also want them to write and try to capture and plan what they will say before they say it to help them smooth out their accuracy. <br /><br />I was also struck about the amount of planning work involved in preparing for this class. I didn’t have time to complete all of my lesson planning for class so I was a bit nervous that I would flop on the first day. I’ve resolved to have a complete lesson plan for every lesson.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6417880442285682669.post-16216995759478474912010-06-15T16:28:00.000-07:002010-08-19T15:59:27.723-07:00Why keep a journalFarrell (2007) states that teaching journals are the more effective way to become a reflective teacher and the most natural way to do research. He lists the following benefits for keeping a journal:<br /><br /><ul><li>Its a way to clarify one's own thinking</li><li>As a way to explore one's own beliefs and practices</li><li>As a way of becoming more aware of one's teaching styles</li><li>As a way of monitoring one's own practices</li><li>In order to provide postitive feedback on one's teaching, for example by writing about successful experiences</li><li>To vent one's frustrations and set goals for remedying problems</li><li>To raise a way of collaborating with other teachers in exploring teaching issues</li><li>As a way to collaborate with other teachers in exploring teaching issues</li><li>As a way of triggering insights about one's self as a teacher and about one's teaching</li><li>To provide a record of one's teaching for others to read</li></ul>As a process of self-discovery, writing journals can give a voice to our teaching and they can help focus our energy. After reading this article, I've decided to change the way I am structruring my teaching journal. I've decided in order to keep my journal writing fresh, engaging, and practical, I'm going to restructure my journal entry in the following way:<br /><br />1. I'll talk about an incident or thought that happened in my teaching to lead the journal.<br />2. I'll narrate or bullet the events of the day<br />3. I'll discuss what events have caught my attention and that I want to focus on.<br />4. I'll analyze what happened and what possible changes can be made and pose questions to my invisible audience or to myself for my next journal entry.<br /><br />I reserve the right to modify my journals as I see fit so that they are relevant to my teaching, myself, and my students.SakeSamhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06128355335569771036noreply@blogger.com0