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I'm back in Japan. It took three days of travel, two
hotels and eighteen hours of enjoying the pleasures to be found in airport
terminals which included a drink with a guy named Sergei, who, not
surprisingly, was from Russia. As
fun as my time returning from the CLESOL conference was though, it was not
nearly as enjoyable as my time at the conference itself. Here are a few of my highlights:
Andreas Lund came from Norway
and riffed on what "two heads is better than one," might mean within
a tech oriented language classroom. He explained a research project in which students built a
wiki of a fictional world together, complete with gangs and philosophical
underpinnings for the government. I'll
admit I started to feel a bit envious when Andreas flashed up a slide in which
his students were debating the merits of various political philosophies. But then I reminded myself that my
students could take his students down when it came to a close analysis of
cuteness levels of Japanese idol pop starts. I had a bit of time to ask
Andreas how he handles the rate at which our students migrate to new
technologies. Two years ago all my
students used blogs, last year it was FaceBook, now it's Line. He said (and I'm going to put this in
quotes, but it's a little rough), "It isn't about the technology
itself. It is about the underlying
curiosity and questions you have about how students learn. If there is something within the
technology which can help you explore those question, then the technology
itself is useful. So first, you
need to understand what technology your students are using well enough to see
if it generates some kind of curiosity for you and if it will help you explore
the learning process."
Paul Nation spent a bit of
time musing on age and pretending to forget things in the middle of his
speech. Or maybe he was really
forgetting things and being perfectly comfortable with all that forgetting
while standing in front of hundreds of people. Whatever the case might be, I hope I can have that kind of
composure when I'm forgetting, or pretending to forget, things in the future.
He also said that if he could recommend one change to an ESL/EFL program which
wasn't currently very effective, it would be implementing an extensive reading
program. He had four more other
suggestions, but he said that while 'linked skills activities' (#4) and a 'fluency development program' (#2) were important, the kind of impact an
extensive reading program can have is a level of magnitude higher than the
other suggestions. He also, as an aside during his presentation, said, "Krashen really got this right. It is about loads and loads of
input."
In addition to extensive reading, Paul did spend a good
portion of his talk on fluency. He
took a bit of time to lay out just what an activity would need to be fluency focused:
- The content must be
meaning based. Students should be focusing on the message.
- It should be simple. Learners
should know all of the language they are working with.
- There should be
pressure to work at a faster rate than usual.
- There should be a
chance to work with the same language a great deal (not a one off activity).
And he really drove home the point that all four skills need to have a well thought out fluency component. If your students don't have a chance to work towards fluency in writing and reading as well as speaking and listening, they're really going to be at a disadvantage when they have to use those skills in real world situations.
And he really drove home the point that all four skills need to have a well thought out fluency component. If your students don't have a chance to work towards fluency in writing and reading as well as speaking and listening, they're really going to be at a disadvantage when they have to use those skills in real world situations.
I don't want to make it
see that everything I got came from the big stage and the keynote addresses.
I filled up a bunch of notebook pages with ideas on realia from Bridget
Percy (and here you can find her abstract). Two favorite ideas:
- Use cup noodle as
super basic template for discussing recipes and cooking. The noodle
packet provides a structured and limited vocabulary to work with and you can
hit ingredients ('what do you need?'), preparation ('How do you make it?), and
even tips on healthy eating and serving if you want ('What else can you add?').
- Use boxes of over the
counter medicine to discuss adverbs of frequency or to teach students how to
set up information charts.
Something like…
Who takes it
|
How much do they take
|
When do they take it
|
Why do they take it
|
What side effects to
watch out for
|
Adults
|
2 pills
|
After breakfast & dinner
|
sleepiness
|
|
Children 7-14
|
Sore throat
|
sleeplessness
|
||
Children 4-7
|
½ pill
|
We went through a
package of medicine and it was clear that the way the information was
presented would be extremely difficult for even an intermediate level
learner. Helping students
convert the info into a chart would not only help make it more manageable, it
would provide a concrete tool for mothers or fathers to use when giving their
children medicine over the course of day.
Qianqian Zhang presented on how she uses number lines to help her Chinese learners of
English deal with tense. Turns out
that tense isn't directly inflected in the verb form in Chinese, so many of her
students get temporally lost when listening to conversations, especially if
there isn't a clear adverbial of time like, "in a few minutes." She keeps a tense number line on the
board at all times during her classes.
She actually gave me one of her hand-drawn number lines, but I lost it
in transit, along with my navy suit jacket. I'm broken up about that, but trying to manage. Anyway, here is my take on her time
line:
The time line isn't
labeled and it probably shouldn't be, as tense and time can sometimes have a
slippery relationship. Instead,
during a listening or reading exercise you can grab a sentence which is giving
students difficulty and just link it to a point on the line. The black triangles connect up
with progressive tenses. The white
triangles with general periods of time. Lines represent a specific point in time. And the arrows are acts which span longer periods of
time. Anyway, I've used time lines
to help tech specific aspects of tense, but I'm happy to have this more
general, non-prescriptive and visual way to help students find their
temporal-feet when they're feeling lost in time.
I've got pages and
pages of ideas I could keep sharing, but as I was going over my notes in the
airport yesterday, I realized that the most pleasant thing about the conference
was how rarely I found myself wondering just what the speakers were talking
about. This is usually what happens to me when things get a little too theoretical. But Andreas didn't spend a lot of time talking
about the wonders of task based learning. He just described a wiki project and the
idiosyncrasies of the learners who built that wiki. Bridget didn't get all fixated on discussing CLT. She just concentrated on concrete ways realia can help students
use the language needed to talk about and understand food and
medicine. Qianqian wasn't debating the
usefulness of a form based class component, she just had a cool tense table to
show off and a basic explanation of how she used it in her classes. All of these ideas were grounded in theory, but the
theory didn't cloud what was being talked about. It was used sparingly
and assisted as opposed to hindered my understanding.
Not all of the talks
were like this. There were some that ran into a theory iceberg of
acronyms and abbreviations and sank quickly out of memory. But for the most
part there we just a lot of good ideas, clearly presented, carrying the hum and
buzz of real classrooms. Something
I could hold and think about at I wound my way slowly back to Japan.
p.s. These scattered
thoughts about the conference are entirely my own. Any misrepresentation of the speakers' main points or muddled
sentences and hazy ideas are entirely my fault and should not reflect in any
way on the clarity and intelligence of the presenters mentioned.
p.p.s. I will be
preparing a web version of the presentation I gave, hopefully sometime this
weekend. If you have any tips for
software that would let me get my voice, the PowerPoint slides, and the videos
and mp3 info imbedded in the PowerPoint slides all playing nice together so I
can record it with my internal camera and just post it up or link to it from
the blog, I will be very very grateful.
