Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Fredbob]

I'm teaching an ?upper intermediate? writing class- intensive 1 hour/day 5 days a week. Students are predominantly uni and grad students. I've been attempting to model proper development of an argument and this has not been effective. I've had them read well written essays and paragraphs, no good. Basically, I've tried just about everything. Today we went over the basics of inductive and deductive reasoning, then I provided examples and even guided someone during class through the process of building a valid argument. Finally, I played blackjack with them and had them argue about whether people should take another card. This seems to be working but I'm having difficulty thinking of experiential types of exercises to help hammer this home. Dave's search hasn't been helpful and google for this was a mess.

1) If there are any resources out there, help is appreciated.
2) Any thoughts on doing it this way?


Thanks

[SPINOZA]

Logic would be useful from a language perspective, but dreadfully dull I feel. Logic was boring enough in my native language...God knows what it must be like in an L2!

[Poemer]

I have taught debating to middle school age children here. Getting them to grasp and employ the concepts of making and presenting a coherent argument is difficult. I've found that presenting them with a simple discussion topic (for example which makes a better pet, a cat or a dog) and walking them through arguments and counter arguments point by point as they occur in discussion is helpful.

[fancypants]

what is your final goal? perhaps "teaching logic" is too vague and needs to be broken down into smaller, more manageable goals/lessons. is it really necessary to teach them the vagaries of inductive/deductive reasoning? are you teaching them an elementary class on formal logic or are you trying to help them develop their critical thinking skills?

if it's the latter, you might present the students with a bunch of short, morally prickly, fallacious arguments and have them work together to try and figure out what's wrong with them. it doesn't matter if they don't use the correct terminology, the goal here is to get their cerebral whirlygigs going and to make the issues relevant.

(eg. sujin is 23. she is a medical student at SNU. her parents say she isn't allowed to stay out past 10 pm because last week their neighboour's daughter got drunk and embarassingly rowdy.)

what are the reasons why she isn't allowed out? (premisses)
are they good or bad ones? (valid)
what is the outcome? (conclusion)

is it a good argument? (valid)
are all the reasons for the outcome true? (soundness)
if they are all true, why is is a bad argument...etc
are there better reasons for her being made to stay home?

give them the vocabulary to help them argue...ways of disagreeing politely. (I'm afraid I disagree/don't see it the same way/but what about.../etc

and for the clincher, formulating counterarguments, my favourite is: "Just because __________, doesn't mean that _______"

this works for EVERYTHING.

debating can get a little tedious and is cliched. role playing might be more fun...or give them slips with personal problems on them and the Ss mingle and counsel eachother...

if anyone out there has more ideas, i would also love to hear them.

[Milwaukiedave]

Ok, I'm going to play the cynic here. I honestly don't think Korean's can understand logic. It doesn't play into how they are taught to think.

I'm sure there are exceptions to this, but it's just the way the culture is. Personally I think your wasting your time.

[fancypants]

[Fredbob]

good input so far, I will not be teaching anything more than the basic concept, not the formulas, I may teach the basic fallacies but probably indirectly. So far something that worked last night with a K friend was asking them to explain how they know when it is going to rain and going over the strengths of each of their points. For example: I know it's going to rain because everyone has umbrellas.

[splok]

Here's a list of fallacies, definitions, and examples in case it helps:

http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/

[Zark]

You are going too far to try to teach logic - and you don't have enough time to do so. You need only to tell them that they must support their opinion.

I taught a Speech class at Konkuk university and students would often say things like "the Japanese are crazy" in reference to the silly Dok-do island thing vs. providing some data - rather than opinion - that would support their opinion. Some students would do their research and find very old documents (actually on the web!) that demonstrated a Japanese understanding that Dok-do actually DID belong to Korea.

They just need to learn to Google and find supporting information. And that personal opinion is squat when making a decent argument.

[red headed stranger]

I think that learning to recognize fallacies in a given argument is a good excercise. Of course, you may run into the the cultural barrier with some of them. (i.e. appeal to authority or appeal to tradition)