Korean Job Discussion Forums

[EFLtrainer]

[tomato]

Hello, Schwa!

If you succeed in getting the kids to communicate in English, tell us how you did it. I have done my dangdest.

On those rare occasions when a student speaks to another student--not to me--in English, I take a picture of that student and post it on the wall, along with a notation of the student's name, what the student said, and the date.

That had some effect, but not much.

I tried compiling a collection of students' most common Korean utterances and incorrect English utterances and devoting a weekly lesson to each one.

I spent a whole day teaching them not only "I have to go to the bathroom," but variations, such as "I have to go to the store" and "I have to go to school." The following week, they still said "Teacher, hwajangshil."

If you have any better luck, tell us how you did it.

[EFLtrainer]

[Ya-ta Boy]

I find in looking back at my lessons, the parts that I add tend to focus more on pronunciation than anything else. If a student can't distinguish between 'fairy', 'very' and 'bury/berry', then their listening skill improves by learning to pronounce 'f', 'v' and 'b' (yes, I know they can say 'b').

The other thing I stress most is 'Make a sentence'. It's astounding that no one has explained to these students (mine at least) is that word order in most answers follows the word order in the question. I know their listening ability is low, but when you write a question on the board, they should have learned long ago that they can follow the same pattern in the answer. When I started two months ago, there was only one student out of 118 in the whole school who could make a stab at making a sentence. Now there are 4 or 5.

[sadsac]

As the majority of my classes are conversation, my order is speaking, pronounciation and listening.

[EFLtrainer]

[Yu_Bum_suk]

[schwa]

[EFLtrainer]

[schwa]

[EFLtrainer]

[capebretoncanadian]

I by no means have any statistical data to back this up but by feel I think the best way of teaching these little rugrats, provided they have a decent base of vocab and grammar skill is conversation. Anyone else?

[elg]

while i am always thinking about speaking and giving the students language to use and hopefully appropriate, listening is something that is very important to me. however, a very big key is that it has to be comprehensible. (i dont know that the avg language class has the time to do listening skills justice.) i put the most value on it but it is not easy and good listening skills require lots and lots and lots of hours of comprehensible input. (as to krashen, having attended a program for many hours, i dont subscribe to the hypothesis but it did open my eyes to the importance of listening.) in addition, most of us are already predicting what our partner is going to say during a conv and listening i feel helps to teach or make the student aware of this prediction skill.

last week i ran into a student i havent seen in a year and is now halfway thru the levels of a 3 yr program. she couldnt even have a very basic 10 min conversation. her listening was too poor. to think about the time and money the student had put into her program and where she was at. i almost wanted to cry!

pronunciation - rarely put special effort into it anymore as its own special skill to be taught. incorporate it into what i am teaching and according to their needs but not a lot of time spent here.

know many many students who can talk, but their listening skills are poor. earlier on i thought that 'speaking' was important. it is important but now it is how can i make the listening more purposeful (and have conversations that the students enjoy being involved in). i do a lot of reported speech after a conversation, even at a low level, to make the student responsible for listening. continually try to educate the students on the importance of listening and give them ideas for pursuing its acquistion on their own, outside of class. (i dont think any of us believe a student is going to acquire a language within the class room. it can be a great start but a lot more needs to be done. they need to have the desire to pursue it outside of the classroom, the resources necessary, and also just plain work at it.)

reading is great for acquisition and implicit knowledge. but, getting students in a 2nd language, or even a first language for that matter, to do a good amt of reading is not an easy task. a once a week reading class is nice and has gotten good participation.

i would love to teach expressions. this is something i have just of late been putting more thought into. make attempts at it but probably not even scratching the surface. in the listening exercises i now pull the expressions out (or try to get the students to) and put them on the board with the important groups of words from the conv. after the listening i have pairs do the conversation using their notes or the board and reconstituting the sentences. i also give them expressions to use in a conv.

with that said, I dont know if expressions are worth the time. many people who speak a 2nd language decently dont acquire expressions. however, i do put a lot of thought into it now.

EFLtrainer - what is the evidence regarding listening and language acquistion you are refering to?

teaching vocabulary? i give it very little time.

it is interesting how many native speakers always want to correct those who are studying a 2nd language. i always ask myself, was my mother doing that to me when i was three or four? was there lots of memorization of vocab, reps of sentences, correction of pronunciation. or, were there huge amts of listening, lots of encouragement and lots of meaningful, authentic conversation.

last week a teacher walked out of a classroom and in the hallway commented, "they didnt retain anything i taught them today."

why is that?

[ontheway]

EFL Trainer and Yu_Bum_Suk,

Thanks for the compliments. Yes, it's a real hogwan program in Korea.

[EFLtrainer]

Some of that info on phonology I said I'd look into:

Current opinion regarding ESL pedagogy in general, and pronunciation in particular, has at least two generally accepted theoretical cornerstones. The suprasegmental features of English뾱tress, rhythm, intonation, linking, reduction, and deletion뾞re called prosodies. These contribute more to meaning and overall listener perception of nonnative speaker (NNS) fluency than do the segmentals, the individual vowel and consonant sounds. Although rules for suprasegmental use exist, these rules are broader and have much more variation than is involved in learning articulation of the individual sounds. Because suprasegmentals carry more meaning and are harder to learn, they require more focused, structured attention and more practice than the segmentals (Hall 1997, Celce-Murcia, Brinton, and Goodwin 1996).
Second, pronunciation taught in isolation does not carry over to improved pronunciation in actual communication (Morley 1991). This is true for both the segmental features and the suprasegmental elements. Many readers will have had the experience of practicing the /th/ sound in minimal pairs and sentences in class, only to have students say, 밪ee you next time. Sank you,?as they leave the classroom. While there is general agreement that practicing sounds and prosodic elements in structured drills is important and useful (Brinton 1988 personal communication), more communicative activities using connected speech are crucial in helping to build automaticity and carryover.

http://searchenglish.britishcouncil.org/SuggestFrame.asp?newURL='http%3A%2F%2Fexchanges%2Estate%2Egov%2Fforum%2Fvols%2Fvol38%2Fno1%2Fp24%2Ehtm'&DocID=37087300&UserID=&UserName=

Pennington's research asserts that, "The typical case in L2 acquisition seems to be that learners approach new values for phonological features gradually and piecemeal, rather than as the outcome of a rapid shift" (p. 95). The following example comes from a student, who had studied English for 14 years prior to coming to the States. It illustrates another essential link -- the one between phonetic knowledge and the ability to self-monitor:

Another big problem is that what I learned about the pronunciation of some words was wrong. And it has become a bad habit to pronounce those words in a wrong way and I even don't notice it. For example, I couldn't pronounce the word "hot" well because my pronunciation of the vowel sound was not correct. But it's kind of difficult to overcome this problem because I thought I was right and it's hard to find someone who is willing to point out all my mistakes during our conversation. "blood." In another time, when a patient needed a blinder to dark the room, I told the aid and he brought me a blender. These examples not only cause my job stress, but also embarrass.

A number of students also reflected on the importance of teaching suprasegmentals. An Asian participant, for instance, wrote:
Before I took this course, my speech tone was very flat. The most important thing is I didn't realize it, but now, I know a lot of how to divide thought groups, and where I should make an emphasis when I read sentences. I really think I make a big progress on it.

http://iteslj.org/Articles/Vitanova-Pronunciation.html

Research carried by Dash (2002) clearly shows that students in governments schools receive almost no opportunity to speak in the L2 in classes that are still teacher centered... ...However, even if the approach changed and students were to receive more opportunities to speak, the native Korean speaker is subject to the overriding silent yet powerful issue of Confucianism (Robertson, 2002b) and may be hesitant/scared to speak in the L2.

In particular, pronunciation teaching should be implemented, at least to some degree, in pairs or groups. Crookes and Chaudron (1991, 46) note,
"Contrary to a popular negative view of the outcomes of learner dominated activities, classroom centered research has demonstrated that at the same time that students have many more opportunities to employ the target language, they manage to perform equally successfully in terms of grammatical accuracy as when the teacher is leading the discussion."

http://www.asian-efl-journal.com/june2003subpr.php

On the other hand, with learners not yet familiarised with phonemic script I have found an even greater inclination to translate the sounds of L2 into sounds of Li. For example, a Pole might enter 'melancholy' as 'melankoli' in a vocabulary notebook as a reminder of how to pronounce the word, but the Polish spelling conventions will encourage a 'Polish-ish' pronunciation. Arguing for a top-down approach to phonology teaching,
O'Connor suggests 'better results are achieved when the learner gets the basis of articulation right rather than trying for the foreign sound sequences from the basis of his own language (1973:289 in Thornbury 1993: 128-9).

http://www.developingteachers.com/articles_tchtraining/voiceset2_sarn.htm

1. Interlanguage Transfer
When a language learner attempts to produce an L2 sound their relative success at approaching the target is reliant on their ability to disassociate their L2 utterance from their repertoire of L1 phonemes and allophones. Disassociation is often necessary because two languages may contain sounds which seem to be the same but are produced by differing articulatory motions. They are therefore acoustically different and may be perceived to be divergent from the target by the listener. While it is possible for adult speakers to learn to produce acoustically acceptable approximations of targets such as the troublesome

/l/
and
/r/

distinction over time (Flege, 1995) the level of success varies between individual speakers. It is a common remark that the more successful producers of near-native sounding pronunciation are rare, gifted or talented. Their success could be more reasonably attributed to their ability to disassociate phonological aspects of the L1 and L2 and thus minimise the transfer of phonological features from one language to the other.

a very useful observation to consider in the contrastive analysis of various language groups and their L2 English production is that nationalities with a vastly different phonetic inventory to that of English, often find it easier to learn to produce an acceptable phonetic target in the L2 than a nationality whose L1 contains contrasting sounds (Flege��s Speech learning model 1987, 1995). For example, Japanese students have an advantage over Koreans when it comes to the production of English vowels. As Japanese only contains five simple monophthongal vowels to Korean��s ten, Japanese English speakers only have five vowels to interfere with the twelve monophthongs present in (Australian) English. Therefore, it may be assumed that it is a simpler task to learn totally foreign sounds than sounds which bear a resemblance to sounds found in the L1. Furthermore, fossilised errors, which are attributable to the negative transfer of L1 to L2, may more easily be unlearnt when they are of the foreign rather than the familiar variety. For example, English
/v/, which is totally foreign to Korean and often approximated by /b/, is less of a problem to unlearn than the negatively transferred Korean high front vowel /i/ which typically replaces the similar but durationally longer English high front vowel /i:/

(Takahashi, 1987).