Job Discussion Forums

[tigerlily20202]

well, the results are in, and we have another four more years of bush's strategeries to look forward to. china's starting to look a lot better, wot?

anyway, a lot of my students have been asking me about the election so i thought i'd devote next week's lesson plans to discussing the election and voting. my classes are all 2 hours each, with different levels of listening comprehension and speaking ability. i thought i'd include an activity so i'm not talking for the whole two hours, but i'm really not sure how to explain the political process with limited english. the only prop i have is an absentee ballot (i was sent two). has anyone talked about voting in their classes ? how've you approached it/organized your plans ? i teach at a university, classes are between 20-90 students.

[struelle]

You could always do a lesson plan where voting is built into the activities. Then students get an active taste of what democracy is like. Mind you, this works best at the beginning of semesters where students can have some choice and responsibility for what discussion topics they want.

I like to do a 'pyramind debate' that has a ballot box thrown in for good measure. I introduce myself, etc. then give students a list of more than 20 topics that we can cover in the class, but we don't have time to do them all. So, individually they choose 5 of their favorites, they can also add their own if they want.

Once that's done, they are put in pairs and compare their choices. Together they have to agree on 5, so hopefully they discuss and debate which ones to drop and which to keep. If the class is big enough, I put them in groups of 4, same process. Finally, they solidify their choice by putting the consensual piece of paper in a ballot box at the front of the class.

I always get a kick out of this because, without failing, students write the word 'ballot box' in their notebooks, followed by Chinese characters beside it. If nothing else, from this activity, the learn what a ballot box is

[tarzaninchina]

Using votes in-class to increase involvement and participation, fine. Actually teaching democratic systems, red flag as far as Chinese law is concerned. Current events are alright, but not outright political teaching. Be more subtle with current events.

Also, bring on debates if teaching oral English. I was surprised at how good the Chinese can be at this, plus you can get them to work within the framework of a western-style debate:

intro: 15 seconds each team

Then do the following three things for one team before moving onto the next.

state positions and reasons: about 2 minutes

lambasting of those positions: about 30 seconds for all the other teams

rebuttal: 1 minute

Then have students vote for one of the other teams. This makes things interesting, really.