Action Research...too organic for me?

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.

I’m working my way through the Dip TESOL course now.  The theory stuff on SLA, loved it.  Action research, not so much.  And it really is getting to me.  Why don’t I dig the action research?  Here’s my chance to evaluate what’s going on in my classes and for some reason I find myself shaking my head side to side much more than up and down.  I had to critique Nunan’s Action Research in the language classroom and giving it a careful read changed my mind somewhat.  But there is still this lingering unease.

Kemmis (2007) has said that, “Action research aims at changing three things: practitioners’ practices, their understandings of their practices, and the conditions in which they practice.”  So what could there be to disagree with.  I want to improve how I teach English, I want to have a deeper knowledge of how I see my teaching, and there is no doubt I would like to have a mechanism for changing the environment in which my teaching takes place.

I guess part of my problem with action research is the idea that I can spot a problem or am aware enough to pick out something useful in my teaching to focus on.  Sure, I understand it's subjective, that there’s no wrong thing to focus in on. If I or a co-worker identify an issue in my classroom, then I’m good to go.  I should tackle that problem with the same kind of focus I have when I read about and try to implement SLA research in my classroom.  But…but there is always the feeling of “but.”

I did what I usually do in these cases.  I read more.  I buried myself in Action Research for Language Teacher (Wallace, 1998).  Good book.  Didn’t help.  Kept getting hung up on lines like, "the process of professional development varies from one person to another," and "[Action research] nearly always arises from some specific problem or issue arising out of our professional practice."  Am I crazy or are there other people out there who feel that problems and issues that 'arise' might not actual be so much of a problem as the problems and issues that somehow stay hidden?

 

Then I read Head & Taylor’s (1997). Readings in teacher development.  Chock full of goodness.  Especially the stuff on 'Self and peer assessment.'  But did it leave me satisfied?  Nope.  So instead of reading, I decided to take Head & Taylor's advice and do a peer assessment.  They said watching another teacher was going to teach me loads about my own teaching.   

Luckily I have a game fellow teacher by the name of Scott.  We teach together on Fridays.  So I hit him up and he said no problem.  As suggested, I asked him what he was interested in getting feedback on.  Turns out that the issue arising from his professional practice is, "how to give classroom instructions."  Then I sat in the corner and took notes.  Lots and lots of notes.  Scott, like me, is a big kitchen timer kind of guy.  If you’re interested in my kitchen timer fetish, just check out my earlier post.  As I was watching him give instructions, very similar to my own style, I started to feel kind of itchy.  “OK,” he boomed out, “let’s practice for 3 minutes.  Go!”  or “OK, we are going to practice for 3 times.  1^st time is 2 minutes.  Start!”  The look on the kids faces.  He said “start” and it was like the crack of a whip.  Is that what the kids looked like when I pushed the button on the kitchen timer?  Not good.

During our feedback session, I asked Scott, “How do you come up with the times you set for your activities.”  He didn’t know.  He looked a little depressed.  I told him I only asked because I also didn’t have any real basis for the times I set either.  We both kind of agreed that maybe it might be better to just ask the students, “How long do you think you need to practice this language to get a little more comfortable?” or see how many times the students wanted to practice. 

That’s what I’ve been doing in my classes since Friday.  With a little tweak.  First I give the students a ridiculously short amount of time to practice.  Maybe only a minute.  Just so they can see how far they can get.  It's their baseline.  Then I ask them, “OK, how much time do you really need to practice this conversation from start to finish one time.”  The student suggestions are, in and of themselves, awesomely random.  Students yell out, “10 minutes,” “3 minutes,” “5 minutes.”  But they YELL out a time.  They are yelling to practice English.  Same goes for number of times to practice.  In my morning class today the kids built a dialogue on hobbies. One kid said he wanted to practice it 35 times.  We would have been in class until 7 PM.  Luckily the other students had a bit more confidence and negotiated him down to 7 times.

Identifying an issue, careful observation, and just a little bit of feedback has already made my class more student centered and probably more productive as well.  And I wasn't even the one being assessed.  Still, I can't shake my doubts about how I should go about implementing action research for myself.  I long for some kind of truly objective tool to help me identify what to focus on.  That being said, probably my biggest issue with action research is just...me.  I want to learn something before I do it.  I want to break everything apart and put it back together mentally before I'm willing to try it out on the road.  But reading text after text isn’t going to carry me any closer to a place where I’m comfortable with action research.  Just like arbitrarily setting a 3 minute time limit on practice isn’t necessarily going to get my students any more comfortable with a particular aspect of English.  However long it takes, it takes.  However many times I need to try it, I need to try it.  To find out the value of action research, I'm going to have to put it into practice and watch as it unfolds inside and in-front of me. 

Head, K. & Taylor, P. (1997). Readings in teacher development. Oxford: Heinemann.

Kemmis, S. (2007), "Action Research As a Practice-Changing Practice." Opening Address for the Spanish Collaborative Action Research Network Conference, University of Valladolid. Retrieved 17 January, 2011 from http://www.infor.uva.es/~amartine/MASUP/Kemmis_2007.pdf

Nunan, D. (1990). "Action research in the language classroom." In J. Richards & D. Nunan (Eds.). Second Language Teacher Education (pp.62-81).  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Wallace, M.J. (1998), Action Research for Language Teachers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

But am I familiar with familiar?

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.

Lately I am so grooving on Paul Nation's 4-Strands.  I mean, it's got it all, right?  25% of your time on meaning based input (graded readers, book floods, news stories simplified with a frequency checker, movie clips, audio books), 25% on meaning based output (tasks, student directed conversations, role-playing), 25% on form or language focused work (ah, the glories of saying SVO, prefix and suffix challenges, comparing various uses of polite language) and finally, my favorite until recently, 25% of course time on fluency.  And you know why I used to love fluency?  Because it was something I just didn't spend enough time on before.  I was always in such a rush to give the kids something new to learn (there's quite a bit of pressure at my school to produce results) that I didn't take nearly enough time to practice what the students had already learned.  But you know what?  Fluency has fallen off my list of faves. 

Paul says the students should be using language which is "largely familiar" to them in fluency activities and that the key point is to push them to use the language a little faster, a little smoother than they are used to.  The pressure is the key.  Take that "familiar" language and push on it and turn it into a diamond of fluency.

So what's my beef with Paul Nation?  Almost nothing.  If it weren't for him, I would have never have even known about frequency checkers.  And that alone has changed my life for the better.  No, I'm not angry with Paul Nation.  I'm angry with my own inability to clearly identify just what language my students are "familiar" with.  For example, if I use key vocabulary (including phrases) and grammar (including functional grammar) from the previous lesson, but the students somehow managed to forget it over the weekend (imagine that), I somehow go from a fluency activity to a meaning based output or input activity.  Which has gotten me thinking, what does it mean for a student to be largely familiar with some aspect of language anyway?  I'm not trying to be facetious about this. 

Lately there was a little dust-up on how to teach vocabulary on the Osaka-JALT page on Facebook.  It all started with Mike McKay's request for help: "How can I get my students to understand that ‘smart’ means ‘intelligent’ instead of dressing like Dapper Dan?” Suddenly I was faced with the fact that students might think, "Hey, I know this language!"  But, in truth, not so much.  This could be due to L1 Interference, misunderstanding at the outset, or an inability to even recognize when they don't recognize something (a problem of awareness or what I like to think of as the 'lemon juice effect').   So just how familiar with the language do students need to be for their level of familiarity to qualify as familiar?  

Or maybe I'm just too hung up on putting things in their nicely labeled boxes.  Paul Nation never said that there wasn't a constant flow between the four strands.  If a student forgot most of the materials from Friday's lesson over the weekend, and the planned Monday morning fluency activity turns into meaning based output activity, that doesn't mean that in the middle of the activity that same student wouldn't be able to shift into practicing fluency…right?  I guess I just got lulled by those crisp clear "25%"s marching through the article.  I thought I had finally gotten ahold of a more concrete and perhaps less time consuming way to organize my courses.  But of course language teaching isn't crisp and clear. 

I'm also reminded of another number.  This one pops up in Lightbown (2003).  "1".  As in students, "cannot achieve native-like (or near native-like) command of a second language in 1 hour a day."  At my school, students aren't getting 1 hour of English classes a day.  And a majority of them aren't studying 1 hour a day either.  That doesn't mean students don't need to practice for fluency, just that I have to do the messy hard work of keeping track of where my students are to make sure that that particular 25% finds its way into class.

Lightbown, P. M. (2003) “SLA research in the classroom / SLA research for the classroom." Language Learning Journal 28, pp. 4-13.

Nation, I.S.P. (2007) “The four strands.” Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching 1, 1: 1-12.

Nation, I.S.P. (2003) “Vocabulary.” In D. Nunan. (ed.) Practical English Language

Schmidt, R. (1993) "Awareness and Second Language Acquisition." Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 13, pp. 206-226.

             

"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.)

Sorry to have missed that

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.

As I look back on my recent blog posts, I notice that while I briefly touch on what kind of school I teach at, there isn't much in there about the actual students.  Sure, all of the collected speech comes from my students, but there's something wrong with the way those words are floating free, anchored to nothing, no body out of which they came.  Maybe that's partially do to the fact that this is a public blog and the high school where I work has pretty strict privacy standards.  So in one sense, a blog like this can't replace a private journal.  At least not in my case.  But there's another aspect to it.  What I'm most interested in is ideas.  I groove out to know that failing really does lead to better learning  or that a certain level of background noise is optimal for lip reading.  And I love to take these ideas into my classroom.  But in all that clutter of ideas, maybe sometimes I'm not paying the kind of close attention to students that I should.

Today I did a "Make A Museum" class with my students.  I thought it would be fun for all of us to put together a history museum of our school.  So we wandered around the building and asked to borrow anything that caught our eye.  We snagged a piggy-bank in the shape of a Rira-Kuma (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rilakkuma) from the principles desk, A bowl of goldfish out of room 302, the school's name written in calligraphy on a faded scroll.  We had a good haul.  Two of the students, a first and a second year student, were laughing most of the time as they picked things up.  Lets call the second year student Juri and the first year student Riki. 

When we got back to the classroom with all our stuff, I passed out some examples of exhibit identification cards and curatorial comments.  At this point Juri started to explain to everyone that the goldfish weren't actually goldfish at all.  They were actually the souls of graduated students.  These students didn't want to leave their high school behind them so they turned themselves into fish.  Some students laughed.  One student said it was a creepy idea.  One student wrote it down on the identification card.  And that is how our history museum turned into a museum of the strange and wonderful.  The scroll with the school's name became a "piece of ancient toilet paper found in a Chinese castle."  The wooden tops became, "Hypnotic Counseling Instruments to turn bad boys into good boys." 

At the end of the day most of the teachers had come through our museum.  The students were guides and read the curatorial comments to the teachers.  And the teachers laughed.  Not out of obligation, but with the kind of surprised laugh you can't fake.  And I could see the pride the students were feeling in the way they guided the teachers to the next exhibit and the one after that.  But then the chime for the last class rang.  It was over. 

Most of the students were pretty worn out and took off.  But Juri stayed in the room.  Juri always stays in the room.  Tomorrow there's an entrance exam, so all the students had to be out the door earlier than usual.  Still, Juri took a long time to pack up her bag.  Juri always takes a long time to pack up her bag.  She thinks she forgot something, opens and closes pockets, finds what she is looking for, zips up the bag, unzips it again and starts the process over.  Usually I watch her and think, "Why is she so slow?  Why can't she just pack up her stuff?"  Most of the time as I wait for her to pack, I think. I think I am thinking about her, but actually, I am thinking about me.  I am thinking about me waiting.  Not today.  Today, as Juri was not getting ready to leave, I realized, as clearly as if she turned to me and said it in RP English, she loves school.  She loves to be in school and she wants to stay in school as long as she can.  So instead of waiting for her, I just talked to her while she was packing up.  I told her how grateful I was that she had taken the activity to a whole new place.  How much more interesting haunted goldfish were than humdrum history. 

It was raining today in the city.  Juri didn't have an umbrella and she said she didn't need one when I tried to give her one from the teachers' room.  Two years I've been teaching Juri.  Two years and only today did I take the time to walk her to the door.  So I think I've got a while to go when it comes to this reflective teaching thing.  Wish me luck.

  

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.

Do I have the time for vocabulary?

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.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of Paul Nation, which naturally leads to spending a lot of time thinking about vocabulary.  How do my students pick it up?  What kinds of exposure do they need to be able to infer meaning?  If you are looking to find out more about Paul Nation, I recommend Averil Coxehead’s (2010) article from Reading in a Foreign Language as well as Paul’s Teaching and Learning Vocabulary (1990).  Much of my vocabulary anxiety is do to a very short article Paul wrote on vocabulary teaching through task based activities.  Most of the vocabulary teaching I do is quite passive.  At most I might highlight words in a text I want the students to focus on, but I rarely create activities in which I expect those words to be used.  I leave it up to the students.  And as might be expected, some students take the time to learn the vocabulary, while others do not. 

So today, I decided to implement some of Paul’s ideas.  I used 2 stories from All New Easy True Stories (Sandra Heyer, 2004).  The students are second year high school students in an International Program which has 7 hours of English class weekly.  My school is a special environment in that most of the students did not/could not attend junior high school do to bullying, anxiety, family issues or a host of other reasons.  So while the amount of English classes they take in a week is probably slightly more than the average Japanese student, their starting point is slightly (or sometimes enormously) delayed.  I’ve found Heyer’s text to be just about the right level for my students.  Even the highest level students find 4 or so unknown words per ~200 word story, which averages out to a comprehension rate of 98% and the lower level students might encounter 8 or so words per story (96% comprehension).  Here are the first 4 paragraphs from the story, “Grandfather Hada’s Favorite Soup.” I’ve underlined the words that I think my students might have problems with during the class.

   It is New Year’s Day in Japan.  The Hada family is eating a special New Year’s soup.  The soup has chicken, vegetables and mochi in it.  Mochi are rice cakes.

   Grandfather Hada likes mochi.  He takes a big bite of mochi.  Then he begins to cough.

   Grandfather Hada coughs and coughs.  He can’t stop coughing.  The mochi is stuck in his throat.  Grandfather Hada’s face is purple.  He can’t breathe.  Someone runs to the phone and calls an ambulance.  When will the ambulance arrive?  Maybe in five or ten minutes.  That will be too late.

One of the beauties of this textbook is the fabulous picture of a grandfather with a vacuum hose stuck down his throat that each story comes with a relatively detailed storyboard. The storyboard pictures very clearly link up the story content.  I’ve embedded one of the storyboards as an image below:

  As you might notice above, some of the vocabulary I’ve identified is quite simple.  For example the word cough is actually probably known to almost all my students.  But their reading skills are such that they might not be able to identify the word just through reading (more on that in a later post on pronunciation I think). 

I passed out a copy of “Grandfather Hada’s Favorite Soup” storyboard to the students and jotted up the underlined vocabulary words on the white board.  I then read the story out loud to the students.   I encouraged the students to point to the corresponding pictures as I was reading.  I read at a natural rate, although I did leave a little more of a gap between sense groups than I might in a higher level class.  I read the story two times and the second time around I stopped after saying one of the target vocabulary words and did a short pronunciation practice.  As a kind of off-the-cuff evaluation, I have to say that my students didn’t reach for their dictionaries the way they usually do.  I had a feeling at this point that the images and the style of the story provided them with the context they needed to infer the meaning. 

In the next task, I passed out a copy of the written story.  Students had to match sentences with the corresponding images.  Students, working in pairs, circled groups of sentences and then wrote the corresponding number of the image above the first sentence in each group.  Students were encouraged (which is a nice way to say directed) to use only English in this activity.  Here is some of the language that students produced:

           Kosukei: [pointing to picture 5] He coughs and coughs.

           Rina:  Poor Hada Ojisan (laughter).  

           Sema: [pointing to picture 6] What is kyukyusha?
                         (Ambulance in Japanese)

           Ryunosuke: Ambulance.  See, she calls the ambulance.

So it turns out that students were indeed able to infer the meaning of the vocabulary words through context and the task of linking words to images gave them a chance to put the words into action (with the usual treasure trove of grammar errors). 

Finally, I had two pairs of students join up to make a group of 4 students.  I wrote the following three questions/tasks on the board:

          

1.          What are the most common things that people choke on?  List three. 

2.          Give three pieces of advice to help people to keep from choking.

3.          What are some jobs which use a special kind of vehicle?  Which of those jobs would you most like to try?

Students were instructed to first discuss the task before deciding on a final answer.  Here is a sample of the language they used during the discussion of the first task:

              1A:        They choke on bones. 

                            Children sometimes, you know, do with toys.

                            Hotdog.  Hotdogs are easy for it.

                            My mother choked on konyaku jelly. 
                                     I don’t like it.

                            Grape.  I did once.

Students sometimes, but not always, managed to use the target vocabulary while answering the questions.  While I was listening, I noticed students using the target vocabulary about 50% of the time.  The rest of the time students were cleverly finding ways to avoid using the relatively unfamiliar words.

              It’s pretty hard for me to come to any hard conclusions from one class.  Do I think students picked up the vocabulary faster and more firmly than they would have in a class where I didn’t take the time to have them focus on the vocabulary?  Couldn’t they have learned the vocabulary faster just by whipping out their dictionaries?  Probably.  But the fact that they didn’t feel the need to use their dictionaries at all is what really sticks with me.  They were processing the vocabulary in a different way than usual.  And while not all the students bothered to use the vocabulary during the tasks, some of them did and I think it resulted in multiple exposures in a more communicative way.  At the very least, I think this class gave the students some practice in inferring meaning and a few ideas about how to study vocabulary in a new way.  I will be using the same lesson structure tomorrow, so perhaps I’ll have a better handle on how useful it might be. But I’m pretty torn.  My students, considering their academic history, are not the best or most focused students when it comes to studying, so this kind of controlled practice insures some more exposure to vocabulary than might normally take place.  But the time…all that time…

Refrences:

Coxhead, A. (2010) “Grabbed early by vocabulary: Nation’s ongoing contributions to vocabulary

and reading in a foreign language.” Reading in a Foreign Language. 22 (1) pp. 1-14.

Nation, I.S.P. (1990) Teaching and Learning Vocabulary. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.

Nation, I.S.P. and Hamilton-Jenkins, A. (2000) "Using Communicative Tasks to Teach Vocabulary", Guidline 22 (2) pp. 15-19

Heyer, S. (2004) All New Easy True Stories.  Pearson Education.

I teach grammar...but I can quit any time I want...

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.

I recently read Michael Swan's detailed and at times wickedly funny critique of Task Based Instruction.  While his depiction of a pure TB syllabus seems to me a little too stereotypical (and in truth he does clearly say that he is not going after teachers who utilize TBI as one component of their program, but instead going after TBI purists), his frustration with wave after wave of paradigm shifts which often result in the devaluation of useful and effective teaching methodologies seems to me dead on.  And his main critique, that a narrowly structured, TB syllabus (or lack of syllabus as the case might be), is, "unsuitable for exposure-poor context where time is limited," and that in certain situations, "planned approaches incorporating careful prioritizing, proactive syllabus design, and concentrated work…offer the best chance of success," also seems extremely reasonable. 

One might quibble about exactly what Michael means by "success."  Perhaps his success, constrained as it is by time and language exposure issues, might be very different from a teacher working in a different environment and with a different learner population. But working in Japan, where a vast majority of junior high and high school English language classes are held primarily in Japanese (I would be surprised if learners are exposed to more than 10 minutes of English during an actual 50 minute class), I also find myself hoping to get the most functional linguistic bang for each minute of class time. 

Scott Thornbury muses on some of the same issues as Michael in an excellent blog post on input, although Scott's slant is a little more on the, "yes, balance is necessary" side of the spectrum.  There is nothing I could point to and say, "no, no, no, that's not right," but I wasn't nodding along in agreement as I read Scott's post either. 

Perhaps the reason is that for roughly 25% of my class time, I am teaching pre-selected grammar material, and about half of that time I am doing it in a pretty teacher-centered way.  Sometimes I catch myself feeling bad about it.  I'm just thankful to have read Paul Nation's 4-Strand article recently.  It helped clear away some of the shame.  And here I guess is the crux of what I want to say and what I think made Michael's article resonate with me…why the heck should I feel guilty about teaching grammar? And what exactly is wrong about occasionally leading a class through a traditional teacher-student dynamic? 

I'm not looking for an easy out.  I'm not going to suddenly start standing up in front of all my classes and turn into the great verbal fountain of grammar which runs nonstop for 50 minutes.  I'll go to work every week and keep trying different approaches in class.  I'll keep striving to make class more interesting, more fun.  But there is nothing inherently wrong with a balanced program which contains teacher-fronted and form focused classes.  And Michael's article is the first one in a long while to remind me of that simple fact.

The Other Things Matter

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.

I’m an English teacher at a private school in Osaka.  I’m currently working on my Dip TESOL through IPC in New Zealand.  I received my masters in writing from Washington University in St. Louis and have been teaching in Japan for 13 years.  This blog is my attempt to actively try to link up some of the theories that I find attractive (or not) with what is actually happening in my classroom.  The more I study, the more I realize that every act of teaching is in some ways a simplification of how English is actually used outside of the classroom.  As teachers we are often focusing on one point (grammar, pronunciation, discourse) and that necessarily implies that there are a host of other factors we ignore.  If this is done thoughtfully and through necessity, than I believe our students can benefit from the choices we make.  But that entails being aware of the students’ expectations.  It also requires reflection and evaluation to make sure the points we focus on, the substance of our class, is material that the students actually need to learn. 

So why, “The Other Things Matter”?  Because, if at some point in a lesson, we realize that our lessons focus and the students needs do not link up, we must pivot (and quickly) towards those other things.  And in a student focused class, I believe that much of the time, these “other things” will end up naturally becoming the focus of the class.  So as I pick up pieces of theory and try and put them into practice, I want to be vigilant about all those other things that I am choosing to not teach during any 50 minute lesson.  And hopefully this blog will give me a chance to see not only how theories play out during class time, but how they might also be a distraction from the day by day needs of my students.