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Over the past few years I’ve noticed that my lower-level
students fall into two broad categories: beginners with minimal exposure to
English and beginners who have had exposure, but don’t have the study skills or
language learning strategies to take input and turn it into intake. When I use the term input, I am referring to
all language to which a learner is exposed, either in or out of class. Intake, as a term, is a bit more difficult to
get a handle on, but here I’m using Kumaravadivelu’s (2006)
definition in which intake is a subset of input, “that has been fully or partially
processed by learners, and fully or partially assimilated into their developing
I[nter] L[anguage system. (p. 28)”
This
is all kind of vague, so let me give a concrete example, I have one student,
A-kun who attended middle school classes regularly, passed his English exams
(although was by no means a stand out student), has a working vocabulary of
roughly 300 words and struggles to put together even the most basic sentence
when engaging in communicative activities.
I have another student, let’s call her B-chan, who, do to personal
issues, was able to attend middle school only sporadically and functions
basically at the same level as A-kun.
They are both beginners and both need exposure to basically the same level
of English. But I find that A-kun,
regardless of the types of efforts he makes in class, continues to show
extremely slow progress when it comes to developing his inter language system. B-chan shows the kind of sharp gains that is
typical of a beginning language student.
Arguably, what I need to do is find out what is hindering A-Kun’s
development while continuing to provide opportunities for B-chan to keep studying. In order to find out what types of learning
strategies and study skills A-kun is missing, as well as to help B-chan develop
even more comprehensive learning strategies, I’ve come up with the following activities to help me identify students like A-kun and give them the
little bit of extra attention they need to become more effective learners:
I lived on a small island near Okinawa for three years.
To go from my own island to the nearest (１番近い) island, I
took a small boat with only one sail. Even though it only had one sail, when the
wind was strong, the boat moved very quickly.
2.
Dictionary race: I give the students
a list of 5 sentences, each one containing a high frequency word which I’m
pretty sure they do not know. For
example, “My brother was accepted to
Tokyo University
3.
Word use report: All my students
keep a word list and are required to add 25 high frequency words to the list
per week. But I found that many of my
students wrote the words down on the list, studied them and promptly forgot
them. So for the first month or so of
class, I started having students keep a tally of the number of times that they
came across the words on their list in or out of class during a week. All they have to do is draw a hash mark next
to the word on their list each time they encounter it. This helps me identify students who haven’t
figured out the importance of looking for chances to take note of and reinforce
language learned in the classroom.
Students whose word list is littered with hash marks are good to
go. Those who don’t have many (or in
some cases any) hash marks get a bit of one-on-on time to practice noticing
their developing vocabulary when working with spoken or written texts.
4.
Note rewriting time and (very) short
tests: if I do a guided discovery activity in class, for example uses of
have vs. there is/are, I make sure to give the students a few minutes to
rewrite their class notes at the end of the activity. The next lesson I give a very short test
during which time students can use their notes.
I don’t just grade the short test, but compare a student’s answers with
their rewritten class notes. For my
students, many of whom have had limited classroom experience, often times they can
understand the language point explored in class, but don’t know how to put
their knowledge in a form which is useful for later studying. When I give the test results back, I can go
over their answers and their notes and help them notice aspects of the language
that they might have understood in class, but failed to write down in their
notebook.
5.
Free talk using class notes and
translation assistance: This is a 10 minute free speaking activity broken down
into two sections. During the activity,
students are free to use their lesson notes and each student also has a pad of
PostIt Notes. If they want to say
something, but don’t know how, they can write what they want to say in Japanese
on the PostIt Note and hand it to me. I
write out a translation in English. During
the first five minutes of the activity, students talk in pairs. The second five minutes, the students talk as
a class. I write down everything that is
said during the class discussion. During
this time I can see if students are trying to use the language that they have
been working with in class. B-chan type
students will often use and recycle classroom language. They also copy their PostIt note translations
into their vocabulary notebooks. A-Kun
type students make much less use of their notes and often times hand me PostIt
notes with the same phrases two or three times over the course of a week. When this happens, I can just gently nudge
A-Kun to keep the PostIt Notes in his vocabulary notebook and ask him to add
the phrases or sentences to his word list.
Over time, A-kun starts to rely more and more on his notes and less and
less on me or my co-teacher.
6.
Ambiguous Picture activity: this is
an activity I got from Penny Ur and Andrew Wright’s Five Minute Activities. I start by writing up a partial picture of
something, say an apple with a bite taken out of it. Students write down what they think it is in
English. Then I fill in a few more lines
of the picture and students once again write down what they think the picture
is. For every step in the picture, they
are encouraged to write down one guess.
They are also free to use their dictionaries during this activity. There are a number of students who will
simply not write down a guess unless they are certain what the word is. This activity helps me identify low risk
taking students. I find students who
will not write down a guess are also the students who have a hard time bringing
themselves to speak unless they are able to formulate a complete sentence
before they talk. Especially in a class
of lower level students, if I have a fair number of low risk takers, I will
throw in a few activities to help students practice circumlocutions and
augmenting conversation with gestures.
7.
10 loan words: this is an activity
to help me gauge if lower-level learner are using their full language
resources. First I have each student
think of 10 English loan words in Japanese.
They then form pairs and together, check off any of the words on their
lists which they think would be understandable if used as is in an English
conversation. Finally, they consult a
dictionary to see which of their guesses were correct. While there are a number of false friend loan
words, or words whose meaning differ significantly in Japanese and English,
many of the English loan words can be used in conversation. This activity not only helps students quickly
build up their vocabulary, but also shows them that they know more English than
they think they do and provides them with a dash of confidence.
A
few years ago I attended a keynote address by Paul Nation in which he
identified a teacher’s main jobs. Teaching language was ranked fifth out of the
five things a teacher needed to do, two steps behind, “to train learners in
language learning strategies so that they are encouraged to be independent in
their learning.” But to train my students, I often find that I need to start by evaluating if they have the most basic of study skills. To tell the truth,
sometimes, in the middle of a class, I feel like I’m a conductor forever practicing the same one piece of music with my orchestra. But if that’s how I feel, I
imagine it’s probably worse for my students.
For many of them, each class must seem like an hour of tuning up with no chance to truly play a song. But if I do my job right, if I
help students learn how to use a dictionary, take proper class notes, and learn
to notice and recycle vocabulary learned in class, then even students like
A-Kun can start to develop the skills needed to take the noise of input, and
smooth it out enough to become the music of intake.
