Teaching Approaches and Methodologies - Final Reflections

By now I have experienced being the recipient of quite a few different teaching approaches and methodologies, and I have already written quite a few entries on the plusses and minuses of different ones.

I am reinforced in my conclusion that almost any methodology can work if the teacher is committed to it and the student is motivated.

I did not find any methodology that seemed particularly better than what I already generally do (!) so I guess there won't be big changes in my methodology.

But there are already changes in some of the ways I relate to students. For example:

• When I give an assignment or a test or ask a student to perform in class, I try to be more conscious of how the student may be feeling, and am more likely to take the feeling into account. I try to offer more choice. I am more ready to change something that seems to make students uncomfortable. I am more patient with slowness and error.

• Rather than lecture students on how they should study or practice, I rely more on the students to share what they have found useful and effective with each other. I try to give students more time to talk to each other in pairs and groups, and don't worry so much that I can't be on top of each group to make sure they are doing what I want.

• I don't rely on high-stakes tests so much. I don't call tests "midterms" and "finals" or place so much importance on them. I try to give students several chances to show what they can do and make sure there are other ways besides single tests (portfolio, makeup test, alternate assignment) to find out if the student knows the material and has the needed skills.

• For stressful assignments like speeches and class presentations, I try to offer alternatives to coming in front of the class. Students can videotape, or present to a small group, or present just to the teacher or even do an alternative assignment. I found that if a student can control whether or not to speak, and how long to speak, and whether to sit or stand, and so on, the student is much more likely to choose to do the assignment and do it well.

• I try to schedule more time for student practice, and less time for teacher lecture.

All of these are things that I wanted more of as a student. They seem like obvious things, but they are easy for a teacher to forget. Too much stress and too much arbitrary control by the teacher can hurt a student's internal motivation. Finding ways to foster that inner motivation, to help students feel that they have the power to learn and succeed within themselves. are among the best things a teacher can do. I have learned this more powerfully through my experience of being a student.

Final Entries on the Korean Experience

All is not quite over yet with this blog.

Once I got back to full-time teaching at San Jose City College last fall, I let this blog drop. I got busy with work, and I was still handling affairs and adjusting psychologically to my husband's death in July. I never finished writing up my final reflections and conclusions.

But I must! That is a requirement of my sabbatical project.

I CAN NO LONGER PUT THAT OFF.

So there will be a few more entries coming to include my final reflections on my Korean experience. I'll bet you can't wait!

Immersion Activities in the US - Final Reflections

On returning to California in the spring, with no real prospect of returning to Korea, I submitted an alternate plan in which I would seek immersion activities right here in the Bay Area. There is a huge Korean population in Sunnyvale, Cupertino and Santa Clara now; a drive down El Camino Boulevard reveals many bill boards and signs advertising restaurants and car shops and all kinds of businesses in Korean.

So I set out to see what I could find to do.

Here are the activities I eventually logged:

• 150 hours: Doing homework for courses
• 100 hours: Watching Korean dramas and movies
• 5 hours: Learning Korean song lyrics
• 1 hour: Conversing with local Korean shop keepers
• 10 hours: Speaking in Korean with Korean conversation partners
• 5 hours: Writing letters in Korean to friends in Korea
• 5 hours: Reading Korean books, newspapers, etc
• 5 hours: Using Korea while traveling during trip to Korea in March

It is obvious that most of the hours were spent by myself, in the privacy of my room - doing homework and watching dramas and movies over the Internet, writing letters, and reading - not really the type of immersion I had envisioned, and certainly not what I would have had in Korea. Except for my week traveling in Korea, I only spent a little time out in the Korean community - although even one total hour of conversation with local shop keepers meant quite a few visits to Korean markets and restaurants.

My best practice was with the Korean conversation partners I met at De Anza College; thanks to those meetings, I feel I was able to progress a bit in conversation.

So this part was not as successful as I would have liked. Undoubtedly the unexpectedness of having to do this part of my immersion practice in the US and dealing with a difficult family situation played a role. Life changes things. At least I know some things that I wouldn't have known had I stayed in Korea. I have made local contacts and know where to find people and where to go to practice if and when I have the inclination. I think this bodes well for future practice and maintenance of the language.

Continuting Relationships with Koreans - Final Reflections

This spring I have 2 Korean students - a brother and a sister - staying at my house. The sister was one of my Korean language partners in Seoul; I visited her hometown while I was in Korea and visited her home and met her mother. Now she is studying at De Anza College, and her brother is studying at a private language school near here. They are wonderful, friendly, talented, smart, ambitious young people, and even when they go back to Korea, my relationship with them is one I trust will endure.

The professor that I met at Ewha University - the one who introduced me to the students who became my language partners - spends half the year in Seoul and half the year in California, when she returns to stay with her husband in their home in Morgan Hill. She was the main person who helped me wrap up my affairs during my short return trip to Seoul in April - she translated for the landlord, went with me to the bank, etc.. Last summer she brought a group of her Korean students to the Bay Area for a week-long field trip and I helped her with some of the planning. She has just returned from her last 5-month stay in Seoul, and we already have plans to get together next Saturday. Since Myunghee spends so much time in the US and we can easily get together, that is another relationship that I believe will endure.

I still correspond with a few others I met in Korea, but not often, as it takes me so long to compose an email in Korean. Time will tell if I ever see them again.

Here in the Bay Area I still meet with 2 of the students who were my language partners while I was studying at De Anza last spring. We meet on campus or at a coffee shop and continue our practice with English and Korean.

I still feel connected to my teachers and fellow students at Adroit College. Even though I haven't taken classes there for a while, I follow them on Facebook, and I plan to return for a class this summer.

I have not been able to keep up with all the people who showed an interest in maintaining contact with me. I wasn't in Korea long enough to know which relationships would deepen, and I ended up blessed with more potential but still superficial relationships than I could handle. I decided to nurture a few relationships and let the rest go for the time being. If we visit each others' countries in the future, we may well look each other up, and then we'll see what ensues.

I believe that it is through these relationships that my interest in Korea and the Korean language will continue to grow, and ideas for more interaction with Koreans, personally and perhaps even in academic partnerships or projects at our colleges, may emerge.

Korean Literature - Final Reflections

In her memoir The Language of Blood American-raised Korean adoptee Jane Jeong Trenka reflects on the drama of what happened in her own Korean family and the events leading to her being left in an orphanage at the age of six months. She writes, "Almost every Korean family has such a story. The characters are always the same: starvation, lost family members, bitter cold, poverty, men unable to support their families, drunkenness, disappointment, despair."

I want to respond, "Oh, how true, how true!" I have no such family, no such experience - so how would I know?

I've read modern Korean literature!

By now I've read about 15 Korean novels and collections of short stories and novellas written by Korean authors and translated into English. I've only written about one of them so far: The Wings by Yi Sang on March 20. I had intended to write more, much more, but now it is summary time, and I must resign myself to the fact that it is too late. I will do my best to keep it short.

I was able to choose these books to read thanks to Charles Montgomery, former employee of San Jose Evergreen community College District, good friend in Korea, and guide par excellence to modern Korean literature in translation. For anyone interested in the subject, please ignore anything else I might write and go immediately to Charles's Korean Translated Literature (ktlit) website.

As Charles has often pointed out, the themes of most of the modern works of translated fiction relate to division, abandonment, betrayal, poverty, loss. Clearly these are writers' responses to the traumatic events of modern Korean history - colonization by Japan, the Korean War, the division of the country, the repression of the early governments of South Korea. In these stories characters mourn for or seek relatives or comrades lost during the war, deal with haunting memories from these events, struggle to survive desperate poverty, seek ways to escape situations they cannot cope with, and so on. It often seems that there is no other theme! So one has to know something about modern Korean history to grasp much that is in these books. (But reciprocally, the books also provide a way to learn more about the history from the inside of people's lives and feel the depth of its impact. Each successive book reveals a little bit more.)

There are other difficulties in reading these books. I have already written about the problem of reading a translated work and not being able to trust the translation. Another is being an outsider to the culture, not understanding that a look, or a word, or a word unspoken, or a gesture, or an argument, or a joke, or bottle of soju, or a vacant stare, or a statue of Buddha, or a chicken, or an apparition in the night, or the way a name is written, or a red dress, or so many things may have a meaning to Koreans that is missed or misunderstood by the uninitiated. That must be the case! That must be why so much in these books... often doesn't seem to make sense!

Actually the very first novel I read in Korea wasn't written by a Korean at all, but by Chaim Potok. Chaim Potok!?! Yes, he wrote a book, titled I am the Clay, about an elderly childless Korean couple who are among the thousands of poverty-stricken refugees fleeing the invading North Korean army during the Korean War. Even then I wondered, where did HE get the chutzpah to imagine what it was like to be a Korean during the Korean War?? He was so good at writing about what he knew - I had sometimes had my students read his book The Chosen, about young Jewish men growing up in Brooklyn, New York, in similar circumstance to how he had grown up, and even shared with my students Potok's comments about the value of writing about "what you know," and the way he admired James Joyce's choice to write primarily about Dublin. I then learned he had been in Korea for a short time during the Korean War as a chaplain, and he had written a novel about that too. So I read that book, but got no clue from it how he got himself into the minds and hearts of Korean refugees.

Then I read the books by Korean authors. I sensed that most of these books were better than Potok's. But - I never understood the characters in the way I understood the characters in Potok's book.

And then I figured it out. Potok's characters thought and acted like Americans do. Oh, he pretended they were Korean, with their pagan beliefs and ability to dog meat and the like, but their motivations, their reactions, their feelings all seemed perfectly logical, perfectly connected to what was going on around them - in a familiar Western way.

Not so with Korean books. Characters act - and I can't understand why. A character gets angry, or restless, and I can't see why. Something happens to a character, and I may think the character would logically be astonished, say, but then I read that the character is "abashed" or "suspicious." In The Gray Snowman, a messenger who has news of the fate of the main character's comrades in an antigovernment protest movement shows up. We've already been told of the "utter gloom" of the messenger and the "spirit of deep trust" that has emerged between them. Then "From her bag she handed me a thin, sealed envelope with worn edges. Instead of opening it in her presence I impulsively tucked it in my pants pocket and hurried out to the kitchen. The arrival of news, so long in coming, had made me giddy." Giddy?!? I don't get how the characters are seeing and reacting to the world.

Yet another difficulty is getting used to what seems an exaggerated passivity of the characters. Strange and often terrible things happen to these characters; they tend to be mystified by what happens to them, haunted by half-remembered past events, unsure of what is "real"; they choose actions more to see what will happen than to achieve something specific; they often act capriciously, without apparent motivation or understanding of why. In The Cry of the Magpies, the main character, a soldier having returned from terrible battles in the Korean War, beholds this recurring chain of events: magpies start to caw in the trees nearby, his mother starts coughing uncontrollably, and he starts wanting to kill his mother. "One more strange thing was that as soon as my mother's coughing stopped and I could regain some calm, I began to have doubts about what had just taken place. Did it really happen or was it only my imagination? Could it be that I had hallucinated?... Meanwhile the cawing and coughing went on and I usually succeeded in running out of the room before the thing I so dreaded could have any chance of happening... The turmoil in me, however, did not easily subside merely with running away... My body kept on trembling from this unbearable tension and extreme stress. The one consolation in suffering outside rather than inside was that I now did not have to worry about strangling her. Instead I unleashed my pent up fury on our dog, Blackie, whom I kicked and beat in a total frenzy." There may be all kinds of psychological or symbolic meaning here - but I find it hard to figure out. How did the tension and stress turn into fury? Who or what is he furious at? And Blackie?? Who kicks their own dog that they have named "Blackie" no matter how furious they are? Well, these musings are part of both the frustration and fun of reading Korean Lit.

Just for the record, here is a list of most of the books I read. Some books actually contain the title story and one or two other stories as well.

Yi Sang The Wings

Yi Mun-yol An appointment with my Brother

Twofold Song

Kim Dong-Ni The Cry of the Magpies

Ch'oe Yun The Last of Hanako

Lee Kyun-Young The Other Side of Dark Remembrance

Kim Yu Jeong The Camellias

Seo Giwon The Ma Rok Biographies

Kim Young-Ha I Have the Right to Destroy Myself

Your Republic is Calling You

Lee Dong-ha Toy City

Yi Chong-jun The Snowy Road

Hwang Sok-Yong The Guest

Land of Exile - Contemporary Korean Fiction (An anthology)

Amazingly, 2 novels, Your Republic is Calling You and one I have not read yet, Please Look After Mom by Shin Kyung-Sook, are now being sold, even featured, at big US bookstores like Barnes and Noble. These books have themes a little more modern, a little more universal, a little more appealing to American audiences. I do believe Charles himself has had some influence in getting this literature selected and promoted and into the American market.

I wanted to find a Korean book that I could recommend to my book club, a book I thought the group would enjoy discussing. With the difficulties mentioned I haven't found quite the right book yet in the ones I've read, but who knows - maybe Please Look After Mom (my next read) will be the one. If not, it seems that more works with an appeal to western readers are being written and translated and promoted. I will keep reading!

Immersion - Final Reflections

I was inspired by the idea of immersion years ago when I saw what was accomplished by a young Chinese student of mine. I was teaching an advanced composition course (ESL 91) and the student had been placed into a low intermediate class (ESL 332). He refused to accept his placement and by student insistence was allowed to enroll in my composition course.

He put into practice what Kato Lomb (see Aug 16 entry) suggested determined learners do: he signed up for a course far above his actual ability.

How did he do? He turned out to be the only student to receive an "A" in that course that semester.

Here's what he did:

• He refused to speak Chinese during the day. He avoided his Chinese classmates. He stayed at school, studying in the library or participating in campus activities, away from his Chinese family, all day every day. He spent every day immersed in English.
• He wrote an essay in English every single day.
• He came to every single office hour I had to talk about his essays.
• He walked around with an ever-present smile on his face, always seeming happy and friendly, endlessly seeking chances for interaction with native speakers.

This was self-imposed immersion. It worked extremely well for him.

Of course, he was unique (at our college at least) in that he didn't have to work or take care of a family, and as a newcomer he didn't have relationships with Chinese friends that he needed to maintain. He had the luxury to spend all day doing nothing but learn English.

I, too, would be in Korea with no work or family or relationship responsibilities, with the same luxury. What a chance for me to try out immersion.

In the end I was not as dedicated or as successful as my Chinese student, but I did do more than the minimum 10 hours a week of immersion activities I had imposed upon myself for the sabbatical, I did make progress, and I did come up with some conclusions about immersion:

• The time spent in immersion activities - in studying and listening and reading and conversing and practicing in every way we can think of - is when the real language learning takes place - even more than in the classroom. Of course, if the class is conducted completely in the target language, as it was at the Yonsei Korean Language Institute, that is immersion too, but even that is not as good as practicing out in the real world or at home with one's own material at one's own pace. In the class the teacher is in control, and the student's whole attention is focused on pleasing the teacher and meeting her expectations. Outside of class, trying to apply what was learned, the learning feels more personal and memorable. As teachers, we should remember that the work we assign (or inspire!) students to do on their own outside of class is probably more important than anything we say or do in class. It is hard for teachers to release control; we think that as long as we are explaining or illustrating language, we ensure student learning in a way we can't when we release students to learn or practice on their own. We don't know what students are learning out on their own - but the students do, and that's what really counts.

• Finding good immersion activities as a beginner in the language is not that easy! If only I could learn as a baby does, with someone beside me all the time to name the things that I see around me, and repeat those names with exaggerated pronunciation and intonation, and hug me every time I say something right, or cute or interesting. And everything I tried to say would be interesting to that loving person! Alas, such is not to be found. As a beginner, I found it is somewhat difficult to find and sustain immersion opportunities. Finding someone willing to converse is hard. Keeping a conversation going for a long period of time is hard. Effective listening and reading can only be done with simplified materials or extensive use of subtitles and dictionaries, which waters down the "immersion" aspect (not using the native language). Fatigue sets in more quickly as the need to concentrate is so intense at the beginning stages. I think I could not succeed in my immersion practice as well as the Chinese student in part because my Korean was so much more elementary than his English. With that in mind...

• How valuable a language lab would have been for me!! How lucky the ESL students at San Jose City College are! Yonsei Korean Language Institute does not have a language lab. De Anza College does not have a Korean language lab. Adroit College does not have a language lab. There were audio CDs to go with our textbooks at all these schools, which certainly helped, but no aids beyond that. Few teacher office hours. No tutors. No workshops. No supplementary software. No video programs. No conversation groups. I have a new appreciation for what our ESL language lab at SJCC offers students, especially beginning students who have limited opportunities for immersion in the "real world." As I return to teaching at SJCC, I will certainly be emphasizing the extensive opportunities students have for practice in our ESL lab.

• The best immersion activities are those chosen by the students themselves. I think this is something that we teachers in some ways have to resign ourselves to. We cannot control everything in our students' learning. Even though we know the value of immersion activities, we cannot "force" good immersion activities onto students. So much of the success of language learning comes from the students' own internal motivation and analysis of what they need and want to do with the language. A teacher might, for example, design an assignment where students call a movie theater to get information about movie show times. A real-life "immersion" activity. What a great assignment for a student who will really go and see a movie. But for the student with no interest in seeing movies, this activity will be much less memorable and useful. How about assigning students a choice of what business to call? Or a choice to either call or visit a business? Give students a chance to make the assignment as relevant as possible. This again shows the value of the SJCC language lab program, where students are free to choose their activities from among a suggested list. There is currently pressure at the college to require a specific curriculum for each lab course. Our language lab coordinator is resisting this, and I support her. It is fine to have a suggested curriculum, perhaps the best choice for the unmotivated and uninspired student, but once we make it required, and take away choice, we will be limiting the stronger language learners.

• Being required to document immersion activities is not very productive. It is good to think consciously of one's learning activities and reflect on what is useful and not. It is even useful to put this in writing; that forces the thought process to take place. But being required to record every immersion activity, as I have required my students to do in the past and required myself to do for this sabbatical project, has proven to me to be unpleasant overkill. When I required immersion logs from my previous students, it was sometimes like pulling teeth, and now I know why. The effort to remember and record activities each day becomes repetitious and onerous and does not in itself seem to contribute to learning. Often I suspected my students wrote down immersion activities that they never did - or did immersion activities that they never wrote down, as I often did. Students who want to immerse will do it regardless of the log, and students who don't or can't won't (but can easily fabricate a log). In teaching I suspect that indirect suggestion rather than direct assignment is a better way to inspire immersion. Make suggestions, have students brainstorm and share experiences, give students time in the lab - and then, through writing or class discussion, have students assess for themselves what they got out of it - that is enough. I won't be assigning immersion logs any more.

• The best immersion activity I had, both in Korea and in the US, was conversing with a Korean-speaking partner. Through connections I made at Ewha University, the neighboring school to Yonsei University in Seoul, I found 5 different Korean students who agreed to partner with me. Back at De Anza College, I joined Cross Cultural Partners, a program pairing up students who wanted to practice each others' native language, and was paired with 4 different Korean students At both schools, I met with a different student each day of the week. In our sessions we usually spent about 30 minutes using English and 30 minutes using Korean. Wow - 30 minutes using only Korean in a conversation. These conversations represented the main times I felt successful in using the language. My partners and I got used to each other; we took time to explain and reexplain and draw pictures and laugh and drink coffee together; we shared pictures and gave gifts to each other; we used the target language to actually communicate. At SJCC, we currently have no such partnership program. I wonder - could we? I wonder if we could find ways to get native English-speaking students to partner with our ESL students, especially the beginning ones who so desperately need this practice? I had not thought of pursuing such a project before I started the sabbatical, but now... I wonder!

In the end, I only got to stay in Korea for 4 months, so I missed out on the chance for extensive immersion experiences in Korea when my language skills got a little better. But I did pursue opportunities here in the San Jose area. That will be the subject of the next entry.

Learning and Age - Final Reflections

I started my study at Yonsei University at age 61. Out of hundreds of students, there were only a handful of us older students. There were precisely 3 older American students, and of course I was drawn to them and got to know their stories.

One, a man about my age, was an English teacher who had been in Korea for many years and had tried to learn Korean at the Yonsei Korean Language Institute before but had given up. He was repeating level 1 again - and failing miserably. He said that during the listening midterm, he could only catch 1 word! He simply could not grasp spoken Korean. He quit again before the end of the term.

The other, Susan, maybe 45 or 50, was doing well in level 2. But imagine - she had been married to a Korean for many years. She and her husband actually lived in Japan, and she said she and her family spoke Japanese there. Now that her kids were grown, she decided to come to Korea to finally learn her husband's language and show her children how much she valued that part of their heritage. She was succeeding at level 2 and would be advancing to level 3.

Susan's relative success may be due to her relatively younger brain or previous exposure to Korean through her husband, but how much greater was the difference in her attitude. Susan clearly loved Korean people and Korean culture, and she knew her learning Korean would mean something precious to her family. The man showed no such love: he judged Koreans by American standards and often found them wanting. He blamed the Korean language, Korean teachers, Korean culture, for his failure to learn. (How could anyone learn such a crazy language in this crazy environment!)

I do think older learners tend to have a harder time, but based on my personal experience and observation, I would break down the reasons something like this:

slower brain (!) - 10%

attitude and circumstances - 90%

Here are a few things I think interfere with older learners' language learning:

Less ability to accept a new culture

We older learners tend to be pretty set in our values. We are no longer experimenting with possibilities of how to live our lives, and are less interested in trying things out. We are more choosey about what we will and won't accept in the new culture. For me, it was very different from when I was younger, and wanted to try out EVERYTHING in the new culture, without judgment. Culture and language go together: food and the way we talk about food, rules of social interaction and how we talk socially, how we express emotion and how we talk about emotions, and so on, so resisting something in the culture can affect our receptivity to the language in some ways.

In Korea, one obvious difficulty I had was with what is called "honorific" language and forms of address. Most of the students at Yonsei are in their teens and twenties, and we were taught mainly the style of language used to speak to someone older. Outside of class, I was often reluctant to start a conversation with a Korean because I didn't have experience in addressing someone younger - or even my own age (and I rarely talked to anyone older!). In addressing me, sometimes Koreans called me the equivalent of "ma'am," and sometimes they called me "grandmother." Grandmother! That was supposed to be honorific? In my younger years I would have been fascinated with these different ways of addressing people and so excited about trying out the different forms of address with different people. But as an older learner I struggled with this aspect of Korean culture and language and its threat to my sense of self and deeply-held values about how people should relate. It affected my comfort and willingness to speak.

Less urgency to learn the new language

For most older learners, learning a new language does not represent the opportunities it does to young people. Older learners will not likely be starting new careers or establishing new significant lifetime relationships. They can already predict the circumstances in which they will, or will not, be using the new language. Knowing a new language may enhance their later years, but it is not as likely to deeply change them. There is not the same sense of excitement and hope in what the new language will bring. Thus the motivation required for deep and intensive study may not be as present for older learners.

Fewer opportunities for significant encounters with Koreans

In my Dec. 7 entry, I wrote about this difference. Young people all over the world over want to meet each other. They organize parties, mixers, events. Young men and women find each other, spend hours talking and getting to know each other, as I remember doing as a young single student and teacher living abroad. That's how I used to practice so much. Now I remember! That's how I got introduced into families. That's how I always had someone from the target culture to venture out with. That's how I came to feel so at ease. In Korea I did get to know a number of Koreans, and did things with them, but sporadically. I had no Korean friend that I saw on a regular basis, someone that I could call up any time, someone that I shared my daily life with, and my language skills remained so poor that I never got to feeling at ease with anyone. I'm sure that with more time I might have deepened some of those relationships - I was only there 4 months! - but the time and effort involved would certainly be greater for the older me than for the younger me!

But - how great for older folks to learn a new language!

Most of us fear various changes as we get older: becoming rigid and inflexible, losing our brain power, becoming bored and unexcited about life's opportunities, becoming disconnected to mainstream modern life, losing touch with the affairs of the broader world, to name a few.

Studying a new language can be an great antidote for all of that!

Though we are not as flexible as when we were young, we're probably a lot more flexible than we would be without facing the challenges of learning a new language. As we teachers receive older learners in our classes, as we perhaps lose patience with them when their learning seems slow, or when they apologize for their inability to "remember anything anymore," or when we feel they are taking the place of a younger student who could benefit more, or when we wonder why they don't just stay home and relax... I hope we can also celebrate their determination to keep learning and respect their special courage to study a new language at an older age. I personally have lots more respect!