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.
