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[kev7161]

Well, another school year is winding down. Only six more weeks at my school (well, the poor students have to stay until mid-July due to our extra long May Holiday). I will be giving a final test for both my Senior One and Senior Two classes near the end of May, then I have a tongue-twister tournament planned and then probably a DVD to wrap things up.

Anyway, the biggest problem I had this year was students that wouldn't do their homework. I use a certain text that has an accompanying workbook that I usually assign as outside-of-the-class work. The first half of the year I would walk around the classroom and have the students open their book so I could check off whether or not they had done their work (or, at the very least, copy their work!). After the Spring Festival break, I didn't make it a point to do that any longer as I wasn't grading the work, only assigning it for the students to better their English.

So, when I see a student who has not done his/her work, I ask them why not? The response I almost always get is "I FORGOT." Well, sorry, that doesn't cut it with me. So, after a year of being frustrated, I need to think of something else to do next year and I would appreciate any suggestions you might have. As a teacher, I feel it is important for the kids to have homework. It emphasizes what we learned that day and it "should" help on future tests as well - - along with making their read and written English better. By the way, I don't give homework after every class. Usually, I'll assign every second or third class and it isn't much more than a couple of pages. Also, my homework is not always book work. I have assigned short reports to do, writing dialogues, stories, poems, etc. Naturally I encourage them to talk to one another in English outside of the classroom but I'm not hopeful.

Here are a couple of ideas I have and then you help me out if you have the time or inclination:

1. Assign more memorized oral homework such as spoken monologues, dialogues, or poems.

2. With a 45 minute class, teach and practice for 30 minutes, then give the last 15 minutes for workbook exercises (This is just a thought right now, but it seems like such a waste of time when we could be practicing speaking and listening). Then, I could have the students turn in their books at the end of the class, I could check to see if they did some or all of their work, and we could go over it the next day in class.

. . . so, what else?

[arioch36]

I give written homework in all classes, including oral english. The school I am teaching at now probably has the lowest quality students in Henan. But almost all of them do good work.

I had to make it very clear ...one person collects homework and gives it to me at the start of class. No exceptions. Chinese have been trained to accept any excuses (face and all that, dontchyano?

They see that I read it, grade it, give it back with lots of red marks. How much work are you willing to put into grading homework?

[kev7161]

See, that's the thing. I don't want to really grade it, rather check to make sure they have done it. I can certainly collect the books and then check off to see if they even attempted it. Then we can trade and grade in class (I need to invest in a lot of red pens next year) - - so that is a good possibility. There are rumors that I will have fewer classes next year (not fewer periods, just teach fewer classes more often each week). If that's the case, then I would be happy to grade on my own. Right now it would be too overwhelming with over 225 students.

So, what do you do arioch if you notice students have copied each other (assuming any of your students have done that)?

[Roger]

Chinese kids not only produce the most ridiculous "excuses" for never doing their homework, they simply aren't used to dfoing anything that's not done in a communitarian way.
Marking their homework? Great - but do they care about the red blotches and lines and circles on their homework? I don't think so.
I would expect them to CORRECT their mistakes; see that's where the problem lies! Can they do that? In most cases, they are clueless because their Chinese teachers normally enter the "correct" form of the phrase in question; I content myself with notations such as "T" (for "tense") or "SP" for "spelling" and "SVA" for "Suibject-Verb-Agreement", "cap." for "capital letter" (have you noticed almost all CHinese write their own names and the name of 'China" with a lower-case initial 'china', li zhanjiang...).
That's why I reserve a lesson once in a while for the inevitable correction work: we had just one lesson in each class, with students correcting their many mistakes over 120 to 150 words; believe me it took most of them two whole periods!
I did a few sample sentences on the blackboard - the very typical ones, and I asked them to write sentences on the board that they wanted me to explain; I asked the class in turn to "explain" to their clueless fellow students.
What's more, some guys had to be told INDIVIDUALLY to get their act done! It's amazing how much personal prodding these young people need!