Celebration Time!

I passed the midterm!

And I forgot to bring my camera to the celebration party at a local restaurant Friday night.

So this picture is from the internet - but our food and drink looked pretty much like this. There were 11 of us students from the class and 2 instructors.

Here's what you do at this kind of gathering: you grill the meat at the table and attempt to pick it up with chopsticks (more on that in another post!) and put it in a lettuce leaf and pick up more stuff that's all over the table (kim chi and all kinds of sauces and side dishes) and put bits of things on the meat and roll it up and eat. Then you pick up more stuff from the table with chopsticks and pop it directly in your mouth - there's no individual plate at your place. Then you pour beer and soju (the ubiquitous Korean cheap alcoholic drink) rounds continuously and talk and laugh really loudly and just have a good time.

And you try to do it all in Korean.

Ah, the midterm is over. Don't have to start studying for the final exam for 3 more weeks!

The MIDTERM

Wow - the first half of the first 10-week term is almost over already. We had 2 tests today (speaking and reading comprehension), will have 2 more tomorrow (listening and reading comprehension), and 1 more on Friday (reading aloud).

And I am not pleased.

No. If I had reservations about high-stakes tests before, I have them even more now. How nerve-wracking. How undignified. Previously friendly teachers suddenly have this monstrous power. They know. We don't. They're out to get us, to find our weak spots, now to judge us rather than teach us -even though they already know all that because they are with us for 20 hours every week.

I'm pondering ways for a more humane kind of evaluation, where students have more say, more chances...

Of course, if I pass, I'll feel better. Tomorrow is my worst one - listening!!

KOTESOL

KOTESOL - Korea Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages - is having its annual conference in Seoul this weekend (Oct 24-25), so I went to check it out.

In scope and size it is similar to a CATESOL conference. I was surprised to see that ALL the featured speakers - all 13 of them - were white - not a Korean among them. Some of the names were vaguely familiar to me (David Nunan, Scott Thornbury, maybe some others) - the one I noted particularly was John Fanselow, so I went to his presentation, entitled, interestingly enough for a student at Yonsei:

"Huh? Oh. Aha! - Difference between Learning Language through Rote Memorization and Predicting"

Well. Here's a teacher the exact opposite of teachers at Yonsei. His message is something like this (his words copied from a website):

I have rededicated myself to supporting change; breaking rules; having contrasting conversations, and trying the opposite. Supporting change and supporting different perspectives is the only way to move forward.

To illustrate, here's from another website:

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

morning”.

In the session, he gave us a lot more of these "change the way we do things" examples - all of which were basically puzzles (ie students presented with incomplete or incorrect information and asked to figure out or predict the complete message). As a teacher, these things make (made?) great sense to me. I too would have thought such ideas, such efforts to "shake up" the learning process and engage the mind more actively, would be productive. They would have excited me.

But as a student - I just felt irritated. Why do I have to waste time figuring out puzzles in a language class? Why do I have to indulge this teacher in his idiosyncratic approach to teaching - an approach that I know will not be repeated in the next class? Will I really learn more than by just plugging away at the words and structures I need to know (ie repeat, memorize, practice etc.)? How can the teacher convince me, the student, that this puzzle-solving effort will pay off? If the teacher doesn't do that, then motivation, trust, confidence etc - all those really important things - are lost.

The best part - I met a Korean English teacher at the bus stop; we rode the bus to the conference together, talked a while, exchanged contact info, etc. Once that was done I felt my day was made. I met a Korean. He offered to help me with my Korean. Wow.

I don't think I'll go to the conference tomorrow. I think I'll stay home and keep "memorizing" what I need to know for the midterm next week.

More on classes at Yonsei - the bad!

So what's negative?

• 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.)

Of course, there are other little negatives. We had to memorize long lists of Korean food dishes - more than we really needed to learn how to order food in a restaurant. We never have group work or much chance to practice together in class (though we do try to practice when we're together after class). But these things are minor. The material seems to be well-sequenced, and there's no doubt we are learning a lot. Actually, all the negatives have a plus side. The relentlessness of the class sessions and the midterm exams make us study even more. We are forced to do the work of learning. Our brains feel like they will explode. At the end of every class is the same refrain - my head hurts! Yesterday one student asked: "Can we review this material next week?" The teacher just said, "Sorry, no time!" The schedule is set; we have to finish a chapter a day. We even have a new lesson to learn the day before the midterms start.

But - I guess this is how they get students ready for Korean university in a year and a half - for those students who can survive!

I do wonder - as I wondered and hoped when I started this - if there isn't a less painful way to acquire a second language at an older age. Is all this needed to force the older brain to accept new sounds and structures and learn new words?

It does help tremendously that I am in Korea and can practice on real people! More on that later.

Thank goodness I didn't stay in Level 2.

More on classes at Yonsei - the good!

So - the program is traditional, teacher-centered, and highly standardized. And - it's fast! The claim is that if a student takes all six levels one right after the other, which they can do in 6 quarters or 18 months, they can go from being a total beginner to being ready for Korean university courses. 18 months!! Does it work?

These things I have found quite positive:

• 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!

There are certainly drawbacks, which I will try to list later. But actually, I am so deep into studying and trying to keep up right now that it's hard to sit back and make a detached judgment. It's too early to tell what the results are going to be. But I have lessened my resistance to a program like this. I'm sure I will take some of these advantages and try to work them more into my own teaching when I get back.

Classes at Yonsei

Sue Wilson asked some specific questions about what classes are like at Yonsei, and I did want to write about that. So here goes. About homework - yeah, we have a lot, so much that I haven't been posting as many blog entries lately. But now I'll describe - in detail (!) what the classes are like. Later I'll try to share more of my personal experience and reaction being a student in these classes.

Period 1: 9:00-9:50: Room 534 (see picture previous entry), first teacher

• 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.

Period 2: 10:00-10:50 - same teacher, same room, same semi-circle, same seats

• 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.

Period 3: 11:10-12:00 - same room, same semi-circle, same seats - different teacher

• 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.

Period 4: same room, same semi-circle, same seats, back to the first teacher again.

• 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.

After every four lessons we have a vocabulary test - we are given the words in our language and have to write the Korean word. The same test is given to every Level 1 student.

We will have a 2-day midterm exam in two weeks; I believe there are separate listening, writing, reading and speaking parts. It will be the same test for all Level 1 students.

Both our teachers know English, as well as most of the students in the class (and there are students to translate for those who don't), and they occasionally give a meaning in English, but 99% of the class is conducted in Korean: directions, grammar explanations, side comments and jokes, announcements, whatever.

There is no lab. There are CDs that come with our books with the dialogues we have to learn and other listening exercises; they are not assigned, and those with good listening skills probably never listen to them at home (but I spend a great deal of time with them!)

There are 14 Level 1 classes, and students were placed in their Level 1 class according to their placement test. Our class is Class 14, which is a "high" Level 1 class. Everyone in the class had taken at least some Korean before, and several are quite good (ethnic Koreans who have heard Korean all their lives, etc.). I think this is why we get the extra conversation practice, side comments etc. - and why our teachers speak extremely fast!! I cannot even imagine how the students who have not had any Korean before could keep up; most of us in this class, even the good ones (not me!), are mentally exhausted by the end of the four hours.

And that's how I spend my morning, 5 days a week.

My classmates

There are 14 of us in the class - 4 Americans, 7 Japanese, 1 from Singapore, 1 from Hong Kong and 1 from Indonesia. About half are young college-age "kids," about half are young (late 20's to mid-30's) career professionals - and then there's me. A couple shots in class and out:

So far ---- it's been great! Every single classmate is friendly. I've had lunch with classmates, gone sightseeing with classmates, and been included in various activities with them. I had been fearful that my age might make it hard for me to develop relationships with classmates, but such seems not to be the case. We all have different reasons for studying Korean, but at this stage we're all in the same boat, struggling with basic communication and taking our baby steps into Korean life; age seems not to make much difference...