Job Discussion Forums

[TawtViet]

Perhaps I should have put this on the teacher forum but I wanted to focus on Japan specifically. I assisted in a JHS lesson today as an AET or ALT. The student text targeted a certain area of form with this as well as other sentences: "This is a book I bought in America." The Japanese teacher supported it well by providing and going over a lengthy worksheet which gave a nice variety of examples of the form's usage. I followed with some of my own personal life examples and my own worksheet.
My worksheet was comprised of a simple bedroom drawing and several more sentence examples that would be appropriate to conversations about personal possessions one might keep in a bedroom. I had the students draw pictures of things they own in the bedroom inside their worksheet bedrooms. After completing these visuals for themselves, one girl volunteered to talk about one of her drawn pictures in the hearing of the entire class. She performed the language task perfectly. Finally, I had the students do non-theatening pair work involving spoken use of the targeted form as they explained the pictured personal possessions to each other.
We tried this for a short while but the Japanese teacher told me that most of the students had no idea what to do. At times I feel that JHS students are really pampered by teachers, or not allowed to stretch themselves beyond grammer translation exercises. I can't figure out what more could have been done, especially since the one student understood exceptionally well and produced a great example for all. What went wrong?

[Sherri]

First of all, a few questions for you:

Did something go wrong--or did you just have the Japanese teacher's view on it?

How many students were in the class?

Did you have a model form of the target structure on the board?

What were you doing while the students were drawing their pictures?

Did you let the students come up with model sentences before doing the pairwork?

Did you do some open pairwork before closing the pairs?

What were you doing while the students were working in their pairs? Did you notice that they were on task?

Sherri

[hivans]

I can add a comment from my own experience which may or may not be relevant to you, so apologies in advance if it is unhelpful.

Whenever a pairwork section in my lesson goes wrong (and I am afriad this has happened more times than I would like to admit!), it is nearly always because I have not modeled it properly. What I tend to do now before a pairwork exercise is to pair up with a student and act out the exchange in front of the class. Maybe in this case I would have paired up with the girl who was keen to speak about her own bedroom.

I think written models on the board are often useful as the previous poster mentioned, maybe once things start to go well you can try the exercise again without the written model.

I hope this is helpful. Good luck with your future lessons anyway!

[Glenski]

My question is this...

What was the purpose of the partner in the pair work? If one person simply describes his possessions (This is the Rolex I bought in Thailand.), what was the other person supposed to do? Was THAT the problem? I would certainly see it as such.

[homersimpson]

[TawtViet]

You all gave great advice as to my not modeling enough and other things concerning prep work for pair work. I had thought that sufficient preparation was given. Thanks everyone, I learned a lot.
At the same time my heart's desire seems nearly impossible to reach.
I would like to see students struggle with, play around with, explore, and discover the language and it's target during a complete switch over to the brain processes of audible speech. Reading, memorizing, following model dialogues, etc is not as I understand completely in that brain process. My TESOL teacher told us something like this: "The sometimes difficult and a little painful struggle of trying to be understood in a second language is the process whereby speaking skill in a target language is aquired. One time a JHS girl spoke to me after school and said, "We eat breakfast every morning big water." After struggling with each other to communicate, it came out correctly like this: We see you stop by the pond over there and eat your breakfast just before you come into the school building. The English wasn't very good at all but I was so proud of that girl and really tried to encourage her to keep trying to communicate. She wasn't following a model or anything like that. It was a pure switch to the brain processes of speech. I know this couldn't be a common practice in class lessons but I wish there could be more than the spoon feeding of dolts (sigh,....so very many). I think I just have to let go of this heart's desire. As one of you said, they just don't think for themselves.

[spidey]

Tawtviet,

In addition to your last post...

You are right in saying that the classroom is not the ideal place to practice acquired speaking skills.
Firstly, the students are in a group dynamic and the chance of embarassment is high. Therefore, they will not take the chance of making a mistake.
Secondly, students are used to responding in a certain way in relation to the material being taught. Such is the "robot syndrome."
Finally, Japanese in general are taught from an early age not to stand out in a crowd. This behavior really starts to show itself in the JHS years.

IMHO, keep building strong relationships with your students, both as a whole and individually. You will find that the best place to "communicate" with them will be when they are away from the group and able to speak to you on a more one to one basis.
Be consistant, caring and open to your students' desire to communicate. This will enable your students to express themselves without the fear of ridicule.

S

[Sweetsee]

Good advice Spidey!

[homersimpson]

[TawtViet]

Thanks for the encouragement and suggestions!!!