DNT as in Do No Talking (Can ya dig it?)

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

This year I was lucky enough to snag all of the first year communicative English classes at my high school (or maybe the other teachers just avoided them).  But I always run into the same problem with my beginning classes.  How can I present basically the same grammar patterns and very similar vocabulary in new and novel ways week after week?  I’ve done a series of Dogme lessons over the past two months and left the topic of discussion up to the students.  This has gone a long way to providing a sense of “newness” which I think is important for any language class.  

But I also think there’s something wrong with continually relying on new language to make a class work.  How do we move to fluency practice if we don’t find interesting ways to recycle the content which was used in previous classes?  One of my friends likes to use some kind of strange pointer when teaching a class which is full on review.  He will carry an apple throughout the class, point to students with the apple, tap the white-board with the apple, and sometimes even toss the apple back and forth with students while engaging them in conversation.  Just the apple in the classroom distracts learners enough so they don’t have that “same old same old” feeling. (If you have the time, I hope you might leave some of your making-review-class-fresh-again tips in the comment section or tweet them out at #freshreview.)

After the Dogme lessons, I wanted to do some serious consolidation work, so the other day I walked into my class, passed out pieces of blank paper to the students, and wrote the word, “Hello,” on the board.  I waited.  A boy in the second row up-talked with a, “Hello?”  I nodded and underlined the word hello.  Everyone, in unison, said, “Hello,” and we were off.

I wrote:

              ① How are you?

Then I held up one finger and pointed to Mari-Chan.  She actually cocked her head and said, “Two?”  Maybe she thought we were going to do some counting exercises.  But the boy next to her helped out by whispering, “I’m fine.”  So Mary said, “I’m fine.” Which was fine, but not as fine as if she had said how she really felt.  Which is what I got from the long string of “sleepy” and “tired” responses that followed.  Once everyone seemed in the groove, I pivoted and wrote:

② What’s your favorite movie? 

I held up two fingers and pointed to Kusu-Kun, who immediately shot back, “Howl’s Moving Castle.”  Which I guess kind of set the tone for the question because after that almost every student answered with a Ghibli flick.  

③ Why do you like it?

This time I pointed to Kusu-Kun again and held up two fingers.  He said, “Howl’s Moving Castle” again and seemed annoyed that I was asking him the same question twice in a row. Then I held up three fingers.  He paused.  Started to say something.  And then shook his head.  So I pointed to Rika-Chan first with two fingers (“Spirited Away”) and then three fingers (“It’s very interesting.”)  

We finished running through:

④ What’s your best subject?

⑤ Where do you spend your free time?

⑥ Tell me about your best friend.

before one of the more self-assertive students finally shouted out, “Sensei!  Why aren’t you talking?”

So I picked up my white-board marker and turned to face the board.  I started to write, “I haven’t talked yet during class…” when I noticed it.  Silence.  My back was turned to the class.  I was obviously going to be writing for a while, but the students hadn’t started chatting with each other in Japanese.  There was only the deep hum of the industrial heaters warming up the room. In total silence, I finished writing up the instructions, “Why do you think I am not talking today?  Please write two reasons.”  There’s a list of student’s answers to this question at the bottom of this post.  See if you can guess what the students wrote before taking a peek at their answers.  And I want to give a big shout out to Yoshiko here for asking the question in the first place.  I often forget to solicit student feedback to see what the students think is going on in class.  And if I didn’t have students who took the time to check-in themselves, I would spend most of class time nodding off on the highway of intuition.   

I walked around and peeked at students answers.  While peeking, I scrawled “Talk” or “Don’t talk” on the bottom of each student’s paper in thick red marker.  Some of them stopped to give me a quizzical look, but that was about all the reaction I got.  Then back at the board I wrote “Don’t Talk” next to the six sentences and on the other side of the board I wrote, “Talk.”  I drew a nice firm blue arrow from the “don’t talk” to the “talk side” of the board.  

Then I dragged Kusu-Kun up and kind of positioned him in front of the word “Talk.”  I took up my position in front of “Don’t talk.”  I held up some fingers.  Kusu-Kun answered.  Everyone seemed to understand the gist of what was going on.  I picked up my kitchen timer and flashed it to the students.  I wrote, “3 Minutes,” on the board.  I looked at the students and there were some nods.  I wrote, “OK, start.”  And they did.  Half the students walked around flashing fingers.  Half the students walked around answering.  While they were practicing I sat and listened.  I was just enjoying the fact that the students were so actively engaged before I realized that almost every student speaking was talking in complete sentences.  Complete sentences.  Complete sentences are the white truffles of my class.  I can root around for hours without finding a one.  And here they were littered all over the classroom.

Finally, I wrote “EVERYONE TALK for 5 minutes” on the board, held up the kitchen timer and hit the start button.  Students, even though they were free to talk, continued to hold up fingers for the questions as they said them.  I think these gestures added an element of redundancy which is often missing from classroom speak.  And those complete sentences just kept on tumbling out.  5 minutes wasn’t enough time for students to say what they wanted to say.  The timer beeped, but the students were talking so loudly, they couldn’t hear it.  So I used the extra time to write, “How did it feel when all the students could finally talk during the last 5 minute practice?” on the board.  Slowly the students returned to their sheets and started composing their answers, some of which are listed at the bottom of this post.

For students to shift from using short term memory to accessing chunks of language from long term memory, they need to practice the language over and over (Ellis, 2001).  But in an EFL environment, they’re not going to get that practice outside of the classroom, or at least not very often.  Having a wide array of methodologies to draw on is one way we can give our students multiple exposures to the same language without them (or us for that matter) getting bored.  When seen in this light, all of the arguments about methodology can seem a little beside the point, especially when dealing with true beginners.  The real question is, are the students engaged with the language?  Are they using it?  Are they invested?

50 minutes of no talking.  It was a long 50 minutes for me.  Judging by the students’ response, less so for them.  When I finally wrote, “See you later,” up on the board as the bell chimed, I felt pretty sure that it had been a useful 50 minutes as well.  Because the students reply, “See you later.  I gave it my best,” was still ringing off the walls as I walked out the door. 

Reasons given by students for why the teacher did not talk in class:

1)      Talking makes you tired

2)      You feel sick

3)      You want us to practice our reading

4)      You want us to pay more attention

5)      It’s fun

6)      You want us to see how much English we understand when reading

7)      Even without words, you can find a way to say what you want to say

8)      You are in a bad mood.

9)      To learn how to read people’s feelings.

What students wrote about how they felt when everyone in the class could finally speak:

1)      I was happy I could have a normal conversation.

2)      I felt like speaking is really convenient.  I could understand the power of talking.

3)      I felt so refreshed.  It gave me a lot of energy.

4)      Excited.

5)      I could answer the questions easily and quickly

6)      I felt like speaking is really good.

7)      I felt safe

Reference:

Ellis, N. C. 2003. ‘Constructions, chunking, and connectionism: The emergence of second language structure’ in C. Doughty and M. H. Long (eds): Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Blackwell.

Image:

"Keep Silence" from: http://www.designofsignage.com/application/symbol/railway/largesymbols/keepsilence.html

Role-play as (train wreck) learning experience

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

 

Every week I teach an intensive language class for interested students (and by interested, what I really mean is students whose home-room teachers have decided that said student is interested).  The number of students and student levels fluctuates wildly from week to week.  And I am always looking around for new ways to spend two or three hours after which all of the students will have some sense of satisfaction.  Kevin Giddens’ blog is a great source of lesson ideas and I stumbled across a description of a particularly interesting beginner Bosnian lesson  facilitated by Mary Cay Brass at the Summer Master of Arts in Teaching program at the SIT Graduate Institute.  So first off, I would like to lay all the blame for this disastrous lesson on thank Kevin for a great lesson idea which I fiddled with to the point of destruction.   

There were only five students in the class on this day, two lower level first year students and 3 upper level second year students. The six of us sat in a tight circle in the middle of the room with a table in the middle of the circle.  On the table was a voice recorder.  In the standard way this lesson works, students think of something--anything really--that they would like to say in English, tell the teacher and the teacher then provides the student with a translation of the sentence into the target language (in this case English).  But as I was dealing with a mixed group and felt like the students would be missing the energy and excitement that would me generated by studying a novel language like Bosnian, I decided to add some extra spice to the lesson goulash.  I decided to turn it into a role play.  I figured that if the students were in a role where it did not matter what their English levels were, but had to work together for a common end, then it might lead to better group cohesion and everyone might get more out of it.  And this was the absolutely brilliant idea that flashed out of the nether regions of my brain: have the students pretending to be UN Peacekeepers about to head off to a hot spot.  I explained that they had two and a half hours to learn the phrases they might need to interact with the native population and keep themselves safe.  I was going to be taking the role of their language instructor for this intensive course, but as they were trained soldiers who had a better idea of what kind of language they would need to master, I would be leaving all language generation up to them. 

I waited.  The students looked at each other.  One of the lower level students kept looking around at the upper level students pleadingly.  The other lower level student just looked at the ground.  Finally, one of the upper level students screwed up some courage and in Japanese said, “Do you and your family have enough to eat?”  I said the sentence clearly and slowly in English.  The student repeated it a few times, picked up the voice recorder, and said it into the machine.  I waited.  Nervous laughter.  More nervous laughter.  Shifting in chairs. 

One of the students said to me, “Kevin, please help us.” 

              “I want to help you,” I said.  “But my role is to support you.  I’m afraid you will have to come up the sentences on your own.”

              One of the three upper level students started giggling uncontrollably and left the room.  And I waited.  A few minutes later the giggler popped back into the room.

              For 40 minutes this pattern continued and we ended up with 10 sentences which included:

              “This area is not safe.  Follow me as quickly as possible.”

              “We would like to throw a party for you to thank you for your help.”

              “Our countries might seem like enemies, but I am here to help you.”

              “Is there anything you need?  Blankets?  Heating oil?”

               

I then wrote up those sentences on the board with the literal translations beneath each word and passed out 5 long slips of paper to each student.  The students were then encouraged to pick up some of the language from the board and jot it down on the slips of paper.  They could pick just a word, a phrase, or a complete sentence.  Finally all the students gathered back together and were given 15 minutes to make novel sentences, folding the slips, placing them next to each other, or placing one slip directly on top of another for word or phrase replacement.  After they had made a novel sentence, I would ask them what they had wanted to express and if necessary I would correct the sentence so it was accurate.  The students enjoyed this part of the lesson and it worked pretty much as I had hoped.  There were a lot of interesting collocations and phrases that ended up becoming apparent, like “as ~ as possible,” and “I would like to ~.”  The higher level students did a lot of scaffolding for the lower level students.  A bunch of nonsense sentences got formed.  And students started to smile.

So what went wrong in the beginning?  I talked to the students and the biggest complaint was that they had no idea of what it would mean to be a peacekeeper heading off to a hot spot.  Woops.  My bad.  Part of the problem was a basic mistake in how I conceptualized the class.  I wanted to have a time limited role-play which would generate a fair number of sentences quickly enough to move on to the second stage of the lesson.  But I had confused goal with process.  I didn’t simply want students to take on a temporary role to practice a specific type of interaction, like buying a pair of glasses or refusing to go on a date, which is what role-playing, is good for.  I had wanted the students to more fully inhabit the role of Peacekeepers and for the content of the lesson to flow from that role.  This isn’t a role play.  This is a simulation.  Drama activities in the language classroom can be seen along a continuum from scripted on one side to ever more improvisational on the other (Kao & O’Neill).  Improvisational dramatic activities in ELT can further be broken down into three rather broad categories:

1)      Improvisational role-playing: limited time duration.  Used to practice a specific type of interaction in which a specific language might or might not be targeted. 

2)      Simulations: extended activities in which students do not take on roles, but play themselves in novel situations and in which the process of production is perhaps even more important than the final product.

3)      Process Drama: where students take on multiple roles which can span a number of different situations all dealing with a similar issue which is to be explored through dramatic response. 

There are a lot of texts on simulations and process drama filled with concrete advice like: ask questions of the participants to let them help shape the situation (Jones); verify that the situation is understood well enough to, “sustain reality of function.” (Jones); describe the “frame” of the drama well enough to give the dramatic act a sense of tension (Bowell & Heap).  All of which I blithely ignored.  What is even odder, I have actually run a process-drama class in my school.  I’ve spent hours putting together sets of faux-newspaper articles and trial-transcripts just so my students would be able to dramatically explore a re-trail of the big bad wolf from The Three Little Pigs.  That’s right, The Three Little Pigs!  So why did I think that these same students would be able to simply slip into the role of U.N. Peacekeeper?  Somehow, the flash of a good really terrible idea and the fog of expectations that followed had kept me from reasonably assessing the situation and pivoting when necessary.  I think this is a pretty clear case where if I had just stopped and really thought a little more about the theory and methodology which should underpin the lesson, my students and I would have had a much less seat-shifting-cheer-creaking-nervous-laughter fifty minutes.

When I was at university, one of my writing instructors always said, “Kill your babies.”  By that he meant that any turn of phrase or sentence you felt was precious to the piece of writing should be edited out by the final draft.  And while I don’t know if I believe that all ideas that seem to sparkle on first glance should be chucked in the trash, at the very least, they should probably be appraised by at least one other set of eyes.  This is actually one more piece of good advice when it comes to crafting a simulation.  Don’t do it alone.  If you are going to make a world which your students can actually inhabit, even if it’s only for a few hours, it’s best to recruit as many sets of hands as possible.  After all, we’re only human.         

Addendum:

There were a few reasons for why I really wanted to give this lesson a go in my class.  At least in the first half of the lesson, the methodology goes against most of my beliefs of what makes for good language teaching:

-          There’s extensive use of translation. 

-          Students produce discreet units of language which might or might not have any direct connection to one another. 

-          While the students are producing content, the teacher is in a very clearly authoritative role. 

In spite of the flawed way things turned out, I could see how all of these techniques for language teaching and learning could be put to good use in this particular lesson.  So don’t worry students, your suffering wasn’t for naught.  Next year, your teacher might have a few new tools to make class more enjoyable, even if you have no interest in ever becoming a UN Peace-Keeper.

Reference Works:

Kao, D. & O’Neill, C. (1998) Words into Worlds: Learning a Second Language Through Process Drama. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing Corporation

Bowell, P. & Heap, B.S. (2001). Planning Process Drama. London: David Fultone Publishers.

Tompkins, P.K. (1998). “Role Playing/Simulation”. The Internet TESL Journal 4 (8).

Jones, K (1985). Designing your own Simulations. London: Methane

Hey...I know...Let's role-play it...

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

Before I morphed into an English teacher, I was a social worker for six years in Chicago.  Teachers, in general, are pretty keen about role playing.  And there are always a handful of teachers who jump into the role of “difficult” student.  But usually they are a source of comic relief more than an actual threat to the teacher’s control within the role-played situation. Social workers are different.  When a social worker gets into the “difficult” client role, they take years of pent up frustration and a deep understanding of human pathology and then focus it like a laser of discontent on their poor coworker. 

I remember one particular training on personality disorders.  Now personality disorders are messy things.  Think about it, personality disorder means just what it says, a person’s personality, their core style of interacting with the world, is their illness.  One of my coworkers, a lovely woman by the name of Lucy, was acting as if she suffered from passive aggressive personality disorder.  I was her social worker.  I asked her about her day and she replied in a non-reply kind of way and slowly pulled a half eaten sandwich out of her pocket.  I tried to get her talking about her upcoming job interview, but “P.A. Lucy” just methodically took her sandwich apart, layer by layer until she had three nice piles laid out in front of her, one of bread, one of sandwich meat, and one of lettuce.  All the while a half-smile played across her lips and she agreed haphazardly with everything I said, including the suggestion that she put her sandwich away.  I did not feel like laughing.  I’m pretty sure the other social workers in the room also did not feel like laughing.  We were all linked by a taught thread of impatience, a desire to slap the sandwich pieces across the room.

So I was wondering about the connection between role-playing in social work, teacher training and the language classroom.  If we look at what the basic ELT literature has to say about role-playing, we find out that it is classified as a social interaction activity (Richards & Rogers, 1985), that it, "allows learners to explore the effects of different contextual factors…on language," (Thornbury, 2006), and that it helps to activate a learners, "emerging language skills." (Nunan, 2004).  Now if we replace the word "language" with "therapy" or "teaching" I don't see much of a problem with how role-playing is similar whether you are an English teacher, social worker or language student.  Role playing allows us to contextualize what we have learned and allows emergent skills to find further room for expression and development.  It also provides students (and social workers, and teachers) with a chance to work on fluency and accuracy; to not so much develop new skills, as to sharpen or keep the ones already acquired in good working order.  

In Moral Principles in Education, Dewey (1909) writes about a swimming school where the students were taught to swim without actually ever going into the water.  When one of the students was asked what he did when he finally did get into the water, he said simply, "Sunk."  There's actually a Japanese saying, "Swimming training on the tatami mat."  It's usually used when referring to someone who has only studied theory without attempting to put it into practice.  And perhaps that's what makes role-playing so attractive to social workers and teachers.  It lets us get off our tatami mats and flounder around in the water, although teachers are much more likely to offer each other a hand if things get choppy, while social workers take a little bit of joy in pushing each other under. 

But for language students, I think the attraction of role-playing is a little different.  Students are continually constrained by the limitations of the classroom and these environmental boundaries invariably rub up against the students' desire for a more uninhibited form of expression. Role-playing offers students an exit from the boundaries of the classroom.  When everything goes well, students can find themselves washed up on a deserted island or making contact with an alien civilization.  It's a psychic-affordance which is wholly dependant on the students' imaginative capabilities and willingness to fully invest in a roll. And once invested, I think that role-playing also serves as a kind of buffer for the ego, allowing for greater risk taking than might otherwise be possible.  Which might explain, for the most part, why during roles plays:

- (nice) social workers seems to get nastier

- (disciplinarian) teachers revel in rule breaking

- and (disaffected) students sometimes go way out on a limb

 and start show genuine signs of caring for each other…

(OK, I did my homework.  I read and thought about what is positive about role-playing.  Tomorrow I start to write about how such a good idea could have gone so terribly wrong in my 5th period class yesterday.  Hope that brings you back for post #2 on role-playing.)   

Sources:

Dewey, J. (1909). Moral Principles in Education. The Riverside Press: Cambridge.

Nunan, D. (2004). Task-Based Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.

Richards, J. C. & Rodgers, T. (1986). Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching. Cambridge University Press.

Thornbury, S. & Slade, D. (2006). Conversation--from description to pedagogy. Cambridge University Press.

It's only a test...but it could be more, you know

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

Lately my wife has been kind of worried about me.  We usually have a drink after we finish up our after-work-work and the other day she said, "You know, the way you talk lately, it seems like you've hit some kind of wall in your teaching."  Which is exactly how I feel.  I've hit a big wall.  I think if I could step back a little and look at that wall, it would be covered in graffiti.  Maybe a nice red, green and black color scheme. And once the colors came into view, if I took a few more steps back, I would probably be able to read the words, "reflective teaching can hurt!" in giant loopy letters.

But right now there is no wall.  There is only my computer.  And if I finish up in the next hour or so, a drink with my wife.  On Valentine's Day.  A rainy valentines day.  It rained all day today.  It rained all day yesterday as well.  So I was pretty sure that my students wouldn't stick around for the STEP interview test practice.  But two students did.  They were waiting for me in room 403.  They were flipping through the notes from their last practice session.  Flip, flip, flip.  And right off the bat I felt guilty.  "Sorry guys, the answers aren't in there.  I made a mistake," I wanted to say.  But I wasn't sure.  So I sent Mi-Chan outside so we could do a run-through of the test and see what happened.

Now the STEP test is made for the Japanese market, so I'm not sure how much teachers in other countries might know about it.  The written part of the test is pretty standard, with some vocabulary questions, dialog transcript based questions, and reading and comprehension exercises.  There's also a listening section which is actually pretty useless innocuous as it only tests students ability to listen for specific information.  But my students rarely break a sweat when thinking about the written test.  It's the interview portion of the test that makes them crazy.  And why?  Certainly not because of the content.  A typical STEP test question for the pre-2nd level (high school second year) might be something like, "Do you think Japanese young people watch too much TV?" or "Are Japanese people losing interest in traditional arts?"  And basically you only need to put together two grammatically correct sentences to receive a passing grade for each question.  But Japanese people have been told over and over again that they just can't speak English.  If you Google "Why are Japanese people bad at English," you will actually find page after page of articles which deal with this issue as if it is an issue.  Whereas if you type in "Why are French people bad at English," only the first two hits actually have anything to do with French people's perceived English deficiencies.  And if you type in "Why are Chinese people bad at English," none of the first page of hits has anything to specifically do with Chinese speaker's inability to handle English.  So while there might be valid reasons for lower level ability in Japanese learners of English (which I'll take up in another post some day), there is undoubtedly the very real issue of self-confidence, or complete lack thereof.

Knock, knock, knock!  That was Mi-Chan banging on the door.  So I cleared my throat and doing my best impression of an official STEP test tester invited her into the room.  Mi-Chan had diligently studied her notes and answered every question I asked as if orally dotting a series of 'i's. 

Then I asked her, "Do you think people in Japan work too much these days?" 

Mi-Chan thought for a second and said, "Yes.  I know many people who work too hard.  They are working for 10 hours a day." 

This was exactly the kind of answer I had been helping my students put together over the past week.  I looked at Mi-Chan.  Her shoulders were up.  She was looking over my shoulder.  When she finished her answer, she didn't relax her pose.  She didn't lean back.  It was like she was waiting for the next tiger to pop out of the door in the arena or something. 

"Mi-Chan," I said.  "I'm sorry.  I made a mistake when I was teaching you how to answer these questions before."  I explained that I didn't want perfect answers.  I just wanted her to tell me how she felt and what she really thought. 

Mi-Chan hesitated, but finally she said, "My father works too much." 

I nodded.

"He works every day.  I never see him."

Pause.

"People need relax time.  Seriously, I think everybody need more relax time." Mi-Chan looked at me, waiting for the next question of the test.

"I think so too.  I'm sorry your father has to work so hard," I said. 

And then it happened.  Mi-Chan leaned back in her chair.  Her shoulders drooped.  And we talked about what it means to work too much.  I recorded it all.  We went over how to use the phrase "time to ~."  We practiced three more sets of questions.   And Mi-Chan used language that she rarely has demonstrated in a classroom environment.  Probably my favorite answer of the day was in response to the question, "Do you like to stay in luxury hotels on vacation?"  Mi-Chan thought for a moment and said, "I can't stay in luxury hotels.  I don't have enough money.  If I were rich I would stay in a luxury hotel.  I think everybody wants to stay in a luxury hotel."

The other day I wrote that even standardized testing can be an affordance.  I still believe that.  But more than that, practicing for standardized testing can be a humanizing endeavor.  Maybe, as teachers, that's our job, taking the dehumanizing machinery of a standard test, and making it human, teacher to student, question to question.  I know that with the three students I practiced with today, just by giving them a little more space to express what they wanted to express, their English ability as measured by richness of vocabulary and complexity of grammar showed marked improvement.  And maybe more importantly, they laughed or sighed or shook their heads in a way that wasn't just about answering a question.

It's 11:00 PM.  It's Valentines day.  Time to have a drink with my wife.  She's right.  I'm bumping up against a wall lately.  But it's probably a wall I should have bumped into a long while back.  And it's only the first of a long series of walls I'm going to have to find my way over.  But tonight is Valentine's Day.  Hope yours was filled with love.

Walking the Walk: testing should be an affordance, but...

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

I’ve had something that’s been bothering me for a while now.  It’s the pebble I can’t shake out of my shoe.  It’s the English STEP test.  3 times a year I’ve got to prep my kids for the listening and then the interview test.  And my school is just crazy about these tests.  I’m not going to spend much time pointing fingers at the administration.  STEP test results are good for business.  When students pass the 2^nd level, its something real they can put on their resumes.  It helps them get into university.  The shiny certificates make for great photo shoots.  And the test isn’t the problem.  How I teach for the test is the problem.

You see, after 13 years of preparing students for the test I know what a student needs to do to squeak by.  Especially in the interview test.  If the tester asks, “Do you think cars will still use gasoline in the future?”  All the student has to do is catch “car” and “future” and string together two grammatically correct and understandable sentences about cars in the future.  Or if they catch “future” and “gasoline” they can do the same with those two key words.  For example, “In the future I don’t think there will be gasoline.  Gasoline is very bad for the environment,” or "I don't think there will be cars in the future.  Most people will use buses or maybe bicycles."  Basically, you can teach students to listen for key words and then use whatever bare-minimum language they can put together to answer the question.  But this is not communication.  This is not teaching English.  And worst of all, this is not respecting the students and believing in their abilities.  

Now I would like to say that I use the STEP Test as a chance to help students develop critical thinking skills, express their opinions and generally work on their communicative abilities.  But, truth of the matter is, I spend much more time just making sure they pass.  How do I know?  Because I record the students when we do mock interviews.  And this week I also recorded myself giving them feedback.  And then I listened to what I focused in on with the students.  

I did the mock interviews in one of the larger empty classroom on the 4th floor.  The recorder had a good mic., so it caught the echo as my voice rang off the walls.  While I was listening, I started to feel uncomfortable.  I sounded so sure about everything I was saying.  That was the first sign that something was off.  I'm rarely that sure in the classroom.  As I listened I kept hoping to hear something that put the student at the center of the experience.  One of the mock questions was, "Do you like to stay at luxury hotels?"  This could have led to real exchanges about family vacations or Japanese hot spring resorts.  But no.  My feedback was on how to pass the test, how to keep it simple and be understood, not on how to answer the questions in any kind of way that fostered self-expression.  

So what am I going to do about it?  Just keep walking around with the pebble in my shoe?  The truth is, I don’t know if I have enough courage to do what I think is right.  Why?  Part of it is self-preservation.  Another part is fear that if the students fail, they might end up damaged (and I know that is so patronizing).  I could just ask the students, “Do you want to focus on getting better at English or on passing the test,” but that seems like an abdication of responsibility.  And I don't need to ask.   When I listened to the recording of one student's wonderfully convoluted and nearly two minute long answer about why she likes to watch movies at home, I knew that what that student wants, what almost all my students want, is for someone to understand them, not to just be merely understandable. 

When I think of the English teachers and teacher trainers I really respect, I feel like I know what they would be doing in a similar situation.  From Monday to Friday I have five days in a row of Step tutoring.  I'm going to try to do what I can to change directions.  Hopefully, by the end of the week I'll have something positive to post.  I've had enough of this hobbling along.  

(Thanks to #ELTchat for bringing up the issue of testing in general.  It was the outside force I needed to help me take a harder look at what I am doing in my classroom)

But will this class fly?

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

My school has been hit hard by influenza.  We would normally cancel classes, but most of the first year students are off on a school trip in Hokkaido and the seniors are finished with classes for the school year.  That leaves only the second year students.  My morning class was reduced to six students.  Six students who were probably using most oftheir energy wondering how long they had until their joints started to ache and the doctor told them they had to stay home.  Not a high energy group.

There’s been a lot of posts on the net about functional grammar/pragmatics/cognitive grammar lately.  Scott Thornbury’s post on construction was one of the things that got me thinking more about functional grammar this week.  And then there was Brad Patterson’s post on “What it means to be polite.”   In my teaching environment here in Japan, at a school for students with extended periods of absenteeism, I bump up against the following issues when it comes to functional grammar and pragmatics:

1.      My higher level students see English as a means to pass university entrance exams, so functional grammar in the way of oral communicative English turns them off.  They don’t see the point.

2.      My students, if they use English in the future, will primarily be using it as a communication tool with other non-native speakers.  So how to implement f.g. when teaching ELF?

3.      My lower level students missed much of their junior high school English schooling, so, for those students, I want to keep class as simple as possible and provide them with language they can pick up and run with.  This means teaching a lot of chunks of language and a conscious decision to keep it simple.

But my mentor on the Dip TESOL told me the other week, that because Japanese has such distinctive registers, perhaps I was selling my students short.  Maybe they would be able to transfer some of that L1 knowledge and pick up on differences in register more quickly than I thought.  So I decided to teach some functional grammar to the still-standing-six who shuffled into class this morning.  How?  Paper airplanes.

I had the students space out their desks in a big circle.  Then I passed out sheets of blank paper.  I started folding a paper airplane.  The students looked a little anxious.  But soon enough, without any spoken directions, all of them were happily folding airplanes. 

I turned to S-san and said, “Can I see your airplane?”  As expected, she held the airplane up for me to see.  So I asked K-san, and he did the same.  Finally I just said, “Throw it to me!”  Then we talked about what “see” meant in the context of my request.  All the students wrote the question, “Can I see your airplane?” somewhere on their paper airplanes.  The students then had some time to look at each others airplanes.  But they couldn’t leave their desks.  This led to much paper airplane throwing.  I asked the students to get their paper airplanes back.  Silence.  One student said, “Can I see my airplane?” to another student.  But I could see that she was dissatisfied with the language she had used.  So I said to N-San, “Hey, can I have my airplane back?”  Which was an ‘aha’ moment for most of the students and a few moments later, everyone had managed to get their own airplanes back in hand.  And without prompting, they all wrote, “Can I have my airplane back?” on a wing or the body of their plane.

“OK,” I said.  “Now let’s see what everyone thinks of our airplanes.  How can we get another person to really think about our airplanes?”  Which, happily led to N-san asking another student, “Can you see my airplane?”  Ah, the joys of look vs. see.  A short explanation and students were ready to make the request, “Can you look at my airplane.”  But here I stopped the airplane throwing for a moment and we talked about the nature of our three requests:

-          Can I see your airplane? (I want to do something.)

-          Can I have my airplane back? (I want to have something.)

-          Can you look at my airplane? (I want you to do something.)

Most of the students agreed that there was something different about the nature of the third request.  It required more of the person than simple tossing a paper airplane.  There was some sort of extra effort required.  So I suggested, instead of “can”, perhaps “would” might be more appropriate. 

Now I noticed that while most of the students were enjoying breaking class rules, some just couldn’t bring themselves to throw an airplane in the classroom with joy.  What's wrong with kids today that they don't want to toss airplanes around a classroom??!!!  So I asked them if it was uncomfortable to throw an airplane in class with a teacher watching them.  And it turns out, it was.  So I left the class and listened in at the window.  There was definitely less hesitation than when I had been in the room.

By the end of the class, students had also written, “Would you get me Maria’s airplane?” And “Could I please keep this airplane?” somewhere on their airplane.  I’m not 100% sure, but I’m pretty sure that students had developed some ideas of how levels of politeness can, in part, depend on where the locus of action is within the request as well as the duration of the request (“Could I please keep this paper airplane” resulting in a permanent state as opposed to say “Can I see your airplane” which is merely temporary).  And if not, they at least practiced some pretty basic requests which we can build on in our class tomorrow.

At the end of class, every student but one happily kept another student’s paper airplane even after the bell rang.  That one student, for whatever reason, just couldn’t bring himself to join in the last 5 minutes of practice/throwing.  So I hit him up after class and asked him what kind of things prevented him from participating.  And he said, “I just felt embarrassed.”  So I asked him if, when we did these kind of wacky lessons, he wanted me to just prompt him once in a while.  Would that make it easier for him to join in?  He looked relieved and said, “please do.”  So I took my airplane and wrote, “Would you please do that” on the inside wing, gave it to him, and headed downstairs to write up my class notes.

So this Russian philosopher walks into a bar...

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

I don't know why, but I kind of feel that if Bakhtin had ever, even one time, walked into a bar and knowingly said, "Hey, bartender…" it would have somehow, in a dialogical way, redeemed every bad joke my father ever told.  Then again, maybe I'm just reading too much theory.

No phones in class? Who says?

Hi all,

A big thank you to everyone for your support over the past two years. Realizing that this blog keeps growing and that the options for making it navigable with blogger are diminishing week by week, I've moved over to WordPress.  I hope this doesn't cause any unnecessary inconvenience.

The original article you are looking for is below this short message. After reading, if you have a moment to check out the new (and hardly changed) "The Other Things Matter", please drop in.  Would love to hear from you.

For the next paper on my dip TESOL, I had to write a critique of any book from the suggested reading list.  I was getting kind of tired of reading about action research and reflective teaching.  I wanted to get back to some more nuts and bolts kind of texts.  I had a bunch of short booklets from John Fanselow and they seemed perfect.  But there wasn't enough for a book critique.  John was kind enough to send me 14 more booklets.  Then I asked my guru for this unit, Dana, if I could critique the booklets.  I mean, they included an introduction, there was a title (Huh? Oh…Aha) and if you squinted just right, it all seemed to be part of some kind of book.  Dana gave me few words of encouragement and I started my readings.

Now I could spend thousands and thousands of words writing about these booklets.  They are funny.  John's decided that if he ever becomes a spy, he's sticking his secret messages in the preface to dictionaries, since the only people who should read them (English students and teachers) never do.  And throughout the booklets, he's severe in a way that shows a deep love for the teaching profession.  When he asks if a math teacher would every compliment a student for an error riddled solution to a problem and wonders if we aren't belittling our English students, I thought, "No and Yes and I'll try and do better on this one starting now."

But this isn't a post about John's booklets.  You see, once a week, I have to teach these crazy communication classes for students who are trying to get into high level academic universities in Japan.  Which means taking an entrance exam.  Which means learning enough of the right kind of English to pass that exam.  Which means that the students, in general, see communication class as a  50 minute pit of wasted time.  Or they did, before I met them much more than half way and started making (slightly) communicative grammar exercises to help them memorize the key test grammar points.  This has produced students who cannot hold a fairly basic general conversation, but who can, in a flash, convert a present perfect continuous statement into the interrogative form, ask their partner the newly formulated question and then take the response and if directed to, flip it into a future tense question.  So it might go something like this:

A: I have been working on my report.

B: Oh, you have been working on your report lately?

A: Yes.

B: Will you be working on your report over the next week?

And the students love this work.  And you know what?  I kind of like it too.  I don't know how long they will remember the grammar, if there is any kind of real acquisition.  I don't even know if it's really communication based.  But it helps reinforce what they need to know for the test and at least the words are finding some kind of life outside of the text book.

Still, sometimes even these students get burned out on the whole grammar jag, and then I ask them if they want to take some down time and do some real conversation work.  They usually say, yes.  The language that emerges is usually too simple grammar-wise for the test, but more practical.  And the students enjoy blowing off steam for 50 minutes or so once a month.   At the beginning of our last conversation class, all the students suddenly decided that all they really wanted to talk about was Evangelion.  I think they had been planning this.  I caught a few evil little smiles here and there.  They thought it was funny.  I didn't tell them, but I thought it was funny, too.  What I did tell them was that I once facilitated a 90 minute conversation class with a group of students who had, for some reason or other, all decided they wanted to talk about tomatoes.  As far as I was concerned, the rich anime world of Evangelion was a full day lesson.  At the least.  And anyway, I had my secret weapon.  "Take out your cell-phones," I said.

I'm a big believer in following language as it moves.  Right now, saying a student can't use their smart-phone in an English class seems kind of crazy to me.  Or if not crazy, at least shows a lack of trust in your students.  It's a darn good tool for getting important information and communicating.  Especially in Japan where reception is good, data speeds are fast and everyone has an unlimited data plan.  So the kids were kind of happy, probably thinking I was going to let them check out an Evangelion video or something.  Nope.  Instead, after eliciting some language and letting them practice, I told them to use the "voice memo" function and record everything they said for 2 minutes.  Then I had them transcribe it.  Then exchange their transcription with their partners and listen again, this time looking for any discrepancies between the two transcriptions.  They probably would have been happier with a Evangelion video.  But they weren't exactly unhappy.  And then I gave them the big news.  I had checked with the head of the International Course, which is me, and had given myself and the other teachers in the program permission to allow students to use the voice recorder function at any time during any English class.  During reading class, if they were required to read a passage out loud, they could record themselves and use the recording to practice dictation later in the day.  If they were giving each other vocabulary quizzes in the TOIEC class, they could record it and use it for transcription practice.  Basically, any time they opened their mouth and English came out, I encouraged them to record it.  Then listen to it.  Then write it down.

Now I wouldn't usually have very high expectation about students following through with this kind of thing.  The hulls of my discarded advice can be found all over my school.  Half used vocabulary notebooks.  Graded readers with the tenth page or so folded down at the corner, never to be opened again.  But a big part of that is my fault.  I don't give students enough time to shift from one off activity to habit.  And I also don't give students nearly enough time to reflect on whether they themselves feel the activity has been useful or not.  So I'm going to put the funky grammar quasi-conversation classes on hold and stick with these "voice memo" conversation lessons for a bit.  See if maybe I can't help it bleed into some of the other English classes.

For the past year I've been videoing pieces of my classes and recording conversation between students.  Sometimes I let the students listen to it.  Sometimes I don't make the time for it.  Which is too bad really.  My wife is a professional announcer.  She's also a licensed Japanese teacher.  And she always corrects my Japanese.  I think it just hurts her ears too much to have those pointy shards of language left hanging in the air.  So I always get to see how well what I think I'm saying and what I do say match up (or don't as is often the case).  But my students aren't so lucky.  And how can they improve, if they don't get the chance to hear what they actually said?  At least that's one of the points John tries to make in Huh! Oh…Aha.  That and the fact that maybe once in a while we should check the prefaces of our dictionaries for secret messages.