In my year's journey as a student I have experienced these sets of teachers:
- teachers at Yonsei Korean Language Institute who were thoroughly trained in one particular method and had to rigidly adhere to it;
- teachers at De Anza Community College who had complete freedom to choose and execute a method (though still required to use a particular text);
- teachers at Adroit College who were loosely trained in one method and had freedom to adapt and apply it, using the required text as much or as little as they saw fit.
Through these experiences I have learned that:
- sometimes a method that seems bad can bring out good learning;
- it's very difficult for a teacher to change her method for the better (though somewhat easier to change it for the worse!);
- a teacher's commitment to her chosen method and attitude towards her students matters a great deal.
I will illustrate with some examples.
Teacher A. This was my favorite teacher at Yonsei. Committed to the Yonsei method (described in detail earlier in this blog, with its plusses and minuses) she executed it with liveliness and enthusiasm, sweeping us along, giving us no time to question it, making us committed too, inspiring us to work hard. She paid attention to the individual student, helping or challenging each of us at our particular level. It was good, and I learned a lot!
But there was a mystery toward the end with this teacher. I still think about it - the student who crumpled. It was another American student, the only one who was having more trouble than I was. For some reason, she stopped helping him out. When he had to perform a dialogue he couldn't remember or answer a question he didn't understand, she started letting him squirm in front of everyone. Sometimes she laughed at his struggles. The student started to be absent, started to do worse and worse. Another method might have worked better for him, and he did begin to complain about the Yonsei method, determined to go to another institute for the following term. But I don't believe that's the reason his learning stalled. How could he possibly do better, with any method, when he worried about being humiliated every day?
I wonder why the teacher changed with this student. Was there pressure on her to have all her students meet the standards of the class and pass on to the next level, and she felt frustrated at her own failure? Did she just feel he wasn't studying enough and lose patience? Why would she take what she did best and chuck it at the end?
Teacher B. This teacher, also from Yonsei, was the only one I felt I didn't learn much from. Why was she a teacher? Maybe she just hated the Yonsei method and was in despair because she couldn't develop her own teaching style and method. Who knows? She was so lifeless, so robotic, so unseeing of the individual students, so unable to match what she was teaching to what we were understanding, that I would mentally go to sleep during much of her class. She didn't dwell on us too much if we couldn't answer her questions, so we didn't worry too much about feeling humiliated, but she was unable to inspire us because she didn't show interest in our learning. She showed no desire to get student feedback on her teaching, seemed anxious to leave the classroom as soon as possible at the end of class, called in sick when she obviously wasn't - I believe the possibility of improvement was too far away for this teacher, and she knew it and wasn't interested in it. She used the same method as Teacher A but with a radically different attitude, so learning was stalled.
Teacher C. This teacher at De Anza spoke in English for 99% of each class. The only times we heard Korean were when she read a dialogue and had us repeat lines after her or when she said sentences in Korean to exemplify a grammar point she had just explained in English. She simply talked about Korean - in English. She focused primarily on grammar. She often repeated and repeated her explanations. She almost never had us speak and rarely had us do anything except occasionally write on the board. No pair or group work. No in-class practice. Mostly we just listened to her English.
Anyone would say this is poor language teaching.
And yet... I found the audio files that go with the book on the internet and so was able to supplement class instruction with listening. And she did make the grammar explanations very clear.
And she was very clear about what would be on the exams and exactly what we needed to know. And that required us to...study! The study we did at home was intensive and focused and productive and rewarding. And through that study, we learned.
Did the teacher know her in-class method was not the best? I believe so. She often apologized for being "very boring" and "talking on and on." At the beginning of the first semester I had her, she tried to have us do pair work and activities that were suggested in the text, but she soon gave it up. I don't think she could see the learning we were getting from our struggles. She was a lecturer. That's what she was comfortable doing. Her greatest teaching value seemed to be unambiguous clarity, and the learning outcome she valued most was correct grammar use. She knew we wouldn't understand grammar explanations clearly if she used Korean, so she used English. She saw the students falling asleep, typing on their IPhones, passing notes.... but she didn't change.
She did have a secret weapon. She showed the students, every day and in many ways, that she cared about them. She cared that we learned. She cajoled us, nudged us, praised us, gave us pep talks. She came to the class every day 30 minutes early so she could meet with any student who had questions. She was the only teacher who expressed such a passion for learning.
So even though the in-class methodology was disappointing, I learned a great deal from the work I was inspired to do for this teacher and this class.
Teacher D. This teacher at Adroit College used Korean in the class all the time, so we really got to hear it, and that was great. Classes at Adroit are quite small (3-6 students) so we had some opportunity to speak ourselves, and we talked about our lives and what was going on in the world and many things of interest to us besides what was in the text.
But unlike the teaching at Yonsei or De Anza, there was little structure in what was being taught. The teacher seemed to feel that just using Korean, any Korean, constituted teaching and learning. So - she gave us lists of vocabulary words to memorize, and even tested us on the words, but we rarely saw these words in context, rarely used the words in class. She gave us exercises to do in a workbook, but only spent about 15 minutes in a 2-hour class going over the workbook and introducing the next week's exercises. We rarely practiced with the material in the textbook or did anything except give the answers. And for 90% of the class, even though the class was so small, the teacher talked.
The students weren't too happy about some of this and twice gave the teacher suggestions to change. One student suggested we try to use the vocabulary words we studied during the class. The teacher gave a long defense on why she does the vocabulary the way she does, saying, in part, that she has to do it that way because students are lazy and won't learn any other way.
Another day another student suggested the students would like to have more time during class for "conversation." The teacher gave a long defense of why she doesn't have students speak more, saying, in part, that she has to do the talking because we students don't know Korean well enough to say anything well.
It was only when the teacher's teaching method was challenged that she showed any negative feelings towards the students. Normally she was very supportive and encouraging, always came to class early and stayed late, talked to us during the breaks, etc. Perhaps she was just frustrated with our inability to learn faster and thought that throwing a lot of language at us was the best way to help us, and the best she could offer.
Did we learn anyway? I wasn't so inspired to do a lot of outside study and preparation for this class, and I agreed with the students she could have made our learning more efficient and rewarding. Yet, because of the small class size and opportunity to use (or at least hear) Korean for actual communication about things we cared about, I was always mentally active and engaged during the class. The teacher was skillful at keeping her language to a level we could more or less understand, and I certainly improved my listening ability, which I desperately needed. And amazingly, I did learn - and still remember - a lot of vocabulary from memorizing those lists. So yeah, we learned.
We teachers pick what our particular study and experience has shown us to be the best method(s), or what helped us most when we were learning another language, or what best fits our own personalities and values, or what seems the easiest or most fun, or... there are many reasons why we choose to teach as we do.
For me, the greatest lesson is:
Whatever method we choose, if we teach it with passion and caring, most students will choose to learn.
