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This was an exhausting week and it’s hard to remember many details of what happened! Three moments stick out in my mind, however:
* After teaching students the difference between /s/ and /th/, I showed them a TV commercial for Berlitz Language Schools. A young German coastguard officer receives a distress call from a ship in trouble. When the English captain says, “We are sinking. We are sinking!”, the young German man asks, “What are you sinking about”? It didn’t get as many laughs from kids as from adults, but they got the message – be careful with your pronunciation!
* During our quiz game, I tried thinking of a very challenging question. When I said, “I’m thinking” a student asked with a grin on her face, “What are you thinking about?”. It’s nice to know the video stuck in at least one student’s head!
* Just as a joke, I asked students to write a large number on the board. When I said, “Write 33,222,999!”, some just gave up. The funny thing was that a few students in several classes came close. However… before sitting down EVERY one of the students who were close added one extra digit. They didn’t have enough confidence in their original answer. I pretended to cry when I showed them how close they were…
One of the fundamental teaching methods throughout history has been the simple technique of asking questions. My classes this week have focused on all kinds of questions. I am now both exhausted and much more aware of my students strong and weak points!
Students do a great job of memorizing and reciting long passages from their textbook. Though they can quote the population of Cambridge and London, talk about the Rivers Cam and Thames, and describe the geographical features to the north and to the west of London, they can not respond to the simplest of questions. “How many people live in London”? No idea. What is the capital of the U.K.? They’re confused. However, with just a little bit of practice, they started to understand the meaning behind what they had been parroting to their Chinese teachers.
Some interesting points came out of these Q&A lessons. Students had trouble with short numbers, such as 14 and 40, but also with longer numbers such as 100,000. They cannot hear the difference in stress in 14 (two stress points) and 40 (one stress point). They have trouble with anything from 10,000 on because Chinese doesn’t have “ten thousand”, instead using “one ‘wan’”, or “ten wan” for 100,000. This week I gave students between one and five points for correct answers. In future weeks, I’ll start giving 10,000 points to 100 billion points for each correct answer. (That will be points, not dollars, I will be sure to emphasize!)
Students also had trouble listening to longer sentences. When I asked them, “Which country had a big earthquake three years ago”, most students did not pay attention to the ending and quickly wrote “Japan”. A few students did listen and knew it was China that had a big earthquake three years ago. Students also had trouble with countries. New York is NOT the country north of the United States, and Mexico is not a country in South America where people speak Portugese. We need to work on comprehension quite a bit in the future.
In my high school classes on Monday, we worked on giving advice. Students could easily understand verbs such as should, must, have got to, etc. At the beginning, they needed a lot of time to think in order to give advice in English. I asked them to help me with various “problems” in my life. My first problem was how to lose weight. They gave some good, practical advice. After that, each request for advice was a bit more silly than the first. “I want to learn Chinese quickly”, “I want to become rich”, “I want to play in the NBA”. In every single class, at least one creative student came up with one simple solution for all of my problems: “You should find a rich girlfriend”! This was a good chance to not only get them to practice giving advice, but also to practice justifying their opinions. “A rich girlfriend will help you lose weight because she could buy and cook healthy foods…. she could give you lots of money… she could buy an NBA team for you…” When the students later practiced in pairs, I heard quite a few students suggest, “I think you ought to find a foreign girlfriend/boyfriend”. They gave a lot of other suggestions in English as well, with far fewer hesitations than in the beginning of the class.
In my junior high first year classes this past week, I used a simple “performance based assessment”, in the form of a rubric. It worked perfectly, not only providing me with instant feedback on students’ performances in English, but also helping students understand, with perfect clarity, what they were expected to do in Enlgish.
I gave students three criteria for speaking: 1) Look at your partner when speaking, 2) use clear pronunciation, 3) answer with sentences. Each criterion lead to many “teachable moments” in class. Some students tried speaking too fast, just to show off. All I had to do was point to the criterion on the blackboard and the whole class knew the performing pair needed to use clear pronunciation. Other students did not practice speaking enough when given the chance (they were busy speaking about something else in Chinese) so their pronunciation wasn’t smooth. Quite a few students performed while looking at the blackboard for clues, or up at the ceiling (again, because they hadn’t practiced enough). Some students (fewer than I expected) answered with partial sentences, or with single words only.
What made the biggest impression on me (because of the rubric!) was that students who performed first had trouble, but students who performed later got the message and met the criteria listed in the rubric. Quite a few pairs who struggled at first volunteered to perform again and did much better.
This is a simple example of a performance based assessment. These students have had few chances to actually use the English they’ve been learning for the past 6 or 7 months, so it was simple. It was simple but effective. I’m curious what kinds of assessments other teachers use, beyond the usual graded tests or quizzes. Any good ideas out there?
TPR (Total Physical Response) has really taught me a lot this week. Oh, and my students learned a something too! I don’t believe there is any technique as versatile and as useful as TPR when teaching beginners in a language. This week, for example, when setting up the aforementioned quiz game (See Post 16), I had the students draw a chart using commands in TPR-fashion. I got instant feedback on what my students understood and what they didn’t understand – they did not always notice when I said “draw one line” or “draw two lines”. When I said “write ~ on the right”, they sometimes wrote BELOW the previous word or sentence. When I asked them to spell “baseball”, they told me the Chinese meaning (“bangqiu”!) instead of the spelling. A few students, even after hearing “baseball” spelled, still wrote “basketball”, but most got it.
Of course the best thing about TPR is not that I found out what they did not understand. The best thing is that now they DO understand. They no longer have to feel that they can’t understand the teacher. They no longer have to feel that it’s too difficult. If they pay attention, they’ll figure out the meaning behind the words. It’s not just a fun activity. It’s real learning on the deepest level.
My challenge now is this: how can I build on this in the future?
We had four interesting high school classes on Monday. I challenged students to speak only English for 5 minutes without stopping. Although five minutes may not seem like a long time, it is something that is rarely done in China. Students taking the IELTS exam must speak for two minutes without stopping, and this sends fear into the hearts of most Chinese learners of English.
In today’s classes, students first practiced vocabulary they had learned during the past two weeks, related to the textbook theme “Futurology”. We briefly discussed various possibilities for the future, including space travel, ending starvation, robots (and androids), solar energy, among others. When we got to the speaking part, the students had trouble using only English. However, by the time we got to the last question of the day, quite a few students were able to keep going using only English. There were, of course, quite a few hesitations, but for their first time doing this, it was not bad at all.
I told them that they did such a good job that they will speak 10 minutes next week! Actually, I’m going to try something a bit easier next week. I think they’ll realize that they can do more and will increasingly gain confidence in their speaking. That’s the hope. Is this realistic at all?
Last week I wrote about the “avoidance strategies” of the 2nd year junior high students. This week, I unveiled one of my “secret weapons” and exposed their weaknesses for all to see. Yes, I did it, even though some teachers have told me I shouldn’t. In a fit of desperation, with students gradually going out of control, I broke down. I panicked. Greed got the better or me. And so, I used… competition!
It really was unfair. They never saw it coming. I started the lesson with some simple TPR instructions, as I often do. First, students drew a chart according to my commands. Well, SOME students did! After filling in the chart with answers to various questions (based on their textbook grammar and vocabulary), the good students had all the information they needed to do well in the following quiz game. Unfortunately, some students wrote nothing. Needless to say, when their turn came to participate in the quiz game, all they could get was the dreaded BbZzZzZz – that terrifying sound that suddenly explodes from deep within my throat, signaling to other students that their teammate has let them down and earned no points.
In the quiz game, I gave students one point for each correct answer but FIVE points for a correct sentence. They slowly started to realize some key elements of the game: 1) If they use a sentence, their team can pull ahead of the others and 2) If they listen carefully, they can answer a question that the other team failed to answer correctly. Students became more and more quiet as the game progressed. The number of complete answers steadily increased.
At the end of the second class, a student in Team 2 (the second row) answered a question correctly with his team trailing the leaders (Team 5) by four points. Too bad he didn’t use a correct sentence! His team lost by three, and as I was leaving the classroom, I saw several students from the same row descend upon him in anger. Ha ha ha (evil laughter). If he lives to tell the tale, he will certainly be speaking in full sentences!
I’ve heard all kinds of arguments against competition in the classroom. I really don’t like the idea of giving rewards for good behavior. We shouldn’t “buy” students’ efforts or “pay” them for doing what students normally do. Giving prizes of any kind can lead to jealousy and disappointment. This kind of competition, however, is what I call “friendly competition”. It’s like playing basketball with your friends. If you win today, then you have “bragging rights” for the day. But tomorrow is a new day, and any defeats from the past are forgotten. In this kind of competition, students encourage each other, but nobody takes it too seriously.
Well, that’s my point of view. What do YOU think?
I’ve discovered this week how different the junior high school grades are. The first year students are eager to try English, eager to participate, eager to improve. The second year students, on the other hand, have developed a variety of strategies to avoid English. They are very good at pretending to understand when they don’t. They pretend to speak English but stop as soon as they think I’m not looking. They have all kinds of other things distracting them – math exercises, toys (I took two plastic machine guns, a marble, and a paper airplane away from students in one class yesterday), and each other.
This week in the 2nd year classes, I tried to get them to conduct a survey based on the textbook topic, “hobbies”. HA! A few students actually asked questions in English, but not many. Next week I’m going to try some motivational techniques that have worked for me in the past and see if I can get them to participate a bit more. My plan is to get them to compete in a game, with each row of students being a team. The questions will be based on a listening activity in the first half of the class. Those who don’t listen will not be able to answer. I will only give them a limited time to answer, and if they can’t respond, I’ll quickly move on to a student in the next row.
Edit: I’ve now noticed some of the 1st year students are starting to develop their own bad habits, for example looking at game cards under their desks or only speaking English when I’m not nearby, but their much more hesitant to do so and they stop as soon as I look their way. They’re not yet like the 2nd year students who have firmly developed avoidance strategies but I can see the direction some of them are moving towards if I let them…
I know I should have posted something earlier this week, but the school threw me a curve by adding four more classes to my schedule. The students are all from Korea and are in China to learn Chinese. So, naturally, they gave these students extra English classes!
The high school classes (ages 17 -18) were very good this week. First, we worked on paraphrasing vocabulary which is very useful if students forget a word. They had trouble explaining vocabulary in English at first, because they have always translated English vocabulary directly into Chinese. I told them that some day they will either have classmates or coworkers from other countries, and at that time they will need to explain in English. They all made a good effort and by the end were paraphrasing easily.
We also did a pair exercise, discussing a short passage from the textbook that they were assigned to read. Although they know much more vocabulary than the younger students, they seem to have the lowest speaking ability of all the students I teach. We took it slowly with the speaking exercise this time but for next week I’m planning a longer conversation activity, to see if they can keep on speaking for up to five minutes without stopping. So many students that I’ve met in China are terrified of the IELTS test where they have to speak for two minutes without stopping. If I can get these students to keep a conversation going for more than two minutes, it will be a great success.
A random list of the funniest things from week 2:
- During our pair practice, many students tried to speak faster and faster, sometimes finishing five questions and five answers (using complete sentences!) in just five seconds. Needless to say, the fastest responses were not comprehensible! It was a good “teaching moment”.
- One student took the opposite approach and answered as slowly as he could. I pretended to yawn as he spoke. It was a good laugh for everybody.
- I wanted to be sure everyone knew what “sentence” means, so that they would all understand that I want them to start speaking in complete sentences, rather than just using single words. I intentionally confused the Chinese word for “sentence” with the word for “orange”, which are the same sounds, but with different tones. They not only got the meaning of “sentence”, they also saw how important it can be to focus on precise pronunciation.
- To illustrate the stress-timing of English sentences, I wrote stressed syllables in VERY large letters and reduced syllables in very small letters. In past teaching, especially in Japan, I found that students responded more to movement and clapping. These students responded more to my exaggerated writing on the blackboard. Yes, they laughed, but they also started speaking with more natural rhythm.
- I chose students to perform in pairs at random (after all students had practiced at the same time) and other students cheered on the “lucky” students who were chosen. The students mostly did fine, so I believe the confidence level is rising slowly.
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