T-DAD

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.

Teacher Dereliction Anxiety Dissorder

(a follow up to my first extensive reading post here)

T-DAD is not found in the
DSM-5 and is not likely to be
found in the DSM-6 or DSM-7

Extensive Reading, or carving out class time so students can read what they want for pleasure and hence spend reading time practicing reading, is a large part of my program here in Osaka.  Students read for three 30-minute periods a week.  There are no rules about what they can read, how long they have to continue reading one book, and no follow up exams.  Students just read.  

Now, if you don’t have an extensive reading component in your English program, you might have a few questions about how to set up an ER program for your school, in which case I highly recommend you check out the Extensive Reading Foundation’s Guide to Extensive Reading as well as Bamford and Day’s “Top Ten Principles for Teaching Extensive Reading.”  And if you are looking for some evidence to back up that idea that this whole ER thing actually works, I recommend this, this and this which read together point to the fact that extensive reading improves reading speed, spelling, writing, vocabulary and attitudes towards reading itself.  

But that’s not what this post is about.  This post is about T-DAD and the fact that teachers are teachers and often have the very bad habit of wanting to actively teach something.  Even more so, teachers too often sometimes want to measure if students learn what the teacher has taken pains to actively teach.  In general, a pure ER program, one in which students are just reading for pleasure, doesn’t really allow a teacher to do either of these things.  And this can lead to some serious anxiety.  Are the students really reading the books?  Are they learning anything?  Are they improving?  I also suffered from these flashes of panic.  I too was diagnosed with T-DAD.  So I want to give 3 or 4 ideas of things a teacher can do to decrease the anxiety around extensive reading.

• Have students keep track of the number of pages they have read.  They keep a running tally of the total number of pages they have read in their notebook.  It’s amazing how quickly the pages add up.  Don’t worry about the level of the books.  Don’t worry about the rate of reading.  Just have students keep track of this raw number.  In my class, many of the students are reading starter-level books.  Usually they are about 17 to 20 pages long.  Most of them will complete one book in a 30-minute period.  This means that at the end of a week, they get to add about 60 pages to their page tally.  At the end of a month they usually get to tack on over 200 pages.  At the end of a semester, a big number like 500 pages of English read really helps the students feel like they’ve accomplished something.  And it also gives you, the teacher, something tangible to hang on to.  What did your students really accomplish with all that class time dedicated to reading?  THEY READ 500 PAGES OF ENGLISH!  That’s what they did.  Relax.

• Add a 1 minute speed reading sprint to the end of the lesson.  Tell the students to read for one minute, time them, then have them count up the total number of words they read.  Instead of just writing the number, have them plot it on graph paper.  Students in my class have seen steady reading speed improvement over the past two years.  Those steadily climbing line-graphs give the students a lot of confidence in their own reading abilities, and helps reduce my anxiety that ER is worthwhile.  I just took my last reading speed rates for this semester and each and every student in my class is now reading at over 150 words per minute.  Most of them over 200 words per minute.  And most of them started with a reading rate at right around or under 100 words per minute.  Sometimes their line graph will show a sudden extended dip, and this is almost always do to the fact that they have jumped up a level in regards to the reading material they are selecting.  When this happens they get to enjoy watching the rates crawl steadily back up from 120 to 200 again.  

• 3 sentence book reviews on the inside back cover of the book.  Just what it says.  Students only have to write three sentences about the book.  They can write whatever they want.  The book reviews are not graded, but they are signed.  You can go back at the end of a few weeks and notice how the language the students use in these reviews changes and develops.  And the best part, students think they are doing it to help their friends and fellow students read interesting books and avoid boring ones.  They have no idea that actually, producing these short reviews is all about making the teacher feel good about the fact that students are picking up new vocabulary and improving their grammatical accuracy.

As you might have noticed, all of the activities above are low pressure and don’t require a lot of time and clearly show improvement in some way or another.  This is key as the whole point of extensive reading is that students enjoy the act of reading.  If ER comes attached with all kinds of difficult tasks and assessment components, than they joy of reading is likely to become infected with the taint of “school work.”  Which is why I’m a little hesitant to share my fourth (and last) ER extension activity.  But when it comes to easing the symptoms of T-DAD, this is the absolute best activity I’ve ever used.  And I still use it in my classes.

・Read/Think/Write: This is an old activity recommended by Michael West, the guy who gave us the General Service List.  It’s also something that my friend and mentor John Fanselow recommends highly and mentions in this article.  But I don’t recommend it because it comes attached to big names, but rather because I have seen how well it has worked in my classes.  The activity lasts 7 minutes.  Students turn to the front page of the book they read during an extensive reading period.  They read as much as they can easily hold in their working memory (as much as they can easily remember), turn the book over, count to 3, and write down what they thought that had just read.  Then they draw a slash.  Then they pick up the book and read from the last word they wrote down.  Once again they read as much as they think they can easily remember, turn the book over, count to 3, and write down what they can remember, ending with a slash.  It looks something like this:

They do this for seven minutes.  They do not correct anything.  They do not go over what they have just read.  They just keep plowing ahead.  And ahead.  Right until 7 minutes is up.  Then they count the total number of words they wrote and the number of slashes.  If you divided the number of words by the number of slashes, you get a rough idea of how many words a student can hold in their working memory.  Even better, if students are putting slashes in the middle of syntactic groups (those groups of words that hang together naturally in a sentence), you have a pretty good indication that something odd is happening with how they are reading the text.  Reviewing their read/think/write notebooks can highlight students who are reading at an inappropriate level, are having trouble with spelling and sound relationships, and a host of other factors. Here’s a sample of two Read/Think/Write exercises from the same student, one at the beginning of May:

and one from October:

You can see that the average number of word per slash increased from 4 to 8, a pretty good sign that the student is starting to work with larger and larger chunks of language.  

The final step in the read/think/write activity is to have the students compare what they wrote with the text and circle any differences between the two.  Some of those difference will be perfectly acceptable, such as a student who wrote down “the very pretty girl was loved by her father,” instead of “the most beautiful girl was loved by her father.”  Going over these differences with the students and showing them how some changes are OK while some are not, can help them to develop good summary skills and also helps you, the teacher, to see at what level students are comprehending the texts.  

It usually takes a while for the students to get used to the read/think/write process; I've found that things go smoothly after about a month of regular practice.  But just giving the students a chance to clearly see that they are working with larger and larger chunks of language makes the time and effort worthwhile.  As an added bonus, read/think/write is an activity that students can use outside of class and with any text.  So not only are they improving their English, students are also adding another activity to their autonomous learner's toolkit.

So that’s my list of 1 relatively long (~12 minutes in total) and 3 very short extension activities you can do to reduce your T-DAD around ER.  But these activities also reduce your students’ anxiety as well by giving them concrete evidence that they are improving.  And that’s important, because as much anxiety as you as a teacher might have around extensive reading, I find it often pales in comparison to the anxiety students are feeling.  For a majority of our students, learning English has been a story of struggle.  They’ve been forced to read texts in which they have minimal interest, littered with language they cannot understand; even worse, once the text is read, it is usually only reviewed for the purpose of preparing for the test which looms at the end of the semester.  So for many of our students, reading classes are by nature joyless and stressful.  A well-structured extensive reading program combined with unobtrusive extension activities can convince students (slowly but surely) that this doesn’t have to be the case.  And that’s a pretty good thing, seeing as how a classroom free of T-DAD and S(tudent)-DAD, is classroom where everyone can settle into a good book, secure in the knowledge that the joy of reading is very much the joy of learning. 

In case anyone is wondering, at the end of the semester, we take the raw data from students’ ER extension activities and give each student a reading report.  Here’s the report for one of my second year students from the second semester of this year:

If you’re interested in getting the Excel file (which includes all of the equations and graphs), just let me know in a comment or send me an email.

Fluency activities to build summarizing skills

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.

In my summarizing skills building posts 1 and 2, I’ve been writing about summaries as if they are all equal.  This is clearly not the case.  In fact, two weeks into my summarizing classes, John Fanselow, the advisor for my school's English program asked me, “Well, why do you want your students to practice summarizing anyway?”  Which seemed like a pretty valid question.  So I turned it over to my students to see if they had any ideas as to why they might want to work on their summarizing skills.  A number of students said it will help them with the longer readings that appear on most of the university entrance exams and standardized English tests in Japan.  Two students said they thought it would help them take notes in English class.  One student said he thought it would help him remember things better.  I was glad to know that the students did see value in practicing summarizing skills.  And all of those reasons were on my list when I was talking with John.  But there was one which my students didn’t mention.  I believed (and still do) that summarizing, especially when working with less advanced students, is a crucial conversation skill.  When students talk to each other about the books they read in class, the movies they watch in their free time, or chat about the latest TV shows, they need to summarize.  Part of the reason I wanted to get students to work on summarizing skills was to kind of push them to feel a bit more comfortable actually talking about stories as opposed to answering the question of, “How was The Secret Garden?” with pat responses like, “It was good,” or “I really liked it.”

In my class, I’ve used simplified news articles, short stories, graded readers and movie plots as material for summaries.  I didn’t use any scholarly articles and most of the news articles I did use had a strong narrative thread.  Which simplifies the task immeasurably.  Because students are working with something that already has an identifiable beginning, middle, and end, they can hit the key points for each step in the story without spending too much time searching for where certain types of information is in the text.  And at a certain level, stories are better suited for fluency activities, as it’s pretty much human nature to tell the same stories over and over again (sometimes much to the annoyance of people like my daughter who can often be heard saying, “Papa, you already told me that story!).

Fluency activities:

If you want students to get fluent at a skill, they have to use it.  A lot.  In a recent talk at the CLESOL conference, Paul Nation identified adding a fluency component as one of the top five changes he would recommend to improve an ESL program’s effectiveness. Like any other skill, summarizing needs to be practiced and practiced again for the skills to become automatic.  With that in mind here are a few activities you can try out in class to have students engage in a lot of fluency work.

Book Critiques: I have an extensive reading program in my school.  The students get two hours of actual class time a week to read.  Because it’s a reading for enjoyment class, I’ve encouraged students to read texts just a little bit below their level of competence.  Which usually means an intermediate or lower-intermediate students is going to be reading a starter level graded reader or level 1.  And they have a huge stack of readers they have finished by now.  For this activity, students grab a reader they like and summarize the story for each other.  One of the best things about this activity is the students don’t have to struggle with finding the language themselves.  They can talk freely about the book, but if in their summary they don’t quite know what to say, they can just refer to the book and find the language they need.  After they have summarized the book for three other students, they get a new book and start again.  If you want to give the students a stronger sense that summarizing has some value aside from practicing English, you can pass out future reading list worksheets.  As students listen to each others summaries, they can choose to add the book to their future reading list.  In this way, students get immediate feedback on if their summaries are engaging and having a positive influence on the other students in class.

What movie is it: Students write a short movie summary.  You can limit the written summary to a certain number of sentences.  Usually I ask the students to keep to about 10 lines.  After students have written up their basic summaries, they then talk about the movie’s plot with another student.  The point of the game is obviously for the students to guess the title of their partner’s movie.  To make the activity a little more conversational in nature, during the second round of the game, I will ask the students to include personal opinions about the movie after every two lines or so.  Here is an example of a summary a student gave about the movie Real Steel.  The bolded sentences are the student’s personal opinions which were added to the written summary:

           A man controlled a big steel robot and had boxing fights.

           I thought the fighting was really cool.

           But the man got divorced and the man had to raise his son.

           His son found an old robot in a garbage dump.

           I liked this part of the movie.  The man and his son could know each

          other.

    

Pictogloss: This is a variation on the dictogloss activity.  First students pick a book or a movie that they would like to recommend to a friend.  You could also ask students to choose from one of the articles that they have read in class.  Students get a few minutes to compose a written summary.  Then, while saying the summary, their partner listens and instead of writing words, draws pictures of key words.  Here is an example of two movie summaries that students produced in pictogloss form.  Can you guess what movies they are?  The written summaries and movie titles are included at the end of this post:

Now comes the confusing part.  The student who originally said the summary takes the pictogloss from their partner and uses that to help give the summary to other students.  This requires the student to engage in a transformation activity, in which the images in the page are translated back into words and then serve as the base for their spoken summary practice.   As a side note, you can do all sorts of activities with written summaries and pictoglosses, such as playing a matching game, having other students in class try to read the pictogloss and decide what the summary is about, etc.  (Shameless promotion #1: if you’re interested in a more detailed look at pictogloss, I will have  short article in the upcoming winter issue of the ETAS Journal in which I go through the process step by step.)

Story Flood: I have 14 short stories I’ve written for ELLs.  Some are available here and here.  For a story flood, I lay out a handful of stories and have the students read the first line of each paragraph until they find a story which they find interesting.  Once they’ve picked a story, they read it through and write up a summary, a critique, and give the story a star rating (1-5 stars).  Then they have four minutes to tell another student about the story as well as to listen to their partner’s summary.  If they hear a summary which seems intriguing, they then go and take that story, read it through and produce a new summary which is then shared with another student.  The activity is a bit chaotic as some students are reading while others are writing and others are talking.  But I find that in a ninety-minute class, students will be able to write and practice talking about three stories.  Here is an example of two students’ summaries with links to the stories upon which they were based:

 Summary of "Learning to Call Something from Nothing"

Summary of "To Gather Up"

A Summary of Summarizing

Doing summary work with upper-level and lower-level students is going to be quite different.  Not just because the level and types of texts will vary, but because of the sense of audience.  By sense of audience in this case, I mean the idea of who will be reading or listening to the student produced summaries.  For a higher-level student in a EAP class, the audience is, eventually, the scholarly community which they are hoping to join.  The act of developing good summary skills is necessary for them to engage in dialogue with this community.  But for lower-level students, there is always the issue of who they are producing their summaries for and just what purpose a summary actual serves in communication.  I’ve tried to make these summary fluency activities as conversational as possible.  I’ve also tried to get students engaged in activities which will, in some way, potential impact the other students in the class.  I wish I had found a better way to emphasize these points at the beginning of this process and would really appreciate any suggestions along those lines.  And while I said this was going to be a 3 part series, I am planning to write one more post on summarizing.  The final post will be a look at an activity to boost student autonomy around summarizing and should be a return to a more reflective practices style of post.

Pictogloss answers:

 Special Delivery Witch

A.I.



Laughing Journal Challenge

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.

Inspired by Mr. Griffin,
I yearbooked myself.
Frightening stuff. technology

The semester has wrapped up at my school.  Which means I’m inputting grades in the school computer.  As I enter the grades, one by one, I can’t help but feel a certain regret at what I could have done better, seeing missed chances for growth for each student.  A-chan nodded off too often during extended reading time, why didn’t I help her pick more level-appropriate books?  C-kun came to every class except the TOEIC lessons, which he managed to miss with clock-work regularity.  Couldn’t I have helped him connect up the TOEIC work with the other classes he enjoys?  And the list goes on and on.  If it weren’t for the fact that I get to tutor students for the big summer speech contest in the morning, I would probably melt right down into a puddle of despair. 

Then Anne Hendler, a fellow English teacher in Korea, blogger, and friend, wrote up a courageous post about her dangerously high stress levels and how she was going to use a laughing journal to help cope.  Sounded like a good idea to me.  So here is my laughing journal for the past week:

Day 1: Not a big laughing day.  I was working on almost no sleep.  I was a test monitor at school for students taking make-up tests.  I was late getting home and made problems for my wife.  My daughter was cranky and sad.  I spilled some Jello on the floor.  Actually, a lot of Jello on the floor.  And then I went on Facebook and saw it was one of my favorite couple's anniversary.  So I typed in a message.  This message actually: "You guys still had the best wedding I was ever late for.  Congratulations.  Love you."  I finished typing and hit return.  But nothing happened.  I hit return again and nothing happened.  Facebook was bugging out.  I pounded the return key with frustration.   Nothing.  So I reloaded my Facebook wall.  There was my friends wedding anniversary picture, only now it had 42 comments where as few seconds before it had only had 6 comments.  I looked at my running list of fourty-two "You guys still had the best wedding I was ever late for.  Congratulations.  Love you," and laughed about one time for each of the 42 comments.

Day 2: My daughter Luca was working in her Kanji exercise book and she had a question about what she was supposed to write.  Without looking up, her mouth twisted into a half-frown off of concentration, she said, "Mama, what am I supposed to do here?"  And I said, "Did you call me 'Mama'?" And we both exploded in laughter.  

Later in the afternoon we went for a walk.  Luca was sleepy and wasn't listening to anything I said and complaining about being hungry.  Basically being a typical, slightly frustrating 4 year old.  So I sat her down and started to give her a lecture.  She looked really sad and serious as she listened to me.  She nodded at just the right times.  I stopped talking and she was about to apologize (I think) when suddenly she farted.  It was a big fart.  I forgot to be angry.  Luca forgot to be sad.  We just laughed.  

At 10:30 PM at night, Luca came downstairs.  She said she woke-up because her tummy was talking to her and she needed to eat.  That was after wolfing down about 11 pieces of sushi at the sushi restaurant earlier in the evening.  So Mamico (my wife) and Luca and I were sitting around the table while Luca ate a piece of bread to satisfy her hunger.  It was cheese and fig bread.  We told Mamico the story of Luca farting just before she could get her apology out.  Luca and I laughed again.  Mamico laughed, too.

(#TESOLgeek memo 1: the second day of my laughing journal had three bursts of laughter entries.  Right before I went to bed I was talking to my wife and I hypothesized that perhaps laughing is similar to language acquisition.  Perhaps the very act of noticing laughter leads to a higher rate of laughter uptake.  I was pretty sure that I would be increasing the number of 'laughter-events' as the week went on. Unfortunately, this hypothesis just goes to prove how over-generalizing language acquisition theory to life in general is nothing more than an excellent form of silliness.)

Day 3: We went to Kyoto for an essay reading event.  It was held at a small bar with nice sofas and people in expensive jeans who all managed to look shabbily smart.  We took Luca with us.  Because our friend was reading from her essay collection and you know, taking a 4 year old to an essay reading is often good form.  Or not.  Anyway, Luca was doing great.  She was sat quietly and listened to the first essay about how the naming of a child is the first gift that parents give to their child.  But the next reader started off by giving a color quiz.  A kind of pop psychology thing.  The woman was holding up a color chart which had a lot of little colored balls glued to it and one of the balls fell off.  It was very small.  Maybe the size of a pea.  It was red.  As soon as it fell off, Luca laughed.  A loud, rolling laugh that you don't really expect from a 4 year old.  And no one expects at a high-class essay reading.  It was, in short, a gloriously incongruous laugh.  And the people on the sofa next to us joined in.  As did the people across the coffee table.  There were eight of us laughing.  The reader didn’t laugh.  But to her credit, she did wait patiently.  

Day 4: We were all laying down on the floor in our living room.  It is very hot in Japan this summer, but we don't use the air-conditioner.  Everyone in Japan is trying to conserve power.  We don't like being hot, but we don't want the government to start up the nuclear power-plants even more.  So we lie on the floor.  And we don't stand up if we do not have to.   There we were, just lying on the floor, Mamico, Luca and I.  Then Mamico started talking up towards the ceiling and we noticed there was a great humming echo.  You know, like the kind of echo you get in a room with a curved ceiling; the kind of room where you can whisper and the person standing all the way on the other side of the room from you can hear it.  At least that's what I thought it was like.  I was really excited.  I made Mamico stand up and walk to the corner of the room.  I whispered in as small a voice as I could, “Can you hear me?”  She said yes.  I got even more excited.  I was talking about the interesting acoustic properties of our living room.  I was comparing it to a concert hall.  Mamico said, “Stand in the kitchen.”  So I did.  Mamico stayed in the living room a few meters away.  She whispered in a tiny voice, “Can you hear me?”  I said yes.  “I’m not sure it’s the acoustics," Mamico said.  "I think our house just isn’t that big.”  That made me laugh.

Day 5: I had a pretty informal lesson observation today.  I video taped one of my classes and sent it off to John Fanselow, and then we spent an hour going through the lesson.  He asked me questions (“Why are you having all the students do the dictation exercise at the same time?” “Why do you explain all the steps of the exercise at one time?” “Why don’t you give your sample sentences a title?”).  One hour of question after question.  Which did lead to some moments of laughter.  But it was more of a desperate laughter of exhaustion.  And it also led to this insight: a good observation starts with a sense of curiosity and ends with the sense of curiosity spreading from the observer to the observee.  At the end of the observation, John mentioned an article I had written about a dictogloss variation I had developed with my students.  He said, “You know, you have this paragraph at the end of page 22 and I have to say, I have no idea what you are talking about.  Why don’t you take that paragraph and rewrite it without any jargon.  And while you’re at it, see if any of your friends will give it a try as well.”  So I rewrote the paragraph.  It took a long time and gave me a headache.  I also posted the paragraph as a Google Doc and invited people on Twitter to give it a re-write as well.  Anne Hendler (@Annehendler) sent out the following Tweet:

“my original translation had the word "stuff" in it multiple times #imakenosenseeither”

Which I think was the point John was trying to make.  But the idea of taking an academic article and replacing all jargon with the word “stuff” made me laugh.  A lot.   

(#TESOLgeek memo 2: John very much enjoyed everyone’s translations and said, “This is the exact point I’ve been trying to make for the past forty years.” He also sent me a copy of his article Beyond Rashomon, recommended reading for anyone who talks about teaching English.) 

Day 6: I was writing an article on various approaches in language teaching and realized that while I had watched people use Cuisenaire rods to teach, I had never actually tried to use them in learning a language myself.  So I fired up Youtube and found a series of seven videos which use Cuisenaire rods to teach the Native American language Lakoto.  Mamico and I watched all seven videos over and over.  We were particularly confused by the words “ba-nis” and “jim” which seemed to be very important to the conversation.  We had figured out that “na” was a conjunction.  That “sapa” meant ‘both.’  We understood the basic structure of the sentences.  But “ba-nis” and “jim” remained a mystery.  Until Mamico said, “It’s their names.”  Oh, “Bernice and Jim.”  We watched the videos a few more times and every time I heard “ba-nis” and “jim” I would laugh.  And then have to rewind the video because I had laughed right over the lesson. 

(TESOLgeek memo 3: I ended up using Cuisenaire rods to help one of my students use adverbial phrases and noun clauses in his speech.  The fact that I could easily pick up an entire clause and physically move it around in the sentence proved to be very helpful for understanding.  Sandy Millin also has a must read blog post on Cuisenaire rod use.)

Assorted other laughs:

-        Michael Griffin’s (@michaelegriffin) mullet photo which can be seen on Facebook.

-        An academic essay on cupcakes http://www.samplereality.com/2012/07/24/on-the-predominance-of-cupcakes-as-a-cultural-form/ (favorite line: “Ontologically speaking, just what the hell are cupcakes anyway?”)

-        A series of tweets between Laura Phelps (@pterolaur) and Michael Griffin about toilets, toilet water, and unexpected dangers.

So that’s it.  Six days of things that made me laugh.  So did it work?  Did I feel less depressed about a semester full of missed teaching and learning opportunities for my students?  Not really.  But when I wasn’t busy feeling regretful, I was definitely more cheerful and ready to laugh.  Perhaps there is something to the idea that noticing laughter-events leads to more laughter.  And even if it doesn’t, writing up this laughing journal gave me a chance to laugh at my week again.  So at the very least, a laughing journal certainly leads to recycling of laughter-events and even a certain kind of joyful consolidation.

"What do you want to talk about?"...novel?

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.

Note to readers: this is just a straight up reflection of a lesson I ran today.  There’s no overarching theme.  And the lesson itself has been done in a similar way by hundreds and hundreds of teachers before me.  But while I was doing it, it felt novel and new to me.  As John Fanselow says, “Each of us has to reinvent the wheel even as we see others using wheels.” So here is my new wheel.  Not perfectly round, but it rolled well enough for 50 minutes today. 

     Influenza is knocking out students left and right at my school.  Most of the classes don't have enough students present to push forward.  So instead of rushing ahead with the one (mostly) full class of first year students I had, I decided to take some time and talk with the students.  We dragged the desks to the back of the room and sat in a cirlce.  I said, “If you could suddenly speak perfect English today, what would you want to talk about?”  Here were the answers I got:

-       Delicious Food

-       Hobbies

-       Music

-       Sports

-       Talk to Kevin (that’s me)

-       Movies

-       The differences between Japan and other countries

-       Just talking with a friend, answering and asking questions

-       Where I live

     I asked the students if they had ever spent time in their English class just freely talking about any of these things?  The answer was “No.”  Which is pretty amazing.  Not that they didn’t have a chance to talk about these things in their English classes.  That’s to be expected considering the school's set curriculum and teachers' hesitation to deviate from it.  What was amazing was the fact that most of the students answered the question at all, verbally or with a head shake.  They were engaged.  So I apologized for the fact that, during their first year in high school they didn’t get a chance to talk about what they wanted to talk about during English classes.  As the coordinator of the International Course, I felt at least partially responsible.  Now to defend myself (from who?), we actually did cover most of these subjects in oral communication class this year.  But obviously something about the manner in which the topics were presented and how practicing the language was carried out left students with the impression that they had never talked about hobbies or music or delicious foods in class.  Maybe my heavy handed focus on form short-circuted their ability to focus on content. I should have been thinking of 'time-space.' 

So I made a promise to the students.  We have about 1 month left of regular classes.  About 7 or 8 classes depending on what other things pop up in the schedule (and things always do pop up at my school). I promised we would spend those 7 or 8 classes just talking about a few of the subjects they had brought up.  I asked the students to vote and we would focus on the three topics students had the most interest in.  Now I felt kind of conflicted about this step at the time.  And feel even more conflicted now that I’m writing it up.  Exactly why did I feel the need to force the students to pick 3 topics?  Probably I wanted to regain some feeling of teacherly control in the classroom.  At least that’s what it feels like now.  And maybe it was anxiety about not being able to teach the students well enough or just “enough” as far as content is concerned.  I wanted to hedge my bets and give myself a chance to prepare. 

Students ended up picking “music”, “hobbies” and “movies”.  And by a vast majority, they wanted to spend the rest of class time--35 minutes-- talking about hobbies.

So I said, "OK, talk to each other about hobbies.  Just give it a shot.  Talk for a minute." I pressed the start button on my kitchen time (that's how I keep track of time in class). 

The students talked.  I heard “Do you have what hobbies?”  and “What have hobbies?” and “Do you hobbies?” 

And I heard answers.  A lot of answers in…English.  The timer beep-beeped.

On the white board I wrote down, “What is Nanae’s hobby?” and I asked a student.  I said, “Kesukei, what is Nana's hobby?”  He said, “Watch TV.”  Which I corrected verbally and then wrote on the board as “She likes to watch TV.”  I got all of their hobbies up on the board.  They were:

-       Watching TV

-       Listening to music.

-       Playing video games.

-       Using a computer.

-       Drawing pictures.

-       Reading books.

Then I wrote the letters “W” “d” “y” on the board.  I wrote them as giant frankenstein letters, scary in their enormity.  And there was also a lot of white space between them.   Then I asked the students to talk to each other about hobbies again but for 2 minutes this time.  They talked for a few seconds and then some students looked at me pleadingly.  I wanted to help, but we had an odd number of students and I was busy talking to Saki.  I was torn.  The kitchen timer beeped.  The students looked relieved.

 I asked the students what it was they had wanted to say or ask that they couldn’t get out.  One student said he wanted to ask about when their partner did their hobby.  I should fess up to the fact that I speak Japanese, so the students told me what they wanted to say in Japanese. But I didn't rephrase it in English.  Instead, I pointed to those magic letters, “W” “d” “y” and said, “Here’s all you need.”  I was patient and waited and sweated while the students were thinking and they came out with, “When do you hobby?”  Which was great as far as I was concerned.  I got it on the board and circled hobby and replaced it with words from the hobby list and we were good to go.  And then another student said they had wanted to ask about where their partner did their hobby.  I pointed to those letters again and we got, “Where do you hobby?”  I’m not sure of hobby as a verb here, but as a kind of place holder it seemed to work and students didn’t actually use the questions, “When do you hobby?” or “Where do you hobby?” So maybe it was OK, although I think there could have been a smoother way to handle this linguistic hiccup. 

     I started the kitchen timer and told the students they had three minutes of talk time.  And as this is a reflective teaching piece, I have to ask myself, “Why are you so hung up on this whole keeping time thing Mr. Me?  Can't you just throw that kitchen timer out the window?”  I'll have to take that up in another post soon.  Maybe I should write it while watching a kitchen timer counting down.  Anyway, I talked with my partner, Keiko, who it turns out likes to watch TV shows.  American dramas. Every evening before dinner.  In her room.  But her TV is small.  Then I was ready to find out about the other students' hobbies.  So I had the following conversation:

Me: Taka, what is Kenta’s hobby?

Taka: Reading books.

Me:  Really.  I didn’t know that.  Where does he read?

Taka: In his house.

Me: When does he read?

Taka: Every day.

Me: What books does he read?

Taka: ???????

Me: What books does he read?  Novels?  Nonfiction?

Taka: I don’t know.

Me: OK, Kenta, what books do you read?

Kenta: Novels.

I wrote the sentence “What novels do you read?” on the board and underlined the words “novels” and “read”.  I passed out blank sheets of paper to the students.  I set the kitchen timer for five minutes.  I said, "please tell me about your partners hobbies when I come back."  And I left the room.  5 minutes of talk time for the students. 5 minutes of pacing the hall for me.  5 minutes with no over-eager teacher sucking up oxygen.  I think that must have been nice for the students. 

When I went back into class we were almost out of time for the day.  Just had a few minutes to find out that Kenta and Saki both really like the same author.  And that they felt pretty happy to know that.  I also asked students to let me know how they liked the class.  Because if they didn’t like it, they had to let me know or they might be stuck with this style of lesson for the next month. 

I did end up getting some feedback while I was helping students clean the entrance hall at the end of the day.  Kirara, a quite girl who sometimes avoids English class entirely because she hates the pressure of having to speak, told me, “today’s class was good.”  She got to talk about something she was interested in, she said. On the flip side, two of the more studious boys were sweeping and stopped to tell me that today's kind of class was their, “real weakness.”  And I told them, “me, too.”  And it’s the truth.  I’m a plan-it-out kind of guy.  I try to be student centered, but I know my classroom can lean in the other direction.  Still I would like to think some of the teacher centered classes and focus on form exercises we did this year were useful.  I’m pretty sure that without them, the students would have never come up with the questions from the letters, “W”, “d”, “y”.  But then again, if the classes had been a bit more student centered, maybe the students wouldn't have so completely forgotten what we had been talking about while studying the forms.   

Four more weeks and a pretty long list of required grammar points still left on the syllabus.  7 or 8 more lesson...seems just about the right amount of time to figure some things out, or at the very least, stumble upon a whole different set of questions. 


(A big thank you to all the bloggers on the right side of this page and many more.  In the past few weeks, your posts on teaching unplugged, Dogme, and reflective teaching have helped me to take a clearer look at what I am doing in the classroom and given me the confidence to admit when I can make something better.)

Do you really need 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.

Recently I’ve been running some activities to try and get my students used to the fact that when it comes to listening, they just ain’t gonna hear everything that get’s said.  I'm lucky to be working with John Fanselow who is advising our schools.  He is unbelievably generous with his time.  He was telling me a story of how the old Bell Telephone Company put together a kind of clozed test to figure out the minimum number of relays they would have to install before reception degraded too much during a phone call.  Bell technicians (were they even called technicians way back then?) would phone people up and start talking, leaving out words in a set script.  And it turned out that there was no problem up to a certain point.  For example, if the Bell people called up Mr. Smoking-his-pipe-and-reading-the-evening-paper-guy and asked him, "What did you eat for ＿＿＿＿ this evening?"  Well, Mr. SHP would maybe reply, "For dinner , son?  Well I had a nice steak!"  Mr. SHP didn't even seem to notice that the word dinner had been "dropped" from the sentence.  Of course now we have wonderful things like schema theory and ideas about top-down listening to make sense of what was going on.  But back in the 1940s, Bell Telephone was just happy to find out they could get away with less switches than they thought they needed and make even more money off of their telecommunications monopoly.

Now my students are about as far away from Mr. SHP as you can get.  They are hyper-vigilant listeners.  In fact, one could even say that their unending desire to hear every single sound that is uttered by a speaker (the bottom-up thing), is one of their biggest problems when it comes to understanding. And that's not the only issue facing them.  The way they listen, what they are listening for, is just not very useful when it comes to English.  If this kind of stuff gets your heart racing, check out Anne Cutler's article, "The comparative perspective on spoken-language processing" or maybe even my own totally unpublished and hence perhaps unreliable article.  So anyway, I wanted to get my students used to the idea that they didn't have to hear everything that was said, so I started doing a warm up dictation exercise in which I would leave out a few words or even in a sentence while trying my best to maintain the natural prosody of the sentence.  Basically I would end up saying something like this:

"・ mother read・ novels every night ・ ・ living room be・ go・ to sleep." 

And the students would write something like this:

                "My mother reads novels every night in the living room before going to sleep."

Now the thing about this activity I want you to remember, is that it was just a warm up.  I did 5 sentences in five minutes and then would call on students to read what they had written down and I would write it up on the whiteboard.  As time passed, students expressed to me how much they liked the activity and it became a regular feature of class.  I was pretty happy with the activity and the students level of engagement, so I took a video and sent it off to John Fanselow, who called me up and said, "Kevin, why are the students facing the board?"  (I bet you thought this was going to be another detailed lesson plan dressed up as a blog post again, didn't you?  Nope.)  Which was the first thing I learned from this episode.  What's the point of sending something off you are satisfied with if you think you're going to get praised?  If someone's going to be kind enough to put some time and effort into thinking about what I did in my class, I should be overjoyed that they have an idea to make it better.  But for some reason I wasn't overjoyed.  I was confused. 

"Where should they look John?"  I wasn't being smart by the way.  I had no idea where the students would look if not at the board.

"Out the window," John said.  "Have you ever had your students look out the window."

"Nope.  Never thought of it," I said.

I've observed enough classes to know that I can never know what is going to happen if I change this or that variable in a class.  And as John was obviously being sincere in his suggestion, that's what I did.  I went into class the next day and told all the students to turn their chairs around and look out the window.  And we did the same basic warm-up.  And you know what, when it came time to get the right answers from the students, I thought that it was kind of a waste of time to have one student say their answer if I couldn't write it up on the board.  And then I quickly realized that maybe having a student say their answer and writing it all up on the board was actually a big waste of time in general.  Instead I had them just exchange papers and see if there was anything different about what the person next to them had written.  Then I had them exchange papers again.  And again.  Finally I told them to get their own paper back and make any changes they wanted.  And then, just to see what would happen, I had the students all say their revised sentence at the same time.  And you know what, they all said their sentence with a lot more conviction than usual.

So the second thing I learned from this experience was you just don't know what you don't need unless you take it away.  The white board, that piece of white real-estate shinning at the front of the room, with it's alluring blankness, wasn't actually blank at all. It had filled up my class with all sorts of expectations and habits that I hadn't even noticed.  So I spent the rest of the class like that, no white board. 

Lately I've been reading Kevin Giddens posterous feed, "Do Nothing Teaching."  I dig it.  But I do think it's pretty hard to figure out what you don't need or don't need to do on your own.  Some things become so ingrained we don't even really think of them as an action anymore.  And if we don't think about them, we can't change them.  So a big thanks to John and to all the bloggers who are posting things to help bring my focus back to what I am actually doing moment by moment in the classroom.

As far as the rest of the no-white-board-lesson is concerned, well, I can't say that the rest of the class was perfect or anything, but at the very least, it was a sunny winter day and one of the students told me that the feeling of the sun coming in from the window felt good on his face.