Teacher Discussion Forums

I am sure this topic has been addressed before, but I did not immediately find it and I was wondering on advice for my particular situation. I am teaching English at the public schools in the country of Georgia. It is a co-teacher type of situation. I work with a native teacher and am in the class at the same time as her (there are no male teachers in my school). The idea I think is similar to what is going on in Korea--I am to help with speaking while the teacher does more grammar.

I find a lot of problems in these schools. The teachers are underpaid, the schools are under financed, there are sometimes a lot of behavioral problems in class because the students are bored--it's all lecturing and repetition. The teachers don't plan anything. When I mentioned a syllabus, one of my co-teachers was like "I already have one", meaning the outline in the table of contents of the textbook. There are no games, no activities, the most creativity the students have is to reword a reading passage in supposed rewriting.

My biggest issue is that there is a lot of translation. Every time a student reads a passage, he or she has to give the translation in native language sentence by sentence. When I speak, the teacher translated everything I say. Like, I know this is horrible for learning at least the communication aspects of a language, but I don't have a lot to back myself up as to why. I have some linguistics background, buy not a ton and I am a fairly new teacher.

When I take over the class, I plan out activities and games, and it's amazing how all these kids who normally are horrible students suddenly become interested and try to interact. But at the same time, this is supposed to be co-teaching. I am supposed to impart some information to these teachers because there are not a lot of native English speakers in the school and there may not be many at this school in the future.

I'm kind of just asking for general advice. But specifically, how do I get these teachers to quit translating everything? Even the textbooks, which are government regulated, have a lot of translation exercises. And how can I explain that this is bad?

To defend them, the teachers try very hard and the students are eager to learn. Sometimes we have very meaningful conversations that deal with the subject. And they must be doing something right, because the kids have pretty good grammar (and some of them speak English well). I know that the translation method has been used at least since the middle ages, but that the modern emphasis in language learning is on communication. I get a feeling that there is something useful in translation, but I am supposed to be helping them to speak.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you.

Hi Joey, and welcome to the forums! (And sorry for the slight delay in replying - I started reading your post not long after you'd posted it, but didn't quite have the time to reply until now!).

I've team-taught in China and Japan (latter was on JET, and then as a dispatch AET), and there are similar problems in those countries.

I found that what helped was to make whatever I said as "vital" (not just relatively frequent and useful, but as succinct) as possible, which also meant designing activities where a student response based on overall comprehension (rather than any exacting translation-ability) was the more pressing (and interesting!) concern. You can get some idea of this sort of approach from the following:
http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewt ... 0680#10680
> http://forums.eslcafe.com/teacher/viewtopic.php?t=2149

Once the students were thus much more involved in the listening, it became obvious to even the most hardened JTE (Japanese Teacher of English) that they could shut up translating and getting in the way quite so much and the students would still manage somehow (indeed, thrive, come alive now that the filter and/or stranglehold had been removed). That is, who can really object to and then interrupt communication when it is actually occuring? To do so is disabling rather than enabling (or is at the least a crutch that interferes with natural walking).

And you can still allow the students more time to formulate their response than (un)necessarily translating (or having translated for them) "what you said"! (Meaning, if they are going to be translating, at least have it explicitly from their language and into English i.e. encoding, than from English into their one i.e. decoding).

Anyway, I'm not sure that I would be talking or pressing too much about the theory outside of class, because in ELT methodology, absolutely everybody has an opinion, and the bilingual teacher often feels (and may well be more entitled!) to "their" opinions than the monolinguals are to "theirs".

By the way, what is the Georgian teachers' English like? Do they spend so long jabbering away in L1 that they don't give enough attention to the L2? If so, then threads like the following may be of interest (note especially the set of links that I provide in its second page):
http://forums.eslcafe.com/job/viewtopic.php?t=83765

You might want to join the Job Discussion/International forums also and post your question there (if you haven't already). The application to join there needs to be vetted, but is pretty straightforward.

Thanks for the reply.

Some of the Georgian teachers (I work with 3) have very bad English. They are hard to understand (which is not a big issue in my opinion--that's why a native speaker is there), they make a lot of lexical and grammatical mistakes, etc. But they nevertheless have a good hold on the grammatical concepts. I think that in this case, rigidly following the textbook is good, because it mitigates their own (i.e. the teacher's) lack of knowledge.

However, the problem is that there is almost no English spoken the entire class, except for the exercises. Then the students will read a passage in English from the textbook (the teacher corrects every mispronounced word as it's read), and the new words from that passage are written on the board with a single-word Georgian "translation" written next to it. After that, we go over answers to exercises (in Georgian), with the English written on the board. When a mistake is made, the teacher screams at them at the top of her lungs and calls them stupid. I mean, the kids are used to it (her violent screaming), it's just cultural differences, but it's funny to me.

Now, one or two of my co-teachers are better. They speak better, one of them lived in England for a while, and a lot more English is spoken in that particular class. They are also more laid back. But they still follow the above method, with reading a passage and writing 1 to 1 translations, following the book, etc. I am open to different teaching methods, but I have trouble contributing to the class when it is all in Georgian, you know? I'm not sure what to do (I'm kind of bored), I see from your links that other people have had this problem.

I posted here because I was thinking that, maybe if I can give them some technical reasons for why they should speak in Georgian as little as possible, it would help. When I learned Spanish, at first I did not understand 3/4 of what the teacher was saying in class, but I picked up on it after some time without having to be explained every definition. I found that looking up definitions in Spanish-Spanish dictionaries, rather than English-Spanish, was more time consuming but also more effective. The same goes for my pronunciation (not needing to be corrected much). It was usually inhibiting. But I guess you are right, that they have been doing this a lot longer than me.

Decoding is kind of out of the question then for the reading passages, but I like your suggestion about meaningful conversations, and the necessity of encoding when doing that. I try to jump in with thought provoking questions when I can, sometimes it's hard when everyone speaks in Georgian. I feel like an overeager mouse or something. "Car! I recognize that word. What's your favorite car? What do you think about the relationship between communism and cars? Uhhhh. What about nuclear physics? And cars? Connection? ehhhh."

Thank you very much for the suggestions. Some of the links were useful. For me, it's not so much a matter of coming up with ideas as it is to find a way to use these ideas without stepping on the other teacher's feet or taking over the class. I did pictionary one day and it was great. The kids were yelling out English left and right and getting into it. But then the principle comes in and chews them out because they were making too much noise. And my co-teacher hasn't let me do the lesson since. But that's another topic I guess. I may try to post this in the job discussion forums as well.

Heh, you're welcome, Joey!

I posted here because I was thinking that, maybe if I can give them some technical reasons for why they should speak in Georgian as little as possible, it would help.

You don't really need a technical reason (although I'm sure some can be found in SLA theories!) when some simple rhetoric will suffice...something like "Don't the students know how to say, or what 'I like bananas' means, in English yet?! They do, Georgian Teacher X? Why then did you translate it into their L1?!". (Throwing a desk out of the window is purely an optional accompaniment to this example ).

But seriously, you could perhaps impose (inflict?) some simple-for-relative-numbskulls communicative notion/jargon on the teachers, like 'information gap', because that might jog their memories and/or get them to design an activity or exchange or two that actually involves as much if not more English than L1! And from the sounds of it, there is little if any spoken pairwork in your classes (where the teacher steps back and simply monitors, allows the stduents to work at their own pace, following some genuine input (input which could of course be provided by you, if the Georgian teachers aren't confident of departing from the book much)).

Things are working out better in my classes, time and interest has helped the kids to want to communicate, the advice helped a lot, but maybe I can rephrase my question because I'm still hitting a wall sometimes when we work from the book.

When we have a new reading passage, my co-teacher basically has the students memorize it word for word. My opinion is that the kids should learn the vocabulary (maybe ahead of time?), but then once understanding the passage, we should move on. Or work on questions/summarizing about the passage.

Does anyone know of an article or chapter or something similar which explains why this would not be an efficient method? So I could have something to back my opinion up?

Or is memorizing (or translating in the native language as you go along, for that matter), a whole passage, perfectly efficient? I mean, it seems to work, whether good or not. The kids still learn English.

I'm kind of looking for viable background to back up my opinions. (or to refute them if I'm wrong)

Any advice or reference would be appreciated. Thanks.

There are a lot of articles on Google Scholar. Here is one that looked interesting:
http://www.tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues ... 13/ej13r9/