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.

"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.)