Job Discussion Forums

[Otterman Ollie]

After all this we still haven't arrived or discussed ways to solve this problem, it seems to me that most of these instıutations are only interested in making money ,so whats new ?
Sadly they expect their kids to do better at languages because we are there making that possible ,someone said" there is not such thing as an unsuccessful student, just unsuccessful teachers " so we get the blame and the flak .
Some people have suggested inside these places that we are surplus to requirements ,well respected people who write letters to newspapers ,as a result some teachers get their marching orders . Is that fair ?
Are we adressing this ıssue as teachers who care what we do or as people who are in this job for the salary we collect each month and little else ?

[Mark Loyd]

Well, it is our fault. We should have just done a year or two in TEFL and then gone back to our own countries and got a real job.

[calsimsek]

Otterman Ollie said

[ImanH]

[Otterman Ollie]

If you go to the third page of this forum,scroll down to September 8th you will find the link to letters to a certain English newspaper,quite pertinent to this thread as it happens it does highlight the dependant learner ,but , offers no real solutions to the problem which seems to be where we are now .Full circle as it were .

[ImanH]

Thanks Otterman Ollie - I'll check it out.

[justme]

[ImanH]

[yaramaz]

I did a negotiated syllabus with my adult evening conversation class the other night-- and may I emphasise that this is a CONVERSATİON CLASS (as listed in Bilgi Eğitim catalogue)-- and out of my 8 students, more than half said they wanted the main focus to be on written or spoken grammar. Discussing world events, debating, and functional language skills hovered around the midway mark in a list of ten suggestions (after listening to tapes and reading articles and watching videos...)

May I state again, they had signed up for a CONVERSATİON CLASS.

[Golightly]

they feel safer with grammar and writing - that way, their mistakes stay on the page rather than out in public.
It is one thing that language learners in general do get anxious about - that they are judged by their peers in their class, especially when it comes to making errors. It does seem that Turks are more prone to this than others as well. Then again, I've often come up against this strong judgemental streak in them. A factor that inhibits independent learning, maybe?

[molly farquharson]

I think the students are a product of their education system and it is hard to change their habits. However, it is not impossible. Having high standards for them is important. For solutions, come up with a proposal for support courses/center for your univ and see if it flies. At least you know you've tried. The Koc comm dept did this for freshmen at least, even though the writing center subsequently faded away. For the univ it is a money and space issue, as they have to staff support for the students. However, if a proposal is couched well, it may be accepted.

Some of this stuff sounds like what i experienced with students when I taught in Japan. Their education system also require conformity and rote learning. They too have jukus, like dersanes, to prep for the big exams. Critical thinking is rare. However, this was more than ten years ago, so perhaps the new generation is better.

Motivation is a hard thing to instill, but teachers often have to try it. I think a sense of humour is essential in helping to do that as well as keeping one's sense of integrity.

[ImanH]

Otterman Ollie I read the article you mentioned with interest. As you say no real solutions, but one thing stood out; something I completely agree with:

[yaramaz]

Iman, if it was a beginner or elementary level conversation class, I could understand the grasping at grammar. I too would feel a bit more confident in a Turkish class at that level if it gave me some structure to work with. However, my students are intermediate level. I did a follow-up last night with a debate on the importance of grammar in a language classroom and it got so heated and ran so much into overtime that I just barely made it out the door into the servis bus to get home. One student followed me onto the bus and quizzed me in Turkish all the way to taksim about a really minor grammar question about gerunds vs infinitives at the beginning of a sentence that seemed to have wormed itself into her subconscious as a BİG SCARY THİNG TO UNDERSTAND. I need to help my students understand that accuracy is fine and dandy but you neednt stress over every little detail. The class is about communication and becoming used to speaking in English, feeling comfortable and spontaneous with your tongue and brain.

Another student came to me and says she feels nervous talking because her last teacher (turkish, for what its worth) at Boğazici told her that her sentences werent complex enough so now she feels so pressured to speak complexly that she gets bogged down in structure.

[justme]

This is one of the best discussions we've had in a long time. Thanks to the OP for bringing it up.

Interesting point about contact hours and homework. As an undergrad I had the same pretty much-- for every 2 hours of class, expect at least 1 hour of work outside of class. For language classes, anyway. I think students here should be doing 2-3 hours a night (for 5-7 lessons a day), but there's no way I can get them to do that.

And the teachers doing the higher levels are having a terrible time with the writing-- first, the students just can't see a way to choose their own writing topics. They come in the office every day begging the teacher to assign them one. In the first week, they all made their best efforts. Now most of them are turning things cut from the Internet. The teacher spends her time correcting the papers of the few who bothered to do it themselves, and the rest of the time doing phrase searches so she can confront the students and they won't have room to lie. Some of them are clever enough to cut sample TOEFL essays or other student work so there'll be mistakes in their papers.

The culture problem is an interesting one for me. In the back of my mind I'm trying to frame some kind of research to do about this, because it seems to me that a lot of students are really put off by having to learn the language of countries they despise, and to have their learning framed by cultures they've been taught to hate (moreso here at this ultra-conservative school than other places I've taught). Most of my students have suprisingly few Western culture reference points-- like, for example, you can't just give Gandolf as an example of 'wizard' and expect that more than one or two have seen or even heard of the film or the book. They're just not a part of the world that's eating up American pop culture, and outside of school, I think a lot of them, especially the girls, are discouraged or forbidden to participate in it.

But part of learning a language is taking something new into your identity, and for some of my students, the identity we're asking them to take is against everything else about them. There's an argument here somewhere about international English, or even some kind of Turkish English, because most of them don't want to communicate with native speakers in their futures-- English is purely a tool for acheiving other ends, but other factors are making the tool inaccessible.

[ImanH]

It sounds like you've got some keen students Yaramaz! And interesting of course that again differing expectations are emerging as a factor (thinking about the complex sentence issue)
justme, the example of the writing tasks I think is an excellent example of the issues around independent thinking. I remember when I first started as an under-graduate it was very much a process of gradually getting us to be more independent learners by starting with very rigid assessment tasks to begin with (often related to study skills such as finding a journal article in the library about a particular theorists and writing a summary of it), gradually building up into much more opened-ended tasks. The second year we were carrying out our own research but it was guided in the sense that we were looking at resources like the census and choosing which aspect of it we wanted to write about. By the end of the final year we were designing our own research and carrying it out. It was a very structured process, which only in retrospect do I understand was about gradually getting me to think about not only what I found interesting but how I could and how I wanted to go about exploring it.
Do you think it's the same with your department or is it a case where students have come in from school where everything was arranged for the - i.e. they were told what to do, and now suddenly they have to be creative?
Your point about language/culture/identity is a really interesting one. I am going to see if I can find some relevant research.