METHODOLOGY: Pronunciation

Pronunciation on the Fly ( “FFF”, Fly! Look! Put your teeth on your lips, and PUFF air)

Recently since we’ve been testing and preparing to recombine classes for the upcoming winter schedule, I’ve spent about 50% of my classes reviewing for tests and testing. This is, theoretically, done to make sure students get extra practice for their tests; however, in practice (and especially with a few of my classes who’ve been failing to complete workbook practice or pay attention well), it often means I am able to better see GAPS in students’ understanding of TLC, pronunciation, etc.

In one class, the aforementioned “PN Class”, remedial pronunciation has become a big thing for us. Beginners in most proficiency areas, they struggle with basic pronunciation as much as with grammar. Unfortunately, they had in the past fallen prey to a phenomenon in Korean schools’ English phonics education in which students learn the SOUNDS of the letters but are left without the knowledge of the letter name. I actually haven’t polled any of my fellow teachers: Does this problem exist only in our school? At any rate, my students often enter my classes unable to follow a spelling given them unless the person dictating makes the letter SOUND instead of stating the letter name. While we’ve practiced enough for PB class to follow, they still have trouble pronouncing  - or even recognizing the name of - the letter V. I have found Harmer’s comments regarding speakers’ difficulty HEARING the sounds of their L2 helpful as I consider how to approach teaching pronunciation. (PB Class can hear the sound but not the name; I’ve decided to exaggerate the letter name and to often use ‘v’ spelling words for identification practice). With that being said… I had them practice the letter name by putting their pointer finger on their upper lip parallel to it, and “biting” their lower lip before smiling and vocalizing the “veeeee” sound to “try and touch your smile to your finger”. Following my instruction, they were careful not to purse or round their lips into the ‘o’ of their usual incorrect “vo-ee” sound. They looked hilarious and enjoyed it.

With PK2 class, a younger group of intermediate speakers, we’ve begun a newspaper class that requires a lot of vocabulary work with difficult words. This week’s article was an animal fact article about kangaroos. Words like Papua New Guinea, species, and marsupial featured among the list. These students are incredibly astute and imitate and practice well if given words with the same sounds. I let the students read the words and guess how they were pronounced. Next, we spent several minutes talking about how the spellings didn’t correspond to the sound: “It LOOKS like…..” After this, we broke the words down into separate sounds and wrote them phonetically under the actual spelling of the word. Then we practiced sounding out the syllables separately, then fluently as words, paying attention to how our mouths moved when we said the words. Finally, we clarified stress by marking accent patterns for the words. This class likes to work together to “negotiate meaning” in the sense of deciding what methods they will use to remember the words. I love teaching young children; how often will adults spend 45 seconds grinning at each other while chanting “POP! POP! POP-oo-ah!” and popping their lips to solidify the pronunciation memory…? Using multiple intelligences while learning pronunciation comes naturally to young ones.

ICC Video: Non-Verbal Communication. Don't Spit on Me

After numerous disasters with making videos, PB class (novice low-to-mid ten-, eleven-, and twelve-year-olds managed to participate without fighting in what MIGHT be considered the most horrific STG video I've produced. The level of teacher talk in the explanation was exponentially more than I expected, caused partially by my desire to prevent explosions from this active class, whose hyper movement added irony to the exercise. (A bloopers video might be produced later). James' humorous statments that I was spitting on him while talking were, at that point, the least of my worries.

I appreciated their questions and efforts to understand the explanation. Initially, they were completely baffled by the instructions, as evidenced by their faces. NO HANDS? WHY? While I wanted them to understand the explanation, I was comfortable with them being slightly nonplussed by lack of understanding; it added to the need for plain COMMUNICATION with each other without agenda. I should have comprehension checked a bit more, but this class is usually adept at scaffolding each other (sometimes a bit violently) and constructing meaning amongst themselves (sometimes ludicrously) if need be.

The group standing in front of the camera, I found later, saved themselves the trouble of carrying on a detailed conversation initially by reciting handphone numbers for the first few minutes; however, they eventually settled into a discussion of their favorite game. I enjoyed watching them move back and forth to prevent their hands from popping out of their pockets. The amount of hopping and Gangnam Style dancing in the background highlighted what I expected to find: that middle schoolers at the end of a long school week, regardless of culture, need their hands and bodies for talking and interacting. They resorted to random movements and shuffling, some using their heads to illustrate a point during a discussion of Minecraft, as my student Andy later pointed out.

PB Class' reactions to my questions about emotion were as I expected: some enjoyed the exercise, while others felt "stuffy" and frustrated. Interestingly enough, the quieter members of the class found the exercise "fun" or enjoyable. They hadn't realized how much they used their hands. It caused "many problems" for some, while others, like James, felt "very bored." Video games provided a good format for this exercise because students were unable to fully use action words in English without moving their hands and bodies as well. Students were adamant about the fact that in Korean, people use their hands to talk as much as in another culture.

Unfortunately, I underused my time limits and wasn't able to use myself as an example to contrast English speakers' and Korean speakers' use of body language, or to discuss how we can use our body language to scaffold ours and others' communication or make our output more comprehensible. Now that my students are aware of their body language in communication, I hope to remind them of it in order to highlight their own abilities to communicate across cultural problems.

ICC PB Class: Nonverbal Communication

ICC Reflection: Idioms with PK2 Class

In the past, I’ve used idiomatic expressions for emotions to teach creative responses to the standard “How are you?” This time, I wanted to introduce students to some new expressions and see if they could use what they understand about English and how they relate to the English-speaking culture to identify meanings of idiomatic expressions for emotion.

 The class featured in this video, PK2 Class, has been speaking English for several years, having grown up in an English kindergarten. Most of their skills are on an intermediate level. They can make full sentences, use multiple verb tenses when concentrating well, and converse on a variety of subjects. They LOVE learning jokes and practicing wordplay with new material. Our curriculum is usually very content-based and we have little time to depart from the very ambiguous culture of their textbook, but are often able to take moments to discuss differences between everyday life in Korea and the English speaking cultures of their teachers.

Students started off very energetic and relating to the material. They recalled past idioms they had learned and interacted well, remembering things like "I feel like a million dollar", having been taught monetary value in English already. Their recall of cultural material has grown a lot, so relatability is improving. I think I overdid the teacher talk a bit and could have, even at the beginning, elicited some similar expressions in Korean culture. The matching-expression-to- meaning activity seemed to be on their level, but their frustration with its difficulty proved me wrong. They, did however, engage well with trying to identify the origin meaning of the expression.  I found their comments on being unable to identify culturally with “feeling blue” very interesting. The small time allotted for this segment didn’t allow for follow-up discussions of similar Korean expression, but I hope to develop this further in our subsequent lesson to talk about why idioms are created in a culture.

ICC Idioms

This week, while reading our Harmer materials on pronunciation, I was surprised to find how little time I spend on such things, in comparison with what I assumed I normally do. Most of my classes are very content-based, with set vocabulary. Often Korean teachers stay a step ahead of the foreign teachers in order to pre-teach vocabulary in Korean-English. The reasoning for such, according to discussions with our director, is that students will be prepared and fully "understand" vocabuary and grammar concepts before review and production in our classes. I find, however, that students often leave a pre-taught lesson remembering little of the grammar and the vocabulary words' meanings even if they are able to reproduce the sounds of English pronunciation. During many lessons, I choose to work on vocabulary for only one or two words. After having students repeat vocabulary and begin the practice stage, pronunciation problems become apparent in context.

The lesson I was able to video this week is a phonics segment of Dolphin Class (second year kindergarteners), which I'm not sure counts as a pronunciation lesson. Nevertheless, I enjoyed watching the progression of the lesson and found it useful to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses in MIC.

Recently, I've been pleased with how much I remembered to allow students to dialogue and "interrupt" teacher talk, but when working on pronuciation, I find it difficult to carefully listen/ help students self-correct while they are trying to interact with the pronunciation itself. I'm easily distracted by many voices, especially if it's not a chorused answer. Asking young students to chorus a sound is difficult, because they need their own time to get their articulators and places of articulation in line and produce what's being asked of them. I found myself frustrated when they didn't seem to "know" which 'oo' sound was being asked about, but I realized later they were trying to carefully reproduce the sound itself. Matching their head knowledge with pronunciation ability was more difficult than I was able to sympathize with.

I think my MIC's are getting stronger, but I still find it difficult to balance making things comprehensible with overdoing my explanation and not allowing them to negotiate meaning.

I also should have allowed them to identify and mark the sounds in their books in SILENCE instead of playing their song, the sounds of which could confuse them as they worked on their task. Production of pronunciation work still baffles me. How to help them "own" a sound other than just repetition, hearing and saying it in context....?

This week’s phone difficulties have been resolved, but I didn’t have the opportunity to video my vocabulary sections of teaching time. Usually I feel comfortable teaching vocabulary, and find my interests in storytelling and reading an asset to my MIC techniques. Perhaps it was arrogance, but I expected to “need” to learn less about vocabulary teaching than teaching other areas of proficiency; of course, I found that to be manifestly untrue. In a time-crunch situation, which is USUALLY the situation in our 40-minute curriculum-driven classes, I often spend less actual time teaching vocabulary and try to find ways to make words vibrant in order for students to remember easily.

In one particular second-year kindergarten class, conversation teachers are supporting Korean teachers by teaching out of a Phonics 4 book. We teach songs and writing/reading/listening activities that build understanding of high-level phonics for Korean aged eight-year-olds. One unfortunate part of this curriculum is the book’s usage of relatively obscure words to teach phonics blends. How many beginner EFL learners will know the word “hare” or verb “bear” at age eight? The lesson , a –are/-ere/-air/-ear focused lesson, included dozens of such words that would be a new experience for most native-English speakers. Of course, those students would be more likely to grasp concepts quickly since explanation of could be made easy through using OTHER familiar words to explain unknowns.

In my case, I try to cut frustration by playing a “freeze” game when learning new phonics words. Since this is less than HALF of my 40 minute lesson’s objective (I teach from an additional conversation book) I must manage time and move quickly. Since my objective for the phonics section is two-fold –1)  to teach the phonics blends, assisting students in recognizing and distinguishing spellings and usages while 2)  making unfamiliar vocabulary familiar – I need to move quickly. I usually feel a bit hampered by time and unable to do many comprehension checks.

On this occasion, we sang the “Catch the Bear” song for the book unit, and I used the blackboard to elicit student answers for words with our featured phonics blends. We made lists of words from the song, and words they remembered from other sources. Some students gave wrong answers based on spelling similarity, so we compared and corrected those together. Next, I played the book CD and asked the students to follow along, pointing to the words and repeating pronunciation. When they reached an unfamiliar word, they shouted “FREEZE!” and I’d stop the CD and we’d discuss the word. I used the blackboard to draw certain concepts and compare spellings, such as in AIR- sounding and EER-sounding    “-ear” words. When we encountered a word that could be made comprehensible by physical demonstration, I’d ask them questions like, “Do you have fair hair?” and have them compare classmates’ and teachers’ hair, or demonstrate “stare” to each other.

Time was short, but even so, I could feel and see my students lagging and tiring from too much input. I thought a lot about what the readings suggested for keeping lists short, and I think in succeeding lessons, I’ll break study of the weekly word list into several days, even though students will encounter some of those words in daily writing/listening activities. Sheer volume of input doesn’t help them absorb. If I do daily comprehension check for vocabulary and recycle phonics word vocabulary during a two-minute quiz time or some such activity, I might be able to help them retain learned words. 

Microteaching The Presentation Stage

Approaching microteaching a novice lesson to twenty-  and thirty-somethings is always a fun and confusing task. I think I’m beginning to get the hang of imagining that my classmates are much younger than they are (sometimes easier than I’d imagined ;-)  ) One problem I have is that since my classmates don’t know my class, even though they might be told the ACTFL level, they are often acting in a different ZPD than my students. It means getting “output” on a different level and having sometimes less classroom interaction/need for creative correction to work with than I usually do.

Watching this video, I think my MIC techniques are becoming more consistent both in the classroom and in the microteaching setting, as I learn how to best suit my actions to aid students’ understanding. I’m getting better at eliciting answers through scaffolding and gesture to minimize teacher talk (as I did when working at the whiteboard). However, often when I’m directing students to learn new TLC, creating dialogue questions that are comprehensible is difficult. When this class is faced with a teacher telling them how to ask a student another question, there are often TOO MANY pronouns involved for their comprehension level. I think my whiteboard use, in this lesson as in others, might have been a bit more detailed to help them compare and understand the variations in grammar.  Also, as with the situation of the word clue, I often take for granted that my students know a vocabulary word I myself might not have taught them. In these cases, I still need a lot of work on how to efficiently teach subsidiary words (meta words?) without preteaching too much and getting away from a TDBU format.

I’m still unhappy with my amount of teacher talk during both directions and in general.  Here I tried to allow students to “fill-in-the blanks” to help create instructions, but I’m still goal-oriented so that fell a bit flat. For example, when I gave instructions for the “clue” activity, my teacher talk including the fill-in-the-blanks speech pattern,  but still used many lines of teacher talk.  In the real classroom, as can be seen with my previous videos, my real students are eager to speak but often it needs to be guided so that it’s comprehensible and constructive for all involved. Often there’s just a lot of noise and chatter permeating our purposeful dialogue. While I want all students to talk with each other and be involved, a high percent will still be tempted to scaffold each other IN KOREAN in more detailed groupwork.  I think I should have found a way to get students doing T>S>S>T a bit more for the sake of output. Also, to my dismay, while my face is animated and I would hope encouraging of interaction, my t-talk is more evaluative than communicative, especially while doing comprehension checks. Definitely something to work on.

A previous peer review mentioned that I moved around very little and remained static in the classroom. I found that this microteaching showed a bit of improvement, but I still find my own voice and gesture less helpful than I would hope for. The classroom is large, and mine in school is a bit smaller - so I THINK I manage to move around closer to students and use the space more creatively to make input comprehensible.

Overall, I'm glad to see SOME progress since my last microteaching, but am looking forward to the day when I'm not constantly cringing at some awkward MIC technique or whiteboard usage mistake! 

Watch the awkwardness here:

Microteaching: Presentation 

Listening Skills...whose?

Today ‘s goal was teaching talking about future goals using the new phrase “What do you want to be?” We were reviewing job title vocabulary and learning additional new jobs, as well as practicing listening skills via a listening activity. This proved more challenging for my students than I expected.

For one thing, my pacing for a lesson still leaves a lot to be desired. I tend to rush certain things, packing in too much teacher talk at once, as I did here, especially when giving instructions for the second stage of the listening…or simply pausing and moving too slowly when giving instructions. My MIC techniques are slowly improving (I’ve still modulated my pronunciation and speed perhaps too much, as can be seen here). That being said, I’ve noticed that using more gestures and pausing more often after a word (as I did in the first minute of the video) to allow my students to guess what’s coming gives them confidence and let’s them help construct, if not meaning, the instructions themselves. They seem to have more confidence.

Speaking of confidence, though, I noticed my students’ confidence flagged later on after they didn’t understand part of what I had assumed had been part of their pre-knowledge. In setting up the second part of the listening activity, I had neglected to check their comprehension of “clue” , one of the words they NEEDED to know before using the handout. And, since I loaded my instructions with too much teacher talk and not enough checking of their comprehension (I was hurrying because I hadn’t told them to prepare a pencil), I didn’t understand the extent of their confusion.

One struggle I’m having is with pre-teaching or not pre-teaching words in a listening exercise. In reading, obviously students can derive meaning from context to some extent. But in listening, negotiating meaning is more difficult. Even if students can work together in groupwork or pairwork to scaffold others’ lack of understanding, they often get hung up on one misunderstood or unknown word while listening and that affects the whole of their listening comprehension. With this class ofyoung learners, I feel like I should have pre-taught EVERY WORD they could possibly have missed. What’s ideal?