A teacher shared what he thought students want. I added my own thoughts.
"I HOPE THE TEACHER CAN HELP ENHANCE MY INTEREST TOWARDS ENGLISH LEARNING THROUGH VIVID METHODS, SUCH AS GAMES, SONGS, SHORT PLAYS, STORIES, ETC."
I've found that students don't want games all the time. They don't want movies all the time. But they do want a variety of activities.
"I HOPE THE TEACHER CAN CORRECT MY PRONUNCIATION." "I HOPE THE TEACHER WILL GIVE ME CORRECTION AND EVALUATION AS WELL AS ENCOURAGEMENT."
Somehow, many teachers have gotten the idea that if they correct their students the students will be discouraged. To the contrary, the students really want correction. Of course, the teacher should take care to correct the students in an encouraging way.
"I HOPE THE TEACHER WILL SHOW ME THE WAY A FOREIGNER THINKS." "I WANT TO KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT WESTERN CULTURE."
Students really want to understand how foreigners think and feel. I always had difficulty in managing this. I thought I had to include a class on culture. I realized that I did talk about cultural aspects from time to time but they students didn't realize it. So now when I talk about why or how foreigners think or some cultural background, I sort of headline it to the students by saying, "I know you are very interested in the culture of my country and this is a small cultural point." Then I continue explaining it to them. This way the students do know we talk about culture.
"I HOPE THE TEACHER WILL NOT USE COMPLICATED WORDS AND SENTENCES THAT PREVENT ME FROM UNDERSTANDING." "I HOPE THE TEACHER WILL NOT SPEAK TOO FAST."
Yes, but even though we become experts of simplifying our language, it still happens, doesn't it? In a mixed range class there will always be those who have more trouble. And sometimes these students will complain to the supervisors. To manage this and other problems in college classes, I do two things: (1) Tell everyone to ask me if they don't understand something. And when someone does ask me to clarify something I thank that person profusely as there are probably other students who also don't understand. (2) Ask the students for feedback and instead of having them return their feedback papers to me I have them post them all around the room for everyone to see. This way students can see how other students feel. If they see that they are the only ones asking for the teacher to speak slower then they can understand why the teacher may not be able to accommodate their request. (These feedbacks are useful for many other things as well.)
"I DON'T WANT THE TEACHER TO ENCOURAGE "FREE" DISCUSSION A LOT. IN THAT SITUATION ONLY STUDENTS WITH BETTER CAPABILITY TALK, WHICH WILL REDUCE THE CHANCES FOR SHY STUDENTS. IF I AM A SHY STUDENT, I WANT THE TEACHER TO GIVE ME SOME 'PUSH'."
Students often don't feel they are learning something when the topic is too open. However, I think it's good to break out on a topic that is being discussed or is related to what they are studying. For example, if the lesson refers to "niche markets" then the students could brainstorm and dream up some other possible niche markets.
"I WANT TO LEARN 'REAL' ENGLISH WITH SLANG AND IDIOMS."
Students want that. Very true. But I seldom teach them much. I think it would be fine for advanced students but not the kind of students I usually teach. Most slang has very narrow uses and my students have a lot of other English that they should learn first.
"I HOPE THE TEACHER WILL NOT FOLLOW THE TEXTBOOK RIGIDLY. BETTER BRING SOMETHING OF LIFE AND CULTURE INTO THE CLASS."
Some textbooks bring real death to students. They are so boooring. I recently had a textbook like that but I challenged myself to do interesting things with each lesson. When it was talking about hiring and was focused on a "dialog" of a job interview, I had the students read the interview and then divided the class in half, HR managers and job hunters. I posted the HR managers around the class and sent the job hunters to find a job. They didn't follow the interview at all but some of the language in the interview was helpful. They had a blast.
11 February 2009
03 October 2008
Replying to students' Emails
TOO MANY STUDENT MESSAGES
I get a lot of Emails from my students. As I mentioned before, I am seriously spamming my hundreds of students with thousands of messages. So I get quite a few Emails back from them, usually telling me what they are doing to improve their English in response to my tips and encouragement. I also get a lot of Emails of holiday greetings from them during the holiday season. Often they ask me what I'm going to do for the holiday. Sometimes I see my students making common errors in their messages and I would like to send them a little guidance about this problem.
Normally, I could not keep up with such a large amount of incoming messages. I can read them but to try to reply to them all can be a huge effort and I may be only able to manage the briefest of replies. It may seem a little disappointing to the students to not get an answer to their Email but what can one person do? They understand and don't expect much.
But I want to do more.
I use Microsoft Outlook to manage my Email. It downloads all my incoming messages from my GMAIL.COM account and uploads and sends my outgoing messages.
THE SOLUTION
I use an Outlook function as a simple way to insert stock replies to my students messages. When my students tell me that they are reading a newspaper article everyday or are listening to podcasts from www.eslpod.com to improve their English, I have 10 different encouraging stock answers that I can choose from to reply to them. One of them is:
"THAT'S REALLY GOOD! KEEP IT UP! YOUR ENGLISH IMPROVES QUICKLY WHENEVER YOU TRY TO DO SOMETHING IN ENGLISH!"
If I want to point out a common grammar error I have a rather longer stock reply that explains the problem, the solution and several examples.
I can give really helpful and encouraging replies to students and it only takes me about 10 seconds. If you are a busy teacher and want to give more detailed replies to your students' messages, here is how you can do it, too.
HOW TO
In Outlook go to TOOLS -> OPTIONS... -> MAIL FORMAT -> SIGNATURES...
There you will find a function for creating your signature in your Emails. But the great thing is that you can put any text in there that you want to be able to select and insert into your Emails. When you want to use it in an Email, first you "Reply" to the Email, choose INSERT -> SIGNATURE and then you will be presented with a drop-down menu of all your stock replies and answers that you can select from.
You may want to develop several versions of one reply so that not all students are getting exactly the same thing and you may want to update them from time to time. Of course, this is not a way to deal with all messages but I find it useful to deal with almost all of them.
It really does a lot to help the students feel closer to their teacher. It really helps the teacher to not let the messages go unanswered and to send out some encouragement and guidance.
I get a lot of Emails from my students. As I mentioned before, I am seriously spamming my hundreds of students with thousands of messages. So I get quite a few Emails back from them, usually telling me what they are doing to improve their English in response to my tips and encouragement. I also get a lot of Emails of holiday greetings from them during the holiday season. Often they ask me what I'm going to do for the holiday. Sometimes I see my students making common errors in their messages and I would like to send them a little guidance about this problem.
Normally, I could not keep up with such a large amount of incoming messages. I can read them but to try to reply to them all can be a huge effort and I may be only able to manage the briefest of replies. It may seem a little disappointing to the students to not get an answer to their Email but what can one person do? They understand and don't expect much.
But I want to do more.
I use Microsoft Outlook to manage my Email. It downloads all my incoming messages from my GMAIL.COM account and uploads and sends my outgoing messages.
THE SOLUTION
I use an Outlook function as a simple way to insert stock replies to my students messages. When my students tell me that they are reading a newspaper article everyday or are listening to podcasts from www.eslpod.com to improve their English, I have 10 different encouraging stock answers that I can choose from to reply to them. One of them is:
"THAT'S REALLY GOOD! KEEP IT UP! YOUR ENGLISH IMPROVES QUICKLY WHENEVER YOU TRY TO DO SOMETHING IN ENGLISH!"
If I want to point out a common grammar error I have a rather longer stock reply that explains the problem, the solution and several examples.
I can give really helpful and encouraging replies to students and it only takes me about 10 seconds. If you are a busy teacher and want to give more detailed replies to your students' messages, here is how you can do it, too.
HOW TO
In Outlook go to TOOLS -> OPTIONS... -> MAIL FORMAT -> SIGNATURES...
There you will find a function for creating your signature in your Emails. But the great thing is that you can put any text in there that you want to be able to select and insert into your Emails. When you want to use it in an Email, first you "Reply" to the Email, choose INSERT -> SIGNATURE and then you will be presented with a drop-down menu of all your stock replies and answers that you can select from.
You may want to develop several versions of one reply so that not all students are getting exactly the same thing and you may want to update them from time to time. Of course, this is not a way to deal with all messages but I find it useful to deal with almost all of them.
It really does a lot to help the students feel closer to their teacher. It really helps the teacher to not let the messages go unanswered and to send out some encouragement and guidance.
"To be (a corrector) or not to be (a corrector), that is the question!' (with apologies to Shakespeare)
Krashen tells an interesting story of the time he studied French. He talks about how his "excellent" teacher taught grammar and taught vocabulary and corrected errors -- and how they learned through comprehensible input.
~~~
A Summer as an Intermediate French Student
By way of conclusion, I would like to report on some recent personal experiences as a student of French. The class I attended in the summer of 1978 in Los Angeles was a private class, with a small number of highly motivated, highly intelligent, and mature students. The official "method" used was the Pucciani-Hamil approach (Langue et Langage), used with much apparent success at UCLA and at many other schools. The method is "inductive", that is, students are led to induce, or guess, the rules. In a typical lesson, the teacher asks what are hopefully meaningful, interesting questions of members of the class in hopes of preparing a context for the target structure. The following exchange is a good example (taken from the instructor's manual, Pucciani and Hamel, 1974; p. 321). The purpose in this exercise is to teach the conjunction "bien que" and the fact that its presence requires that the following verb be in the subjunctive mood:
Teacher: Fait-il beau aujourd'hui?
Student: Non, il ne fait pas beau maintenant.
Teacher: Irez-vous cependant à la plage pendant le week-end?
Student: Oui, j'irai cependant à la plage pendant le week-end.
Teacher: Irez-vous à la plage bien qu'il ne fasse pas beau?
Student: Oui, j'irai à la plage bien qu'il ne ...
My excellent teacher followed this sort of pattern, and often tailored questions to individual students' interests. For example, one member of the class was a dedicated beachgoer, and the example given above was actually used with this student. My teacher also allowed some "free-play". If the student did not give her the structure she was looking for, she tolerated some "conversation", as long as it was in French (a cornerstone of the Pucciani-Hamil approach is the exclusive use of the target language in the classroom). Indeed, despite the fact that the class was a first-year (third quarter) level class, it often had the flavor of a conversation class.
The explicit goal of the class was learning, conscious control of structure. There was error correction, and after enough examples of the above sort had been elicited, there was explanation of the rule (in French), along with further examples if necessary.
What is particularly interesting is that many of the students felt that the obvious success of this class was due to grammar work. One excellent student (a man in his sixties) felt he needed to "firm up" his grammar before doing conversation in French, and he told me that he felt our teacher's finest quality was her ability to explain complex rules of French grammar. My hypothesis is that much of the success of the class was due to the teacher's use of teacher-talk, her ability to provide a simple code that provided nearly optimal input for acquisition. The class was conducted entirely in French, as mentioned above. Besides the actual pedagogical examples, such as exchanges of the sort given above, teacher-talk included explanation of grammar and vocabulary, the teacher's participation in the "free play" surrounding the exercises, mentioned above, occasional anecdotes, classroom management, etc. My fellow students reported that they understood nearly everything the teacher said in class. The teacher-talk, not the grammar per se, was probably what motivated the same student who needed to firm up his grammar to comment: "She gives you a feeling for French ... she makes you want to speak French." This is language acquisition, not language learning.
~~~
A Summer as an Intermediate French Student
By way of conclusion, I would like to report on some recent personal experiences as a student of French. The class I attended in the summer of 1978 in Los Angeles was a private class, with a small number of highly motivated, highly intelligent, and mature students. The official "method" used was the Pucciani-Hamil approach (Langue et Langage), used with much apparent success at UCLA and at many other schools. The method is "inductive", that is, students are led to induce, or guess, the rules. In a typical lesson, the teacher asks what are hopefully meaningful, interesting questions of members of the class in hopes of preparing a context for the target structure. The following exchange is a good example (taken from the instructor's manual, Pucciani and Hamel, 1974; p. 321). The purpose in this exercise is to teach the conjunction "bien que" and the fact that its presence requires that the following verb be in the subjunctive mood:
Teacher: Fait-il beau aujourd'hui?
Student: Non, il ne fait pas beau maintenant.
Teacher: Irez-vous cependant à la plage pendant le week-end?
Student: Oui, j'irai cependant à la plage pendant le week-end.
Teacher: Irez-vous à la plage bien qu'il ne fasse pas beau?
Student: Oui, j'irai à la plage bien qu'il ne ...
My excellent teacher followed this sort of pattern, and often tailored questions to individual students' interests. For example, one member of the class was a dedicated beachgoer, and the example given above was actually used with this student. My teacher also allowed some "free-play". If the student did not give her the structure she was looking for, she tolerated some "conversation", as long as it was in French (a cornerstone of the Pucciani-Hamil approach is the exclusive use of the target language in the classroom). Indeed, despite the fact that the class was a first-year (third quarter) level class, it often had the flavor of a conversation class.
The explicit goal of the class was learning, conscious control of structure. There was error correction, and after enough examples of the above sort had been elicited, there was explanation of the rule (in French), along with further examples if necessary.
What is particularly interesting is that many of the students felt that the obvious success of this class was due to grammar work. One excellent student (a man in his sixties) felt he needed to "firm up" his grammar before doing conversation in French, and he told me that he felt our teacher's finest quality was her ability to explain complex rules of French grammar. My hypothesis is that much of the success of the class was due to the teacher's use of teacher-talk, her ability to provide a simple code that provided nearly optimal input for acquisition. The class was conducted entirely in French, as mentioned above. Besides the actual pedagogical examples, such as exchanges of the sort given above, teacher-talk included explanation of grammar and vocabulary, the teacher's participation in the "free play" surrounding the exercises, mentioned above, occasional anecdotes, classroom management, etc. My fellow students reported that they understood nearly everything the teacher said in class. The teacher-talk, not the grammar per se, was probably what motivated the same student who needed to firm up his grammar to comment: "She gives you a feeling for French ... she makes you want to speak French." This is language acquisition, not language learning.
Grammar teaching? Try it, observe & convince yourself
I don't think I ever stated people should not teach grammar. I only said it does not work.
I never teach grammar rules. My students have had enough of that and after about 10 years they still don't have their grammar straight.
However, I do correct incorrect grammar when I hear it. So does that indicate that I believe teaching grammar works? No, to the contrary. I have students that I have corrected for over a year on pronouns of gender and they still are frequently getting the pronouns of gender wrong.
So I will not tell you to take my word for it. Don't take Krashen's word for it. Don't take Truscott's word for it. Just do it. Do it yourself. Go ahead and correct your students. Make it Action Research. Do it and observe and after you observe then reflect and you will convince yourself. Choose a clearly observeable grammar point like pronouns of gender and correct your student everytime in everyway everywhere. Keep track of how many times your student gets it right and how many times he gets it wrong.
I suggest all teachers do this.
I never teach grammar rules. My students have had enough of that and after about 10 years they still don't have their grammar straight.
However, I do correct incorrect grammar when I hear it. So does that indicate that I believe teaching grammar works? No, to the contrary. I have students that I have corrected for over a year on pronouns of gender and they still are frequently getting the pronouns of gender wrong.
So I will not tell you to take my word for it. Don't take Krashen's word for it. Don't take Truscott's word for it. Just do it. Do it yourself. Go ahead and correct your students. Make it Action Research. Do it and observe and after you observe then reflect and you will convince yourself. Choose a clearly observeable grammar point like pronouns of gender and correct your student everytime in everyway everywhere. Keep track of how many times your student gets it right and how many times he gets it wrong.
I suggest all teachers do this.
Why I teach grammar
Why do I continue to correct their grammar? I consider it a form of Comprehensible Input. It is a feedback of their own sentence. I believe they will NOT benefit in a conscious grammar rule way: "Oh, right! Grammar rule #27: Pronouns of gender. Females = she & her, Males = he & his." Krashen brought this out very clearly in his description of learning French which I published previously.
But students will benefit from experiencing an extensive amount of correct Comprehensible English Input at a level of i+1 as explained by Krashen:
"Language acquisition is very similar to the process children use in acquiring first and second languages. It requires meaningful interaction in the target language-- natural communication--in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding. Error correction and explicit teaching of rules are not relevant to language acquisition (Brown and Hanlon, 1970; Brown, Cazden, and Bellugi, 1973), but caretakers and native speakers can modify their utterances addressed to acquirers to help them understand, and these modifications are thought to help the acquisition process (Snow and Ferguson, 1977). It has been hypothesized that there is a fairly stable order of acquisition of structures in language acquisition, that is, one can see clear similarities across acquirers as to which structures tend to be acquired early and which tend to be acquired late (Brown, 1973; Dulay and Burt, 1975). Acquirers need not have a conscious awareness of the "rules" they possess, and may selfcorrect only on the basis of a 'feel' for grammaticality."
And despite what the calculator punchers say (as one teacher said to me about acquisition through Comprehensible Input, "the number of YEARS required is going to be well into the triple digits. Your student's great-great-grandchildren will all be retired before your students will have acquired the ability to write like a 15-year-old"), students actually can learn to an intermediate level in two years if they have wife of that language (as did Guy Brook-Hart and Mert Bland) or sufficient alternative input.
But students will benefit from experiencing an extensive amount of correct Comprehensible English Input at a level of i+1 as explained by Krashen:
"Language acquisition is very similar to the process children use in acquiring first and second languages. It requires meaningful interaction in the target language-- natural communication--in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding. Error correction and explicit teaching of rules are not relevant to language acquisition (Brown and Hanlon, 1970; Brown, Cazden, and Bellugi, 1973), but caretakers and native speakers can modify their utterances addressed to acquirers to help them understand, and these modifications are thought to help the acquisition process (Snow and Ferguson, 1977). It has been hypothesized that there is a fairly stable order of acquisition of structures in language acquisition, that is, one can see clear similarities across acquirers as to which structures tend to be acquired early and which tend to be acquired late (Brown, 1973; Dulay and Burt, 1975). Acquirers need not have a conscious awareness of the "rules" they possess, and may selfcorrect only on the basis of a 'feel' for grammaticality."
And despite what the calculator punchers say (as one teacher said to me about acquisition through Comprehensible Input, "the number of YEARS required is going to be well into the triple digits. Your student's great-great-grandchildren will all be retired before your students will have acquired the ability to write like a 15-year-old"), students actually can learn to an intermediate level in two years if they have wife of that language (as did Guy Brook-Hart and Mert Bland) or sufficient alternative input.
What can teaching students pronouns of gender teach teachers?
A teacher, implying the near impossibility of the effectiveness of Comprehensible Input, wrote:
"How many hours of standard, educated English will a native speaker have been exposed to by, say, age 15. Whatever number you pick, if you expect an EFL student to use the language at an equivalent level without error correction or grammar instruction, you'll have to find a way to get that student an equal amount of exposure. Get out your calculators, folks at ten hours exposure to English per week (a generous amount for a Chinese EFL student), the number of YEARS required is going to be well into the triple digits. Your students great-great-grandchildren will all be retired before your students will have acquired the ability to write like a 15-year-old."
Krashen's theories on the "acquisition" of language facilitated through "comprehensible input" at a level of "i+1" is not just something that sounds like a good idea until someone pulls out a calculator and does the math. Although the subject is widely debated, there is a lot of evidence that it works and you can read research after research on Krashen's website at: http://www.sdkrashen.com/.
Also, in what the teacher said, is the implied assumption that grammar teaching actually does work. There is no evidence that teaching grammar results in the student truly acquiring the grammar. A certain degree of retention is possible in the student's conscious "monitor" (an internal editor), remembering some grammar rules, but this is limited.
Clearly grammar cannot be acquired in such a conscious way. One of my favorite examples of this, which I have brought out many times before is pronouns of gender ("he", "she", "his", "hers"), a grammar rule that can be taught in ten minutes it is so simple but can take a student a year or two to master.
Grammar "teaching" doesn't work.
"How many hours of standard, educated English will a native speaker have been exposed to by, say, age 15. Whatever number you pick, if you expect an EFL student to use the language at an equivalent level without error correction or grammar instruction, you'll have to find a way to get that student an equal amount of exposure. Get out your calculators, folks at ten hours exposure to English per week (a generous amount for a Chinese EFL student), the number of YEARS required is going to be well into the triple digits. Your students great-great-grandchildren will all be retired before your students will have acquired the ability to write like a 15-year-old."
Krashen's theories on the "acquisition" of language facilitated through "comprehensible input" at a level of "i+1" is not just something that sounds like a good idea until someone pulls out a calculator and does the math. Although the subject is widely debated, there is a lot of evidence that it works and you can read research after research on Krashen's website at: http://www.sdkrashen.com/.
Also, in what the teacher said, is the implied assumption that grammar teaching actually does work. There is no evidence that teaching grammar results in the student truly acquiring the grammar. A certain degree of retention is possible in the student's conscious "monitor" (an internal editor), remembering some grammar rules, but this is limited.
Clearly grammar cannot be acquired in such a conscious way. One of my favorite examples of this, which I have brought out many times before is pronouns of gender ("he", "she", "his", "hers"), a grammar rule that can be taught in ten minutes it is so simple but can take a student a year or two to master.
Grammar "teaching" doesn't work.
Grammar teaching teacher challenge!
To settle this point and answer the question, I would like to invite teachers who support grammar teaching to design a lesson or series of lessons to teach pronouns of gender in such a way that a student could "learn" it in one week or even one month in such a way that a student will use it correctly more or less consistently.
Then I suggest that teachers who do not support grammar teaching, with an open mind, try this lesson or these series of lessons with their students and see what the results are.
I have no special interests in showing that teaching grammar does not work. I receive no royalties or benefits one way or the other. My special interest in all of this is language acquisition. I want my students to have the fastest results possible. If teaching grammar brings the fastest results then I am all for it.
Then I suggest that teachers who do not support grammar teaching, with an open mind, try this lesson or these series of lessons with their students and see what the results are.
I have no special interests in showing that teaching grammar does not work. I receive no royalties or benefits one way or the other. My special interest in all of this is language acquisition. I want my students to have the fastest results possible. If teaching grammar brings the fastest results then I am all for it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
