Job Discussion Forums

spiral78 · Joined: 05 Apr 2004 Posts: 11534 Location: On a Short Leash

Forgive me for lurking on your thread; I'm not in China and teach only a few rare Chinese students outside of their natural habitats.

However, as a long-term teacher who's done quite a lot of study in the field, the topic interests me, and I think it's pretty cool that you guys are able to discuss this fairly rationally.

Several posts have noted the value of 'practicing listening skills' when either the teacher or another student is speaking.

Question: to what degree do you realistically think students are listening actively to each other and/or to the teacher?

One tactic that I've learned and used to increase active listening is from Jane Willis' (now out of print) book on task-based learning. She recommends creating a set of 'reasons for listening' which require students to report on different aspects of a speaker's speech. The 'reason tasks' can be printed on cards and distributed in advance, so that students know what they will be responsible for reporting on. They can do this individually or in teams - in larger classes, teams are easier because it's more realistic to get actual live reports from them after the speech is done.

Examples (obviously possibilities are infinite)

What tense(s) did the speaker use? List examples of verbs you hear that indicate tense.
List every adjective you hear in the speech.
What power point slides would be appropriate to go with the speech you heard? (draw them)
What kinds of body language did the speaker use? What was well done and what could have been better?

I dunno if this would work in any of your classes, but if anyone's willing to give it a try, I'd be very interested to hear how it goes.

Fanyi · Joined: 01 Nov 2011 Posts: 47

I'll second (or probably closer to 'million') the comment about 70 students being very difficult to teach if one wants to avoid TTT. I'll also qualify my earlier post: I'm lucky to be at a foreign language school (public high school, but students are the best from the ciy and have to test into it) where our biggest class is 50 students and 90% of classes are under 30 students. With these class sizes, reducng TTT seems like a reasonable goal.

However, if I was back at my old school, teaching classes of 60 students, I woudn't worry as much about TTT. In fact, I highly doubt that any studies showing TTT to be bad performed control studies with 50 or more students. Instead I would worry about whether or not my students were enjoying class. I would throw everything in the book at them: increasing use of short, interesting video clips, talking about personal experience in relation to class, role playing situations (with lots of student talk), songs (and using them to study vocab, etc.), and my personal favorite (my colleague introduced this to me), having students make funny videos out of class in English that they can then show to classmates.

With a class size that big, I think the goal of tryng to improve students English may be secondary to that of trying to increase student interest in English through havig interesting classes, which hopefully would encourage students to study more on their own outside of class. What do you all think?

Non Sequitur · Joined: 23 May 2010 Posts: 4724 Location: China

'talking about personal experience in relation to class, role playing situations (with lots of student talk), songs (and using them to study vocab, etc.), and my personal favorite (my colleague introduced this to me), having students make funny videos out of class in English that they can then show to classmates'.
Assuming students do speak solid English on their vids, there's some good TTT reduction techniques right there.
Some teachers are instinctive and don't need a label to do what's best for their students.
Sounds good to me.

cloud_pleaser · Joined: 29 Aug 2012 Posts: 83

Yeah, my struggles with TTT at a Chinese university have been interesting. My school has a maximum of 14 students in every speaking class (quite rare I know) and so getting them to do the talking has been fairly easy.
Some outright objected to the notion of them doing most of the talking, they seemed to think that this would result in their much-fetishised pronunciation going down the toilet (going uncorrected by a foreigner!) and benefits such as increased fluency/confidence seemed somewhat lost on them.
I made it clear from the start that they should only speak English in class, and that they shouldn't really use their dictionaries. I also have a deck of "forfeit cards", so when someone lapses into L1, they have to draw a card and do the action on the card (sing the ABC, pay someone a compliment, do the robot dance etc.) This has worked amazingly well.
I really cringe when I hear about FTs using their personality/travel stories as a substitute for actual lesson content. When students ask me questions about myself, I'm more than happy to answer them. But if you rely on your stories of backpacking through Southeast Asia, you're not going to have much staying power as a teacher (fascinating though these stories are, undoubtedly). Sitting down and planning lessons that get students to practice grammar, vocabulary and functional language in fun, realistic spoken scenarios is a much better teaching tool.

Non Sequitur · Joined: 23 May 2010 Posts: 4724 Location: China

I still have contact with students from my first year (2004) and once they graduated the stories about FTs were amazing.
One guy used to take off a sock and use it as a glove puppet - Shari Lewis style.
Another would take out his front teeth and carry on in front of the students thinking he was a great comedian.
These kids were sophomore English majors so were expecting a bit more.
What I was picking up was that these two were totally unprepared for the teaching task and were too lazy or incompetent to plan meaningful work.
And this was tier one uni too, so they could have had better teachers.

DosEquisX · Joined: 09 Dec 2010 Posts: 361

Listening to what some teachers have done is definitely a great way to boost self-esteem about your job performance. I've heard of previous foreign teachers at my school swearing at their students and banging them outside of class when they could. One would just sit there and tell his students to "think in English". Another allowed his students to taste Jack Daniels during class.

I don't hate on telling personal stories during class. I tell stories but they are either lead-ins to the lesson or just a very quick story at the beginning of class told to loosen up the students. But yeah dedicating lessons to just you telling funny stories and being a stand-up comedian is generally not good form.