This week has felt like a barrage of information. Somehow I must process, organize, and prioritize these thoughts and ideas. Otherwise, I'm afraid a lot of applicable information will be lost by the wayside in piles of wasted stress.

Second Language Acquisition class' readings about phonetics, phonology, and morphology and how it affects language acquisition have made me more sensitive to the way I encourage students' usage of vocabulary. My students currently seem to see English words as disconnected units of meaning. How much of that is due to age (my students are mostly under age 11) and how much is due to a somewhat rigid curriculum that teaches language mostly through themed units which don't give much extra time for expanding conversationally on material? I'm not sure how to encourage morphemic connection-making in students whose primary environment is not English. Even the kindergartners spend less than 20 hours a week in a mostly-English environment and don't read much English outside of school.

Our Methodology readings about constructive versus obstructive teaching practices offered a lot of food for thought. But such food --like kimchi -- is an acquired taste and a bit bitter on the offset. While reading, and especially while listening to myself on video and paying attention to my classroom style, I've noticed that my teacher talking time is MUCH higher than I previously thought. Now, I'm aware that as a kindergarten teacher, I will often have a teacher-dominated classroom, even in conversation class. But ----do I really love to hear myself talk THAT MUCH?


My classes tend to feature a lot of monologic discourse, which stems from kindergarten students' lack of ability to interact very dialogically in English ---but I noticed that even among my slightly older classes, there was a strong sense of manipulation running through the discourse. I'm so sensitive to TIME! Even my error-correction, while it tends to be more student-focused than error focused, tends to come too quickly without giving students time to think and self-correct. Teacher interruptions were high -  probably from my fears of "wasted" time.  Incongruent to this is a practice which shocked me in its frequency when I analyzed my teacher transcripts: I echo ALMOST EVERY CORRECT ANSWER. How much time does this waste per lesson, on average?  I'd venture to say much more than is wasted waiting for students to formulate answers or pay attention. Minimizing this could put me on the road to much better efficiency and increased opportunities for my students to SPEAK.