Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Yu_Bum_suk]

I'm just wondering how much stress should be placed on dialogues, bearing in mind that it will probably be different depending on how often per week one sees one's students.

My middle school co-teachers, one of whom's opinion on teaching method I actually respect somewhat, really seem to want me to focus on our textbook dialogues, which aren't too bad. There are a few things that aren't written exactly the way a native speaker would say them but on the whole they're all right and the subject matter compliments what the students have been studying that respective lesson.

For my high school lessons, which are entirely my own show, I usually make up one dialogue a month and do it two lessons in a row - the ones in their textbooks are crap. I try to recycle a lot of the vocabulary and idioms from one to the next. Sometimes I give them a fill-in-the-blank dialogue they can practice in pairs, providing their own opinions on things.

I can see the potential advantages and disadvantages to dialogues. They're very easy to teach, but how much of it is really sinking in and will help them down the road? Has anyone read up on what's a good percentage of lesson time to spend on dialogues and if students who practice them regularly do better in the long run? Is it better to do short dialogues over and over or a longer dialogue a few times? What's a good lenth in terms of total words?

I'm more interested in the middle / high school level but info on kids and adults would probably be helpful, too.

[Ody]

context is the most important component of using dialogs, imo. my approach is to introduce vocabulary through discussion and then follow up with dialogs, predominately for listening practice.




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[Billy Pilgrim]

I've never been a bid fan of dialogues, given that it just feeds directly into the Korean's habit of rote memorization and thinking that it is enough.

I prefer to leave it at broad sentence patterns with vocabulary they substitute in so that they are at least thinking a little about what is coming out of their mouths. Then I can fix common errors as we come across them.

[baldrick]

As someone else said, they should first be in context.

One thing you can do to maximize the effectivness of a dialogue is to not allow the students to read from the book or worksheet. They should look at the sentence in front of them and then raise their heads away from the text for the speaking part. Then you can work up to having them memorize the diagloue in this fashion - referring to the text when they need it but not reading directly from it. This way their brains are making a much more tangible effort and are also absorbing those grammatical structures.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

Interesting points. If anyone has examples of dialogues that would work well with high school classes with students at very different levels I'd be very interested to see them. While I think they are quite useful for teaching pronunciation, listening, and a bit of vocab, when it comes to conversation they seem of more limited value apart from asking and answering simple questions and teaching a few simple idioms.

As for the point about memorisation - this seems quite logical, but at my old hogwan they relied heavily on dialogues, doing the same ones repeatedly, and even amongst the students who had been there for years few could put a sentence together (although there were so many things wrong with that place the best dialogues in the world may not have made any difference).

With lower-level students, however, they do make teaching very easy. Yesterday for my grade one vocational HS classes I did use their textbook dialogue, making different vatiations - back ache, sore knee, cut finger, etc. for a doctor's visit - and it was a lot easier to teach having some basic structure with pictures so that everyone knew what everything meant.

Has anyone else done much study on dialogues?

[ilovebdt]

When I do dialogues in class, I give the students the first word of the dialogue and then mix the rest of the lines up. The students then work together to put the lines in the right order to make the conversation.

It gives them an idea of the natural flow of a conversation.

[Yu_Bum_suk]

My schedule is such Swiss cheese this week that I'm just doing filler lessons with the classes I have. For one I was doing an airport role-play with a class to reveiw travel and nationalities. After giving them some time to work in pairs I picked on two who had really been into their pocket translator to complete their work. They came up with:

A: Welcome to China; my I see your passport?
B: Sure, here it is. My name is Osama and I am coming from Iraq.
A: What is the purpose of your visit?
B: To eat monkey brains.
A: How long do you plan to stay?
B: One hour.
A: Where will you be staying?
B: On the street.
A: Is this your first time to China?
B: No.
A: Do you have anything to declare?
B: Drugs.
A: Enjoy your stay!

Who says Korean teenagers can't be creative?

[Hotpants]

Dialogs are an interesting one. We've all surely seen dialogs in text books which look really stilted and unnatural. As some of the other posters have already mentioned, they are often not very helpful until you at least put them in context.

I like to make mock mini-drams with roleplays. Throw in a few props, and get the students to come to the front of the class and perform them. Get one student to be 'cameraman' and another to do the 'clapperboard' and I've found all my students get pretty excited.

There has been analyses of dialogs in text books. You can find some of it with a web search. Perhaps Rogers&Rogers' Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching explains well how the dialog got its place in text books, after educationalists surmised that the original repetitions of mere lists of expressions with grammar substitutions wasn't helping anyone understand the meaning of what they were actually saying. Dialogs were also meant to inform the student what to say in response to another person's utterances - an important part of the communication interface.

I guess someone in Korea needs to make a roleplay about how to correctly contextualize the phrase 'Are you crazy?' rather than making it an isolated expression which all kids love to yell with no accurate comprehension of its meaning!

[flotsam]

[Yu_Bum_suk]

Thanks for that Flotsam. I've sort of flogged travel to death this term, but I might steal that lesson for sometime in the future, if that's OK.

[flotsam]

[the_beaver]

I can't stand dialogues either as a student or as a teacher.

[Hotpants]

I love the animated dialogs presented on the CDrom of the 'Live ABC' series. Have you seen these? There are also a set of great interactive activities for each dialog featuring things like fill the gap, and mimicking pronunciation of vocab. They may be a bit advanced for elementary kids, but are useful for proficient older students. Has anyone used these in class? It seems the CDrom is more for private individual use, but I'd love to find out if anyone has managed to incorporate them in a group class.

[some waygug-in]

I think dialogues can be useful if they are suited to the students needs/wants etc.

The problem with a lot of the textbook "dialogues" is that they are so un-relatable to anything in the average Korean kid's frame of life-experience.

I don't think too much emphasis on dialogues is good, but you can do things to make them more useful.

If you take the same kind of dialogue, add in a few things that Korean's would know.........then see what kind of a difference it makes.

EX: A: HI Ji Soo, how have you been?

B: Great! I just got back from Kyung Ju.

A: Really, what did you do there?

B: I visited Sokuram and Bul guk sa and then I went bike-riding.

A: Wow! Sounds like fun.

There's lots of info on the net........just do a google search for
dialogues in EFL or something.

Here's one:

http://esl.about.com/library/weekly/aa062498.htm