Everybody’s Talkin’ Part 1

Speaking Test Round Up Monday 24^th to Friday 28^th October

Over the next two weeks I will give every single student in my school a speaking test. I have been through the speaking test cycle twice before now and it is my least favourite part of the school term. Giving 200 or so 1 or 2 minute speaking tests in a row is a really unpleasant way to spend a couple of hours. After a little while I normally want to run screaming from the room. It can be a truly draining experience. Part of the difficulty however is not letting the students see my frustration. Obviously I want to provide the best environment for them as possible. I don’t want to convey my irritation with the process during their tests. Remaining visibly upbeat as my co-teachers rush one student in after another can be difficult.

At the beginning of our TESOL course I wrote in an early blog post about my dissatisfaction with the compromised nature of the speaking tests. I don’t think it is really possible for me to accurately gauge a student’s ability using the current format the school has for speaking tests. The first problem is the length of time given for each test; the grade 3 students get 90 seconds, the grade 2 students get 1 minute and the grade 1 students get 2 minutes. Within the 1 or 2 minutes I have meant to give each student a score out of 10 in 4 categories – vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar and understanding. It is remarkably difficult to ascertain a student’s true ability in any of these areas in the time given. To complicate matters all the students are given the test paper, the list of questions I will ask them, at least a week in advance of the test. This means they can just prepare a stock answer, a set answer, to the questions. Another issue is the fact that, although ostensibly marked out of 10, I have been told not to mark students below 5. The reason being that we don’t want to damage the students self esteem or confidence. This means that if a student literally sits there and answers nothing, not a single question, they will still get 5 out of 10 in each category.

I hate it when the students just sit there and don’t answer. I do everything I can, within the time limit, to prompt and elicit answers from the students. I’m practically feeding the answers to them sometimes.

I can understand why the speaking tests are arranged this way. Primarily time constraints are to blame. They can only take a certain amount of time away from regular classes for the speaking tests. Each class actually loses two classes – 1 is spent preparing for the test and another spent actually giving them. The students are given the questions in advance so that they all have a good chance. However, even though they all see the paper beforehand and I devote an entire lesson to practicing the questions some students still turn up for their test completely unprepared. This frustrates me, especially when students who are perfectly capable just haven’t practiced. All they would have to do is spend 30 minutes revising and they would get a good mark.

I find myself cheating the system sometimes. Maybe I will give a better mark to a student whose proficiency is low but who is clearly trying. Sometimes I will give a student a high mark because I know how good their English is from speaking to them in and out of class.

Sometimes I am incredibly disappointed and genuinely upset by the speaking tests. I have mentioned in earlier blog posts that my grade 3 classes are mixed level. I have talked about how in these classes there are some students whose proficiency is so low they are simply not being catered to by my lessons. The fact that these 1 or 2 or 3 students in each class are being left behind is understood and seemingly accepted by my co-teachers. I feel so bad when I’m giving my lessons and see one of these kids just staring blankly into space and knowing that I am not going to do anything about it. So when one of these students comes to do their speaking test and just sits there and can’t answer anything I feel awful.

So far I have given all of the grade 3 tests. I did them all over Thursday and Friday – all 250 of them. I was exhausted afterwards. However, I am glad to have them out of the way. I still have most of the grade 1 and grade 2 students to do.

In my next blog post I will write about how I design the test and how I deliver the revision lessons where I practice the questions with the students. There is definitely room for improvement in both areas.

If anyone has any suggestions that might help improve the way my school conducts its speaking tests please let me know.

‘Once More Unto the Breach’

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility

KING HENRY V

Monday 24^th, October, 2011

Note: This blog post was written on Monday 24^th October at school. However, I did not have a chance to actually type it up until today. The sections in bold however were added on Friday 27^th October.

I arrived at school with a heavy heart this morning. I am sure, dear reader, that you want to know the reason for this heavy heart? I arrived at school knowing that my co-teacher for every single class for the next two days is Pak Anna. The prospect of having to deal with her attitude for several hours leaves me cold. True to form she spent all four of our classes today pacing restlessly at the back of the room intermittently reading a book and looking all the while like somebody murdered her puppy dog. What’s wrong with this picture? She is an educated, 30 year old, professional woman who has lived abroad, completed a master’s degree and yet from her behaviour you would think she is a petulant child or moody teenager. I’m growing tired of it. If she was having personal problems or if everyone received the same treatment from her I could ignore it but I am the only recipient of this behaviour. She is sweetness and light with all the teachers as far as I can tell.

(Pak Anna really caused me some problems this week. All week I have been extremely busy preparing and giving speaking tests. The fortnight devoted to the speaking tests is by far my busiest period of time in the school year. Pak Anna is aware of this. Yet this week she insisted on getting me to prepare outlines for all the lessons for winter camp because, she said, she needs to let the students and parents know what the program is going to be. Now this may be true but the winter camp doesn’t actually start until the middle of January next year. It seems very early to have prepare for winter camp)

However, I was not to be deterred. The classes today were the high level, orange, grade 1 classes and I love teaching these classes; they are collections of some of the nicest, loveliest kids you could ever hope to meet. So, I tried to block Pak Anna from my mind and focus on my lessons.

There is however another reason for having a heavy heart and weary aspect this week and that is speaking tests. Over this week and next I will give every student in the school a speaking test. The two week speaking test cycle is a grinding, grinding chore. I will discuss it in full in my next blog post. All I want to say here is that it has affected my lesson plans with regards to the second methodology assignment. The assignment is due on the 5^th November and should focus on a reading or listening based lesson. This is a problem. Nearly every class I have for the next two weeks will be either speaking tests or preparing for speaking tests. The only classes that won’t be are my grade 3 classes on the 3^rd and 4^th of November or my grade 1 classes today. The grade 3 classes are a little too close to the deadline for comfort and anyway they should be conversation classes according to the schedule. This leaves my grade 3 classes today. Knowing this I scrapped the lesson I had planned on the irregular past tense and modified a storytelling lesson I used during my last winter camp.

The Misadventures of an Amateur Storyteller.

I was nervous going into the first class today because I didn’t think that I was as prepared as I should have been. I had prepared but was not completely happy with the preparation. I originally found this particular storytelling lesson online and then I adapted it for winter camp. I further adapted it for the lessons today. Before getting into the lesson I should mention I couldn’t record it. I didn’t know I would need the school camera today so I didn’t book it last week. Unfortunately, some other department had It all day. I can’t really complain. Instead I took a series of photos of the whiteboard which I will try and insert into this blog post. If you can see them here then I managed to do it. Also, due to the reshuffling of students, teachers and rooms all of today’s classes were held in the English village; the nicest, warmest, most inviting, student friendly room in the school.

Pre-Storytelling.

After a throwaway suggestion in methodology class I have been starting classes with different ways of saying ‘Hello. How are you?’ Last week it was handshakes and ‘how do you do?’ and this week it is high-fives and slang. I write ‘are you alright?’ on the board. I point at it, knock on the board and say ‘are you alright?’ and gesture for the students to repeat (which they immediately do in full voice – I love teaching the orange classes) I ask what it means. Each time there were a couple of students answering in Korean so I say ‘in English’ in mock exasperation. There were guesses like ‘how do you do?’ and ‘is it okay?’ so I write ‘= How are you?’ on the board. I have them repeat it two or three times and then I write, ‘yeah, I’m alright. You?’ on the board and go through the procedure again. Then I go through it for both parts. Then I gesture and ask the students to practice it with their partner. Next I write ‘y’alright?’ and ‘m’alright’ on the board and go through it again. Then I write ‘alright?’ and ‘groovy baby!’ and go through the procedure again. I show a 10 second clip of Austin Powers saying ‘groovy baby’ and ask what it means – ‘great’, ‘happy’, ‘very good’. I write these suggestions on the board and write ‘I’m happy, I’m great, I’m very good, I’m very happy’. I bring a student to the front and practice all three examples with them. On the last one I explain that we high-five as we do it.

After the student I’ve practiced the examples with sits down I get all the students to do the last example with their partner including the high-five. (I wrote this blog on Monday and am typing it on Friday. Since these classes on Monday students have been high-fiving me and saying ‘groovy baby’ all over school. The head of the English department, Son Sujong, asked me what was going on. I had to explain the whole ‘groovy baby’ and high fives concept. Very amusing.)

This whole process took maybe 5 minutes at the most.

Moving over to the second whiteboard I write ‘groovy baby = I’m very happy.’ I ask ‘when are you very happy?’ a couple of times. Invariably, a student will shout ‘Saturday’ or ‘Friday’ or ‘holiday’ so I write these on the board. I am trying to elicit ‘birthday’ so I can lead into the story which is about a birthday present. To this end I underline the ‘day’ part of the words and ask ‘what other ‘day’ is a happy day?’ Strangely, I think every class answered ‘Christmas’ before ‘birthday’. Very quickly however someone does say ‘birthday’. I write it on the board. From ‘birthday’ I want to elicit ‘birthday presents’ and ‘party games’. I ask ‘what happens on your birthday?’ Very quickly I get the following answers – ‘presents’ and ‘party’. I put a square round presents. ‘What do you do at a party?’ I ask. This results in various answers such as ‘singing room’, ‘play computer games’. From ‘play computer games’ I ask ‘what other kind of games do you play?’ Oddly not a single student said ‘party games’ so I just write ‘party games’ on the board and ask if they know what they are. The response was a generally muted silence or suggestions of ‘baseball’, ‘football’, or ‘singing room’. So I explain we are going to play a party game – ‘In Britain, in England, we play party games at birthday parties. One game is called ‘Simon Says’. I write it on the board. ‘Do you know Simon says?’ Of the four classes only one responded overwhelmingly in the affirmative. The others looked baffled. I discovered that describing Simon Says conceptually is actually rather more difficult than one might expect. I was up for the challenge though. First, I tried to demonstrate. I asked everyone to stand up and proceeded to demonstrate. ‘Simon says ‘stand on one leg’’. I stand on one leg. They generally understand they are to copy. ‘Simon says ‘touch your nose’’. They all follow along. ‘Touch your head’. Everyone touches their head. At this point how do you explain this is wrong? At this juncture, on two occasions, Pak Anna just decided to intervene and explain the rules in Korean. I was unhappy with this. On the third occasion I wrote ‘Simon says touch your head’, ‘Simon says touch your nose’ and ‘stand on one foot’ on the board. I put ticks beside the first two and a cross beside the third. This seemed to do it. Regardless of how each class got there they all eventually got there. One more thing I did before the game started was to ask ‘what month is it?’ In each class at least one person answered ‘October’. I write it on the board. Then I ask ‘who has a birthday in October?’ I don’t know what I would have done had there been no students with a birthday in October. Thankfully there was at least one in each class. I choose a student and write their name on the board. Next I explain I am substituting ‘Simon say’s' for the name of the student, e.g. Ji Yon, who has an October birthday i.e. the game will be ‘Ji yon says…’ Finally we play the game for a few minutes. The students seemed to enjoy it and it could happily have gone on much longer. I don’t have time for this and so I stop it after a couple of minute.

This is essentially the entire warm up for the lesson during which I have hopefully activated both content and linguistic schema. I.e. knowledge of birthdays and associated vocabulary. This is my ‘lead in’ where I want to ‘engage students with the topic of the reading’ – the topic being birthday presents.

After I ask the students to sit down I explain something along the lines of – ‘so that was a birthday party game. Do you think it was a good birthday party game? (Wait for responses) What about birthday presents? What is a good birthday present? What do you want to get on your birthday? You may or may not be surprised to learn that 13 year old middle school kids have rather a lot of suggestions for things that would make a good birthday present. For example – ‘money, MP3 player, Smartphone, Nike shoes’ (whoever said these kids weren’t materialistic?) Despite the abundance of examples not one, not a single one, said ‘pet’ or ‘cat’ or ‘dog’ which is what I was trying to elicit. After a few suggestions I had to bring it up myself. ‘What about a pet?’ Once suggested though there were generally murmurs of assent. This is how I transition into telling the story which, you may have already guessed, concerns a pet given as a birthday present.

After the transition I give them the handout and draw their attention to the first picture. The picture depicts a woman standing outside a building with the word ‘pets’ emblazoned on the window. In asking the following question I (think) I am employing a top down, type 1 activity. The concept, the topic, has already been introduced and now I want the students to predict further content and produce possible meanings. I ask the students to speculate – ‘I am going to tell you a story about this woman. What do think it is about? What do you think will happen?’ The students early guesses were all mostly correct – ‘the woman goes to a pet shop’, ‘she buys an animal’, ‘the woman buys a birthday present’. In retrospect I should have asked more questions to build on this and to encourage more prediction and speculation. I could have asked – ‘what does she buy? Who does she buy it for?’ etc. Instead I simply confirmed their earlier suggestions – ‘That’s right this story is about a woman who buys a pet as a birthday present. ‘Before I tell the story however, there is a second small activity I want the students to complete. I direct the students to the next section of their handout. Note that there is one handout for every two students so they are working with a partner most of the time.

Activity:

BEFORE LISTENING

Complete the sentences with words below. Write your answers on the line.

Languages pet shop delicious send rich

1. If you have ten million dollars, you are _____________

2. An animal that lives in your house is a ______________

3. Your brother lives in another country. It is his birthday, so you ____________ him a present.

(There are 6 sentences altogether)

These sentences are not taken directly from the story but they are all conceptually related to it. I am not sure how to define this activity. It has meant to engender thinking about the story to follow and encourage speculation or guided speculation. Broadly therefore is it a top-down, type 1 activity? Is this still classed as activating schema? Does this activity ‘provoke students to get in touch with that knowledge or schema’ to which the sentences conceptually relate? I am not sure. I give the students a few minutes to complete it and then I check the answers. I write number one on the board and elicit the answer. ‘If you have ten million dollars, you are what?’ When they answer ‘rich’ I write it on the board next to number ‘1’. I do this for all 6 sentences. As I get to each missing word and write it on the board I ask ‘what does it mean?’ Initially, they almost always answer in Korean so I say ‘In English! Tell me what it means in English’ again in mock exasperation. This will briefly stump them before, for example, they explain ‘rich’ as ‘having many money’. ‘Okay’ I say, ‘rich means having many money, having lots of money.’ And so on.

The Story

Once this task is completed I ask them to turn to the other side of the handout which has a series of pictures relating to the story. I tell them to look at the pictures as I read the story. As I read it I say the relevant number at each picture section so they can follow the pictures. I put on my best jackanory voice and read the story. They seem to follow it very well. Quite a few students laugh at its conclusion and quite a few seem to think it is disgusting.

The Birthday Present

A rich woman was thinking about her mother. It was her mother’s birthday, and she wanted to send her mother a nice birthday present.

The woman went to a pet shop. She saw a beautiful bird. The bird could sing, and it could speak seven languages. It cost fifty thousand dollars. The woman bought the bird and sent it to her mother.

The next day the woman called her mother on the telephone. “Mama,” asked the woman, “How do you like the bird?”

“I’m eating it right now,” her mother said. “It’s delicious.”

I tell them to turn to the next part of the handout and I read the story again this time without the number cues. Again I check the answers. (See below example) I write 1 – 8 on the board and ask the students what the answer is for each and what the words actually mean i.e. number 1 is ‘thinking’ so I ask ‘what does this mean?’ Again they first answer in Korean and I say ‘in English!’ Some students point at their head to explain thinking. This is good enough for me. How do you explain what ’thinking’ means? This activity, and the others leading up to this point, so far constitute the first several steps in the basic methodological model for teaching receptive skills. There was a ‘lead in’. As the teacher I have directed comprehension tasks. The students have listened for the task and then I directed feedback. Is this right? I hope so.

Activity:

CHECKING YOUR UNDERSTANDING

Listen to the story again. As you listen, circle the correct word.

1. A rich woman was (thinking / talking) about her mother.

2. She wanted to (make / send) her mother a nice birthday present.

3. The woman went to a (flower / pet) shop.

(There are 8 sentences altogether)

The next activity is structured in the same way except there is no ‘lead in’. This time I just tell the students to fill in the missing words as I read the story. I again check the answers, writing them on the board as we go. Then I ask the students to practice the dialog with their partner. They readily do this without much prompting causing me to wish I could teach the orange students all day every day. Whilst they are doing this I go around listening and helping out here and there.

Activity:

Write the missing word on the line. Check your answers. Then read the conversation aloud with your partner. A begins.

A. B.

1. May I help you? Yes, I’m looking for a birthday _______ for my mother.

2. How about this ____? Maybe. What can it do?

(There are 6 lines of dialogue for ‘A’ and ‘B’ each in total)

The next activity was the final activity although it was not designed or intended to be. I had hoped to get on to further activities – one in which the students retell the story in their own words and then tell their version (which they initially write) to their partner. The other involved giving a ‘present’ (a letter) to someone else in the class. Unfortunately my timing is clearly not very efficient because I didn’t have time for either of these. Instead the final activity was a dictation exercise. I tell the class I will read a sentence three times and they have to write it down. There are six sentences. I was surprised at how much the students seemed to enjoy this activity and how readily they collaborated with their partner. It would have been completely different with the mid or low level classes. After I read each sentence for the third time there were nearly always students shouting for ‘one more time’. Anyway, after the sixth sentence I check the answers on the board. I make them swap their answers with another pair and elicit the correct answers as I write them on the board. The students are severe markers of their peers – even the smallest spelling mistake or bad handwriting is considered fair game. I didn’t even say I was giving prizes.

At this point I was pushing the time limit in each class so I just check some additional words from the dictation sentences and it is time to say good bye.

Overall I am reasonably happy with how the classes went. There is definitely room for improvement but I believe I have a foundation to work on. I hope I am implementing the correct and appropriate strategies for teaching listening activities in this lesson. I would love to know what someone else thought.

‘Groovy baby!’

Methodology Week 8 Reading Questions

Harmer, 18, Listening

1. Maybe another name for type 1 and type 2 tasks should be top-down and bottom-up tasks. A type 1 task involves listening or skim reading to get the gist of a text whether written or aural. A type 2 task on the other hand requires that specific information be extracted by methods such as detailed comprehension, text interpretation or language analysis.

1a. Harmer states that the warm-up or introduction section of a listening activity, where the teacher prepares the ground or in some way sets the stage for what the students are about to hear, is vitally important. It is at this point that the teacher can activate the students’ schemata and provide contextual information. He goes on to quote a study by Chang and Read which found ‘that giving students background knowledge before they listened was more successful than either letting them preview questions or teaching them some key vocabulary before they listened.’ Harmer mentions one caveat in connection with this – students are likely to benefit more from lots of listening than they are to a little listening that has been thoroughly pre-explained. I.e. don’t overdo the introduction.

2. The only one I haven’t tried is the ‘interview’. However, I am including ‘conversations’ amongst the activities I’ve tried in class because I’m assuming it includes modelling dialogue in a conversation with my co-teachers. I am happy to have modelling conversations with 3 of my 5 co-teachers. Of the two I don’t do this with one is not a great English speaker and I don’t want to embarrass her and the other is determinedly not interested in this kind of co-teaching.

I specifically read aloud every second week to my grade 3 classes. Every second week I have to teach a listening activity from the textbook which necessarily involves me reading aloud at some point. It is relatively successful but I think lots of students don’t pay attention. I think only the good students really listen. This is partly my fault due to how I structure and introduce the listening activity. I will experiment with changes having now read Harmer and Brown.

‘Story-Telling’ is something I have specifically done on two occasions. The first time was for winter camp. I thought one day could be a story-telling day. The students were less than enthralled. At camp I learned the students just want to do fun activities and I suspect my story-telling lesson was not exciting enough for them. I gave the same lesson in a different context to my grade 3 students one week and it actually went really well. Looking back I don’t know why I haven’t tried it again. I have the actual lesson and will bring it to class on Saturday. I actually found the lesson online in a free downloadable book of listening activities. Looking at it again in the context of the Brown and Harmer reading I realise that whoever made it knew what they were doing as it is really well put together. Furthermore, my co-teacher thought it was a great lesson. If anyone wants a copy of the book let me know and I’ll email it to you.

3. I use video fairly regularly for a variety of different purposes. Of relevance here is the video I use during listening activity lessons for the grade 3 classes. Each activity consists of a 1 minute video depicting a conversation between 2 young people on a topic related to the textbook chapter’s theme. Cleary the makers have aimed to reproduce authentic conversations but they are staged in such a blatant and obvious fashion that most of my students think they are hilarious. It is difficult to take the speakers seriously. There are normally 2-4 different activities associated with each video – say which sentences are true and which are false, choose the picture that relates to the dialogue, fill in the missing words etc. These are easy lessons to teach but again, having done this reading on listening activities, I can probably make them better. It annoys me to note that I thought that I had thought about these lessons and now realise I haven’t thought about them enough.

I also use video for ‘Last One Standing’ games. This is a really great bodily kinaesthetic listening activity. It is nearly always a hit with my students and is a really great warm-up activity.

I also tried playing pop songs and giving students the lyrics with some words missing. They listen to the song and fill in the words. I stopped this because it was time consuming, unproductive and killed the momentum of my classes.

The ideas on 309-310 are all interesting and possible to a greater or lesser extent. However, ‘Partial Viewing’ sounds like the one I would be least interested in trying. It is too fiddly for my taste. I would really like to try ‘Picture or Speech’. I have read about lessons like this before and wanted to try it but have always been put off by the logistics of moving chairs etc. Maybe reading this will provide the impetus for me to try it.

4. I’m not sure I have an order I’d like to try them in but I have some thoughts on each –

Example 1 – Honestly, I can’t really be bothered arranging for someone to come into the classroom to be interviewed. That sounds terrible but it is the unvarnished truth.

Example 2 – I did this activity once before, during winter camp, and the students really liked it. I framed it as a competition between 3 teams. I would definitely do it again. I’ve never really thought about it before but I use lots of lots of things in camp classes I don’t use in normal classes. This could easily be used in a normal class. I should have thought of it before. And it wasn’t a recording the students were treated to it was my dulcet tones.

Example 3 – If I’m being honest I could not be bothered with this activity because I don’t want to record anything myself. I just don’t want to have to deal with the technology or deal with corralling a co-teacher to help me. Modelling in class is fine but recording before class is not going to happen.

Example 4 – This seems okay. Assuming I had the audio track I would try this one out. This is similar to the listening activities I give my grade 3 classes.

Example 5 – I don’t think I would use this because the language and concepts are too sophisticated. I think it would be too time consuming and difficult to explain.

Example 6 – I would happily try this too. It is actually similar to the ‘Last One Standing’ activities I use except it involves a book instead of a song.

Example 7 – I like this one – it’s simple, interesting and compelling. I would try this.

Example 8 – I don’t think this sounds like an activity for ‘lower intermediate’ at all. The concept is too abstract and shapeless for me. Maybe I’m being lazy but it doesn’t immediately appeal.

5. All these questions relate to intensive reading. However, the section on extensive reading is very interesting. I attended a lecture about extensive reading at the conference and I might try and set up an extensive reading club at my school. I found some really interesting sources and websites for this kind of thing.

Other than that I’m always disappointed when I read these things because doing so always reveals how limited my earlier thinking has been. I’ve been giving listening activity lessons to my grade 3 students for weeks now and I could be doing it so much better. For instance I never really give a contextual introduction or consider that everyone listens at a different speed. I never differentiate between type 1 and 2 activities. I could probably use more ‘reading aloud’ activities. I’ve been oblivious to the idea of paralinguistic behaviour. All of these ideas constitute useful and applicable knowledge.