Saturday, October 31, 2009
Celebration Time!
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
The MIDTERM
Saturday, October 24, 2009
KOTESOL
The ways he suggested we break rules were simple:
If you normally ask students to underline words they don’t know, reverse the procedure and ask
them to blank out such words and ignore them. Notice your normal practice and do the opposite.
Notice the difference between the way people do an activity in a classroom and outside in
ordinary life. In classrooms people sit at desks to read – there is silence. At home people
sometimes lounge on cushions and listen to music while reading. Have reading happen this way
in class.
Take a traditional practice like reading aloud in class and change some detail about the way it is
done. Ask the student to read silently, to look up from the page and then to say what she has read
to somebody in the room. The change in detail radically changes the whole.
Fanselow’s message in that lecture was “For goodness sake do something different next Monday
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
More on classes at Yonsei - the bad!
- The classes are stressful!! I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. There is no relaxing. The teachers speak very fast and the brain spends 4 hours desperately trying to understand everything and keep up. Am I learning more than if they slowed down a bit and made it easier? Does the tension get in the way of learning or stimulate it?
- The high-stakes exams! The teachers are with us 4 hours a day 5 days a week and know our level very well- but they are not allowed to evaluate us. No. The TEST will decide that. Next week we have our midterm - 2 days of separate tests for listening, speaking, reading comprehension, reading aloud, and writing. At the end of the course we go through the same thing with the finals. Those scores determine 80% of our grade and whether or not we pass. What if I get a mental block from nervousness, or there's some freaky vocabulary that makes me misunderstand a whole reading or listening passage, or ... I feel the same way our writing students at SJCC feel when facing board-graded exams - IT'S NOT FAIR!
- For a teacher, this has got to be deadly boring. (On the other hand, teachers are relieved of the stress of having to grade the students, and they have almost no preparation to do other than correct the daily homework.)
Sunday, October 18, 2009
More on classes at Yonsei - the good!
- No time is wasted! Class starts on time and breaks are never longer than the alloted time. Each hour is packed! No time is spent trying to get the Internet to work or looking for sites, no time spent passing out handouts, getting students into groups, giving complicated directions, etc. It's just language, language, language.
- There is a great deal of recycling of material and varied practice with the same vocabulary and structures. The 3 books really support each other. We listen, repeat, memorize, copy, pronounce, and use as speaking or writing models the same or similar material over and over.
- Homework and study is efficient because we know exactly what we will need to know for the next class, exactly what will be on any tests or quizzes, and exactly how to do the exercises, since they're always done the same way. It isn't boring because we're always using new language, and that's enough novelty.
- The constant focus on individual daily performance (written homework, listening dictations, Q/A etc.) assures that all the students stay attentive and keep up.
- We use every page of every text. The texts were developed here at Yonsei, and there is clearly an enormous pride and confidence in the value of these books and in the methods used here. This helps us to accept the books and methods, to trust that if we do all we're asked, we'll learn!
Friday, October 16, 2009
Classes at Yonsei
- The fourteen students sit in a semi-circle around the room with the teacher in front. There is a chalkboard and large TV monitor that plays CDS and videos - no other AV or Internet.
- The teacher begins by asking a few questions about the previous lesson and usually goes around the room asking each student in turn to answer a question.
- The new dialogue is introduced, always in the same way: teacher reads the dialog while students listen; teacher reads the dialogue line by line while students repeat; teacher goes around the room after each line and has each student speak the line; teacher speaks a line, students in unison speak the next line, etc; then roles are reversed; we repeat the dialogue with books closed; we go around the room as pairs perform the dialogue - student 1 and student 2 recite the dialogue, then student 2 and student 3 recite the dialogue with student 2 taking the second part, etc.
- The new vocabulary is explained (yes, after, not before, we memorize the dialogue).
- We go through various Q/A and book exercises practicing the new vocabulary.
- The teacher begins explaining the grammar, always in the same way: She writes the pattern of the new structure on the board with blank lines for the nouns and verbs, then gives lots of examples of different nouns and verbs that can fill in the blanks and use the new structure. We often have to take turns (going around the class one by one again) making sentences, answering questions, etc.
- We have to keep 2 homework notebooks; at the end of this period we hand in the notebook with the homework we've done for this day, and she returns the notebook we had turned in the day before with the homework corrected and maybe a short comment; otherwise she doesn't talk about the homework at all.
- It's pretty much a continuation of the first hour - more grammar, more practice questions, more workbook pages to do in class. The teacher has some printed material (vocabulary, prompts) that she shows the whole class - there are no handouts for individual students and the printed material is exactly the same for all the teachers of Level 1. She also has some pages with prepared questions and prompts to refer to for oral practice - again, exactly the same pages all the teachers have.
- This is supposed to be our pronunciation/reading class, and we use a different companion book to the main text.
- First the teacher gives us back our corrected homework from the previous class and the corrected dictation we took in the previous class; then she gives us a new dictation, taken from the reading we studied the previous day. Then she collects the dictation and home work we had been assigned.
- A new short reading (short paragraph) from the text is introduced, always in the same way: teacher reads while students listen; we go around the room, each student in turn reading out loud all or part of the reading; new vocabulary is introduced (this teacher does not use any other prepared materials); we go around orally reading and answering questions from the textbook about the reading.
- Then we have a short pronunciation lesson, not so much to pronounce sounds correctly as to be able to read Korean orally. There are certain letters in Korean whose sounds change depending on what letter the following word begins with, so each day we learn a new rule about how to pronounce such words together. These words are in the book; we just listen and repeat.
- The teacher has "conversations" with us using vocabulary we've been learning - and a lot of new vocabulary as it comes up - just to help us practice oral conversation (and probably to keep herself from being bored silly).
- She assigns the homework which is always the same: copy the new reading twice; write all the sentences from the previous day's dictation in which we made errors, and study the new reading for the next day's dictation.
- Pretty much a continuation of the first and second classes. We have a third book that accompanies the other two - a workbook - and if we have finished all the grammar and practice from the first book we do workbook pages - sometimes on the spot, and sometimes she gives us time to read and write the answers first, and then answer one by one.
- She assigns the homework, which is always the same: copy the dialogue we learned in the first period twice, write the dialogue a third time substituting different verbs and nouns, write sentences using the new grammar structures but our own nouns and verbs 3X each, and then either more workbook pages or a short paragraph to write - or both.
Sunday, October 11, 2009
My classmates
Sunday, October 4, 2009
3-week Observations
- The first week was pretty hard. There were so many decisions to make with so little knowledge. Many times I felt lonely and anxious. I questioned whether I would be able to do this Korean adventure. How could I approach people, and present myself, and get what I needed? Each foray out was was filled with anxiety. Each time I felt that way, I thought about the newcomers in San Jose and how they must feel when they first get here and don't know how to do things and can't speak the language. Each smile, each word of encouragement, meant so much to me. I will always be grateful to Young Kim-Park and Mrs. Park, the contacts provided by John Song and his wife Clara, who I was able to visit with during those first few days, to Kyoung-min You, the real estate agent who showed me how to set up everything, and to Charles Montgomery and Yvonne Dominguez, who provided real company and friendship at the end of that long week. Without their help, I don't know what I would have done. How much power each of us has to make or break a newcomer's day. Even the smallest bit of help or encouragement means so much.
- Each of the last two weeks has been better (and certainly easier) than the first one. Settling in the apartment was huge; getting started in class, and finding the right class, was a big boost too. Now a routine is starting to settle in. I know where to shop for food. I'm slowly getting pans and plates and making most meals at home. I've found where to get scotch tape and a dictionary and contact solution and an iron and all the little things. I'm getting to know the city better each week. I have friends for an occasional outing or meal. I have something important to do (ie homework!) every day when I come home. And the weather has been great!
- However, I am not immersing into Korean as much as I had anticipated. Actually, the need for company is too great. I really don't know how to make Korean friends right now, so I have been spending most of my human-contact time with the English-speaking folks I have come to know. It is so comforting! How sympathetic I feel towards our ESL students back home who continue to hang around with each other, even when they know that it is at the expense of their learning English. I hope I will find a way for more Korean contact as time progresses, but for now I am grateful for the English-speaking company.
- About learning Korean: Actually, it is coming along, certainly at a much faster pace than at home. This Yonsei Level 1 class seems perfect for me. Most of the material is at least familiar, but only now do I feel that I am really absorbing and using it - at least in class. We spend the whole 4 hours hearing and using Korean - at my level. This was the pitfall of the 2 places where I studied Korean at home. At De Anza, the classes were conducted primarily in English, so I had little practice with speaking and listening. At Adroit College, the teachers used Korean in class, but it was usually at too high a level for me, and so I couldn't learn efficiently from it. I think Krashen is right (sorry, Kato Lomb!) - the value of just-right slightly challenging input (as opposed to overly challenging input) is enormous - so it seems to me now. The words and meanings just stick in my brain in ways they didn't before. And I feel so proud to be able to sit through 4 hours of class almost totally in Korean. And even though I'm not speaking a lot of Korean, I am surrounded by conversations I overhear, signs and notices I try to sound out, TV shows I watch - the whole environment certainly helps reinforce whatever learning is taking place in class.
- The best part of all: the endless surprises. Three weeks ago I could not possibly have imagined all that has fallen my way. Each discovery, each success, each kindness, each "aha" moment - each one brings a thrill of excitement. Wow!!! Like just this minute!!!! Clara Song just called this minute - she's in Korea, and has invited me to meet her and a Korean friend for dinner tonight!!!......................... I just got back from the dinner. Wow! One of the best surprises of all just happened as I was writing!!! We had a great dinner and great conversation; I met a wonderful Korean (!!) friend of Clara's and we have plans to go to a concert together on Thursday night. I will end this entry as I bask in the wonder of this evening.
A Professor in Korea
This is what it's like to be an English professor at a university here in Korea. This single office is about the size of 3 or 4 double faculty offices at SJCC (here you only see the back end of it.) There's a sink in there. The professor's nameplate is on a plaque by the door. Those from SJCC would recognize the name- yes, it's Charles Montgomery! He's teaching English and writing literature reviews for Korean English-language magazines and doing all kinds of amazing things. I've already written about the first time I got together with Charles and his fiancee Yvonne here in Seoul - since then we've gotten together two more times. Through them, I've gotten introduced to...bookstores!! with books in English!! Why am I so excited about that? Didn't I come here to learn Korean?? But it feels really nice to hobnob with folks from home. And they have been so helpful with advice about living here, and things to read, and food to eat, and..... it all fits in, and I am very grateful for their friendship here.