U of T PhD Student Seeks PBLA Research Participants

Yuliya Desyatova says:

I am a PhD student at the University of Toronto and a LINC teacher. In response to numerous calls I have heard about the need for independent empirical research, I am starting a research project on how PBLA affects teaching and learning. How big of a resonance the project will make will depend on the number of participants. If you or anybody you know would consider joining – you can e-mail me for more details at yuliya.desyatova@mail.utoronto.ca

Thank you.

How I Use the Literacy Activity Packs

I apologize.

I was rushing on October 2nd and didn't do a good job. Let me try again to describe how I build a week-long module. This time I will get much more into specifics regarding how I use the activity packs that I have been uploading to the LITERACY area of the website.

Staying within a Theme
Though I don't always spend an entire month on the same theme, I do think it is beneficial to the literacy learner to stay within a theme for more than one week. Why? I say this because with literacy learners, it takes a lot longer to activate the schema and prime the brain for the topic(s). Once you've warmed them up for one set of linguistic terms and cultural concepts, why would you want to burden their cognitive load unnecessarily by jumping from topic to topic? Why not settle in a while and allow them to become really comfortable as they layer more and more skills and a richer vocabulary within the same theme week by week? The lower the stress, the more room there is for fun, and I would argue that retention of the new language increases.

Starting with a Needs Assessment
Since settlement English programs are student-centred, you will have consulted with the learners via a needs assessment to determine how to prioritize the topics. I have found over time that some topics cannot be optional. One example is learning about our PBLA binders; another is learning personal information and calling 9-1-1.  I also weave lessons on phonics, decoding skills, and printing into the thematic modules without asking the learners if they want that.

Mapping Out the Modules
When planning a series of four interrelated modules within a month-long theme, I start with a couple of modules that are heavy on skill building and end with a module or two that take advantage of the learners' new abilities. Just as a lesson starts off with more scaffolding and more controlled activities, gradually reducing the need for 'training wheels,' so can a module or series of modules be constructed so that students are using language more independently by the end. They can also be reading about the topic at a higher literacy level or with more fluency by the end of a module or series of modules when you stay within a theme.

An Example of Layering Modules
Let's say the theme is housing and the house. My series of modules might look like this:
Week 1 - learn the names of the rooms and a few key furniture pieces for each room
Week 2 - learn to read a house-related story in Talk of the Block short vowel series, HOME volume
Week 3 - learn to read Perminder's Cleaning Day
Week 4 - learn to ask the landlord to address problems in the apartment

Key Resources
The resources I would use to execute the modules listed above could include: a picture dictionary; student-made reference materials from flyers and catalogs; HandsOn!; Talk of the Block, ESL Literacy Network's Readers and Read Aloud versions of the same readers; ESL activity kits from Community Legal Education Ontario (CLEO); my own activity packs.

My Activity Packs
The resources I've listed above almost never come complete with sufficient activities to give the learners the number of linguistic affordances (opportunities to encounter the new language in a variety of contexts and ways) that I believe are necessary for long-term retention of the language. I have therefore developed the habit of creating my own set of activities that I use week after week. I simply change the vocabulary while keeping the activities pretty much the same. To see a sample, check out my activity pack for Deng Starts School.

One huge benefit to this habit of staying with a limited number of activities is that it vastly reduces cognitive load that otherwise would be devoted to instructions for the task. Students become so familiar with our routines that their entire cognitive load belongs to the linguistic and cultural content of the lesson. This level of confidence on the part of the learners means that when a new student joins the class, a peer will always jump in and show the new student the ropes.

An activity pack will typically start with easier controlled activities such as:

• Match the word to the picture
• Word Shapes worksheet
• Listen and fill in the (first, middle, last) letter
• How many times can you find the word?

It will include guided and more difficult but still relatively controlled activities, such as:

• Unscramble the sentence
• Gap fill with no word bank (answers are in the reader)
• Crossword with no word bank (some schematic knowledge, some verbatim from reader)

I try always to include a peer survey. This can be used as a free activity, giving students an opportunity to use new questions and answers related to the real-world task or it can be used to help activate the schema and prior knowledge at the beginning of the unit.

Finally, I include two activities to be used at the end of the week to solidify rapid recognition of our new lexis:

• Flyswatter game (I often don't include this as a document in the pack because teachers can simply print the words across the board)
• BINGO grid with word bank

Incorporating the Activities into Lesson Plans
At the beginning of the week I remind students of our needs assessment so that they recognize the module as being an answer to their expressed need. This helps give them confidence to communicate to me any desire to slow down, repeat, add new material.

As I place activities into lesson plans, starting with a hook, I try to be mindful of how the student will be feeling after one activity. To keep a fast PERCEIVED pace, which has nothing to do with actual pace, I strive to give them a change in activity about every 20 minutes. I endeavour to go back and forth between work that focuses on meaning (e.g. T/F quiz) and work that focuses on form (e.g. printing). I also try to break up periods of sitting and concentrating with bursts of movement and interaction.

Of course all the while we are building toward one or more real world tasks such as asking, "Excuse me, where's the sugar," understanding, "On aisle six, with baking," and responding, "Thank you."

A Snapshot
So a typical day might unfold like this:

12:30 - announcements

12:35 - review the alphabet and sounds

12:40 - review the prior day's learning (if it's Monday, ask each other about our weekends)

12:45 - hook - activate the schema, brainstorm, elicit prior knowledge

12:55 - introduce the new lexis, reader, etc.; students predict from pictures, pass around picture flashcards, etc.

1:05 - matching words to picture (project onto board)

1:15 - take up the worksheet by projecting it on the board, students come up and draw the lines

1:25 - work with word flashcards - one set per partnership; teacher says, "Show me X, show me Y..."

1:35 - categorizing activity - students group the picture or word flashcards in some way, such as by part of speech, by type of object, by sound, etc.

--BREAK--

2:00 - Introduce a short dialogue, such as "Do you like _____?" "Yes, I do / No, I don't." Give students a chance to practice it verbally many, many times in various ways. These exact phrases will appear on the upcoming peer survey.

• Repeat after T
• Teacher plays role of A, students take turns taking role of B
• Chain drill around the room
• Write the dialogue on the board. Read and speak.

2:20 - Project the peer survey form on the board, demonstrate. Make sure students remember how to say "How do you spell your name," and can spell their names. New students are allowed to cut corners (copy instead of speaking). Veteran students are strongly encouraged not to 'cheat.' Hand out the peer survey. Teacher always participates.

2:40 - Do a plenary activity with the results of the peer survey, such as forming 3rd person singular statements about others. Ali likes tomatoes. Jenna doesn't like tomatoes. (Note that you have now covered all forms of this grammar point: question, positive and negative answer, positive and negative statement in first and third person.)

2:50 - Written sentences summarizing our peer survey findings or start a puzzle. (Teacher is now free to start cleaning up the classroom.)

Extending with Online Games
There are times when I need a little ten-minute filler activity and the students need a change of pace. In that moment, I'll be so glad I loaded the week's words and sentences from their text into Spelling City. Our school pays about $74 CAD per year for up to 25 students at any given time to use the premium activities. If you only want spelling test and a few games, you can get a free account. Since I believe the Sentence Unscramble game has enormous value to the learners, I have the premium account.  In a given week, I might use Hang Mouse once, Sentence Unscramble once, and then link to the word list on the classroom blog so that the learners themselves can opt to practice our week's lexis using these same games and quizzes. 

The Week
I tend to stick to a rather predictable pattern through the week:

Monday - presentation, controlled activities, take pictures for LEA books

Tuesday - skill building, practice reading, paragraph unscramble in pairs, phonics

Wednesday - iPads, reading circles, gap fill, posters, practice reading

Thursday - comprehension quiz, peer survey, flyswatter game, role plays, assessments

Friday - learning logs, BINGO, computer lab

Conclusion
So those are some routines I follow in order to reduce the cognitive load on me and on the learners! When the students are highly familiar with an activity, they do not rely on me to spend my time and energy explaining and re-explaining, wrangling and redirecting them. This frees me up to help struggling students, tick boxes on rubrics, or prepare for the next activity.

What do you think?

Will PBLA Address My Frustrations?

If you teach in a program funded by Citizenship and Immigration Canada, as I do (the program is called LINC--Language Instruction for Newcomers to Canada), then you are already using Portfolio-based Language Assessment in your classroom or soon will be. At my centre, we have begun training and will do our first pilot modules in the new year.

In one of those training sessions recently, we were fleshing out plans to incorporate PBLA practices into our teaching, such as:

• needs assessments
• the setting of language (for life) goals by the learners
• the identification by the learner of steps to be taken to reach said goals
• formative assessment by the teacher
• learner reflection (such as journaling re achievements every Friday)

As I was sitting there working on the task analysis of a sample lesson with the colleague who will be paired up with me to pilot a module, it began to dawn on me how useful some of these tools might prove to be with my morning class of seniors (see last week's post). Indeed, it seems that their biggest problem is an inability--tucked tidily into their blind spots--to make the link between a lack of progress in a given area and their failing to stretch outside the comfort zone of the small set of learning tools they brought with them to this new setting after spending five decades in a teacher-centred academic system steeped in the grammar-translation method of language learning.

That's what I'm up against. Add to that the fact that most of them are not comfortable reaching out, initiating conversations with strangers, or taking risks in the language.

But while I was sitting in that PBLA workshop, I began to envision a new kind of conversation between us in the new year. What exactly IS my goal, I want them to ask themselves. I want them to reflect on whether the tools they are currently using are or are not bringing them closer to those stated objectives. I am hoping that through reflection and self-assessment, they can begin to see that some of their tools are proving only moderately effective, while others lie in the toolbox untouched.

Well, I actually couldn't wait for the new year to begin. Since we had a short teaching week before winter break--too few days to tackle a whole topic--I decided to get them started thinking along the lines of goals and strategies. First, I threw out some discussion questions for them to address in groups of three to four, such as: 

• Why do you come to this class?
• What do you hope to achieve?
• Do you feel you are making good progress?
• What do you do to work toward your language goals?

After small group discussions, we had a plenary discussion about goals, progress and strategies. I gave them a few examples of strategies that I use when learning a new language. (I have studied about ten languages ranging from Latin and Greek to German, four romance languages, Japanese and Farsi.) I told them that when I set my mind on learning a new language, there are a couple of things I never fail to do. For one, I do whatever it takes to spend time speaking the language daily. If I can't find anyone wanting to be my friend and hang out, then I pay a tutor either with money or by bartering English lessons for their tutelage. Secondly, I label every item in my environment in the second language and read those sticky notes every time I pass by. Third, I immerse myself in the language by tuning my TV and radio to L2 content, picking up magazines and newspapers in the L2, and talking to myself in the language everywhere I go.

Some nodded agreement at these ideas while others laughed sheepishly, knowing full well they are resistant to such immersion.

With that I introduced them to the Strategic Inventory for Language Learning. They could take it home for a couple of nights to tackle all the big words with their electronic dictionaries, then we would start going over it before the break and continue in the new year. I think that's a very good place to start: with raising awareness of all the strategies we COULD add to our arsenals to give our brains many more ways to make connections.

As we were going over the first few strategies on the list, I did my best to illustrate when something wasn't clear to everyone. For example, I took a tin of jasmine green tea out of the cabinet and passed it around the room. "As you breathe in this scent, repeat the word jasmine ten times." To illustrate another strategy, I had an Iraqi student teach me two new words in Arabic. I acted both of them out (eat and walk), but one of them I also wrote on the board in Arabic script. I left it there five minutes before erasing it.  After the break, they tested me. I still remembered the word for walk, which I'd written. I couldn't remember the word for eat, which I'd only chanted while acting it out.

So! We are getting friendly with the idea that strategies matter. Some work better than others, and each of us is different with regard to what works and what doesn't. I am very much looking forward to more work with goals, strategies and reflection in the new year!

How about you? Are you implementing PBLA in your teaching? If not, are you using any of these elements in your classroom? Why or why not? And if so, are they working?

Addressing My Frustrations

I love my morning class. This group of about eleven Mandarin speakers and four Arabic speakers--all over the age of 55--is the light of my life.

And they constantly express to me how happy they are with their class, especially since we've overcome the Chinese students' reluctance to participate fully in needs assessments and what I call classroom democracy. No, they are over that. Now they boss me around, which is wonderful. They adore their little English class that I tailor to their expressed needs.

And yet...

I don't feel I am helping them nearly as much as I could be or should be. Before I get into what isn't working, let me share...

Some things that ARE working: 

• Through a 'Back to the Well' approach, I can provide lots of rich 'affordances,' meaningful encounters with the same lexis so that their brains can latch on, integrate, build connections for long-term retention of new language.
• With regard to pronunciation, by focusing more on prosody (stress, rhythm and linking) rather than on segmentals, we are noticing an improvement in intelligibility.
• I make compromises which allow Asian students to indulge in habits left over from their upbringing in a teacher-centred academic culture, such as providing all handouts at least one day before they are to be used (students can go to town with their electronic dictionaries the night BEFORE the lesson).

I'm ashamed to admit that after three years with this group, however, I'm just now starting to wrap my head around what isn't working. My students, with a couple of exceptions, are NOT meeting their stated goal of increased social integration. They are not becoming risk takers. They are not breaking their addiction to the little gadgets. They are not practicing English outside the classroom, nor even at break time. In fact, a recent speaking/listening assessment that came on the tail end of two plus weeks of preparation for it left me crestfallen.

The task seemed simple enough to me. Start a conversation with a stranger. We practiced and practiced. We paired up with each other in every conceivable way in order to get ready for this test. We used photos as cues and role played these scenarios ad nauseum. The test had a few criteria, which we went over ahead of time, pulling up the rubric on the projector board. One of the criteria involved strategic competence. 

"I will use a word you don't know," I warned them. "You will be expected to use the strategies we've been learning in order to repair the communication breakdown."

The Arabic speakers had no issue with the task. When they entered the room to be assessed and saw me hit the RECORD button on the iPad then point to the photo of the neighbour shovelling out a driveway buried under a foot of snow, they chatted me up charmingly. When I used the word squalls to see if they could recover from encountering an unknown term, they used effective strategies.

The Mandarin speakers, on the other hand, floundered. The fact that they can ace grammar tests blindfolded with hands tied behind their backs isn't doing them much good if they can't carry on a simple conversation with a smiling stranger at the bus stop, especially in light of their stated GOALS. Sigh.

So! (This is where you, dear reader, come in.) I need a new attack. I'm going to try to find everything I can find on two topics, to start with: teaching strategic competence and teaching English to Chinese students specifically. I've already found one scholarly article online indicating that being raised in a culture steeped in Confucianism can indeed hobble an ESL student in some aspects of their ESL progress. Fascinating stuff.

One thing I may do is give them the Strategic Inventory for Language Learning. This might help raise their awareness of weak areas while showing me where we need to focus more of our energies. 

Can you help me out? Can you give me ideas and suggestions and paste into the comments area links to every resource you know of that could help me build a different and more effective curriculum for this special demographic of ESL learners in the new year? I need help!

Desirable Difficulties

John Sivell just sent me a link to this video of Robert Bjork talking about the importance of what he calls "desirable difficulties" in helping students not just to learn and quickly forget material but rather to retain it over the long term.  I take it as a validation of 'Back to the Well' principles and feel vindicated in one aspect of my teaching philosophy as he urges teachers not to jump in and answer their own posed questions after only four or five seconds. Amen!

It is under six minutes long. I hope you'll take the time to view it and comment below.

P.S. The contest for the $50 Amazon certificate is still open (read prior post).

Why I Love 'Back to the Well'

At the end of May I'll be co-facilitating a workshop once again with John Sivell, TESL educator at Brock University. We'll be talking about the notion of taking students back into the same audio or written text over and over again. In how many valuable ways can we revisit the same passage or dialogue, squeezing it to extract all the juicy linguistic affordances we possibly can before ushering students on to a new text?

I believe in this.

Chart paper helps us revisit lexis.

I have watched as students build their meta-linguistic skills, and with that their confidence. I've seen how this way of approaching the new lexis results in narrowed cognitive burden, and a more relaxed classroom.

One reader of this blog asked me in an email how I can take such a thorough, thoughtful pace and still cover everything I'm expected to cover in a term. That's a good question.  I've answered that question one way, John another.

At my school, we are given the freedom to balance how much we cover with how well we cover it. The answer John has given to this question in Toronto was something to the effect that sure, you can rush through and say you've covered a lot, but where is the value in that if students don't RETAIN any of it?

Back to the well, for me, means doing all the exercises that come with a given text, such as comprehension questions and the like, then going back into the same text with a nice variety of vocabulary, syntax and discourse activities. The aim is to give students' brains multiple meaningful encounters with the new language.

At first we are getting more familiar with each vocabulary word. We look up the definition, note the part of speech, note any irregularities (such as irregular plural form for nouns, irregular conjugation for verbs), list lexical sets of which it may be a member, debate whether the connotation is positive, neutral or negative, jot down as many forms of the word as we can find, use the word in a sentence. We use a website or corpus to discover collocations and discuss what register we think the word falls under (e.g., standard, slang, colloquial).  We make semantic maps and play games like "Each One Teach One."

The middle of the week may find us engrossed in dialogues or correcting each other's parallel paragraphs that we've written borrowing structures taken from our text. We look for useful lexical chunks that can be turned into pattern drills. We might analyse clauses or label all verbs as transitive, intransitive or both--dreaming up three possible objects for transitive verbs.

In other words, by the time we finish with the text, we know the language structures inside and out. We've looked under the hood and we know how this engine works. And we are happily ready to move on, not feeling one bit rushed.

I am now in my second year implementing this way of teaching, and I continue to swear by it. I've seen how it creates a more egalitarian classroom where keen students are satisfied by the depth of exploration while those slower to process are less stressed by a pace that leaves them behind.

What do you think? Is John and Chirawibha's idea of "Sending Them Back to the Well" something you would try out with your learners? Why or why not?

Easy Peasy Custom Flashcards

I underutilize flashcards. I know that's a weakness in my ESL literacy teaching and want to address it. A recent post on the ESL Literacy Network blog inspired me to use flashcards to teach personal information with a new iteration of learners who are just starting with me this month. While I was nosing around in the Community - Showcases area of the same website, I rediscovered a showcase by Shelley McConnell called Making Picture Flashcards Using a Template. Mind you, I have visited many websites that offer flashcards as well as flashcard templates, but this one was just so easy to use that I felt compelled to share it here.

Shelley's template has a variety of sizes ready for you to insert the pictures. She also includes one set with an area under each picture for text. The font is 20 pt Century Gothic, perfect for literacy!

My school is about to get a subscription to Clipart.com. In the meantime, I discovered that this set of templates pairs beautifully with our Oxford Picture Dictionary software. The software, which we have licensed for each classroom, comes with one WORKSHEETS and one ART folder per topic. The art folder, I discovered, is full of png image files. The way that Shelley has designed her flashcard templates, all you do is click on the picture icon in the middle of the flashcard. This triggers a dialogue box whereby you find the image that you've saved on a drive. When you select the image, it inserts itself into the flashcard with no need to resize! With very few clicks, you're ready for the next flashcard.  I was able to make four sets for the hospital topic for my seniors class, print them AND cut them up with the paper cutter in about twenty minutes. I was very pleased by this time saver. Next time I'll get out our school's laminator to make the set more durable.

Shelley's showcase includes an instruction sheet.

I haven't made any flashcards for my literacy class using these templates just yet, but am happy to report that they came in very handy in my morning class. The seniors enjoyed having one set per group of three students so that they could drill each other on hospital vocabulary.

Do you think these templates are a time saver? What do you use to help students remember new vocabulary?

Dogme, Anyone?

I'm not sure how I stumbled upon the book Teaching Unplugged: Dogme in English Language Teaching by Luke Meddings and Scott Thornbury. I just know that I was immediately intrigued by the synopsis and ordered a copy from Amazon that instant, not even waiting until Monday to see if my employer might purchase a copy for our library. No, I knew this was a book I had to own. And I was right. Within hours of unboxing the slender volume with its glossy white cover, I had festooned the pages with ever so many green, pink, orange and purple sticky bookmarks. Late into the night, I could be found tucked snugly in bed with my new book, a fat yellow highlighter in my hand.

Because I was at that time volunteering my lunch hours to facilitate a Lunch 'n' Learn class for our full time students who had no place to sit and eat between morning and afternoon classes, I got an opportunity to try many of the suggested "materials light" activities with this wonderful group of about eight students. The response? They loved these lessons, and so did I. Soon I was babbling on excitedly about the book to any teacher who would listen. One colleague took it home for the weekend and liked it so much that she also ordered a copy. Two years later, my practicum student also ended up with a copy.

After trying several of the suggested activities in the book, I began to take off the training wheels and do a few lessons that were completely born of a teachable moment with no prior prep having gone into it. Though not every one of them took off like a rocket, the vast majority of those lessons seemed to me to be even more energizing and successful than the ones based on activities in the book.

Now I can't say whether I was implementing dogme in the way that the authors intended. I hadn't yet had a chance to go to any workshops on dogme (though I have now twice attended Ken Lackman's 'C.A.T.: A Framework for Dogme). So I just made up my own jazz tune based on dogme principles.

So what does my version of dogme look like?

The dogme lesson, in my mind, can start with a topic elicited from the students. More often, however, the teacher can simply eavesdrop on the before-class chatter and can pick up the juiciest, most promising thread. If neither of those is viable, the teacher can ask students to brainstorm topics, put a list on the board, and have students vote for that day's topic.

The way it works in my class is that gaps in the students' communicative knowledge and ability come to the surface like bubbles. In my experience, there is no lack of interesting language points to explore. In fact, there are usually so many potential linguistic points to mine that the teacher has to narrow them down to a manageable number for the time allotted.

A given conversation might render a need to explore a few new nouns, verbs, adjectives, one or two phrasal verbs, and perhaps a point about a tense, a voice, a mood. If several students are making the same pronunciation or prosody error, that becomes an impromptu lesson. I tune into students' energy and interest, surfing them like ocean waves.

After I have put the needed language on the board, using familiar conventions for grammar formulae and IPA for pronunciation, we practice the new language. And this is the hard part for the teacher. I have to come up with what will help them practice using the newly learned language structure or lexical chunk. You end up being a walking encyclopedia of language activities. Sometimes it's a game or a role play, other times a pattern drill or a writing exercise.

For example, during one conversation hour it became evident that many students had no mastery over question syntax; they were not inverting the subject and auxiliary verb.  "We don't know how to make questions," these CLB 2/3 students whined. Fortunately the TESL Ontario conference was only weeks behind me and I still remembered how much fun I'd had playing The Question Game in one workshop. So I put students in pairs and explained the rules: A asks a question and B asks another question. And so on. The first person who responds with anything other than another question loses. It's harder than it sounds, I warned them with an evil grin.

Within minutes the pairs were laughing, arguing over points, reminding each other of proper syntax, laughing some more, and getting better at questions!

To sum up how I feel about dogme, I can say that dogme is to language teaching what "Just in Time" is to the business and manufacturing world. In traditional language teaching, we give the students all sorts of vocabulary and grammar, filling their storehouse in the hopes that when they need any of it, they'll remember where it is on the shelf, pull it down and use it.  Dogme, on the other hand, waits until the learner has the need for the language and then provides exactly the language that fills the gap and no more. Because the presented language is relevant to a student's need in that moment, the lesson is very well received and classroom energy is high.  However, I would like to see some research into how this method compares with others in terms of long-term retrievability of the newly acquired language.

In closing I would like to add that although I don't currently teach dogme lessons on a daily basis, having delved into the methodology and movement has left its mark on me as an ESL teacher.  I have become a teacher who looks at pre-packaged materials with a more critical eye, often abandoning them in favour of my own materials that leave more room for flexibility, more space for us to flow with what emerges through the week. While I might have an idea where we want to end up by Friday, how we get there will depend on formative assessment and feedback I get hour by hour, minute by minute. My explorations into dogme help me feel validated and more confident in implementing a materials light approach.

If you would like to read another educator's blog post about this same topic, visit Giulia's blog, Wandering in Absolute Freedom. Her post is called My Dogme Experiment.

What about you? Have you heard of or used a dogme approach in your teaching?

The Listening Skills Dilemma

I am about to pull my hair out. Seriously, I'm at my wit's end. Today I did a needs assessment with my beloved morning class (90% Chinese, 100% over the age of 55). They are almost in tears, they so badly want to improve their listening skills. And yet, when I try to get them to set aside their electronic dictionaries and pencils for a block of listening / speaking time, I feel like I'm dealing with toddlers. They are sneaky. They apologize. They laugh. They look sheepish. But they do not comply.

The same thing happens when they repeatedly revert to their L1--a problem that comes with the fact that it is such a homogeneous group. We have voted on it. THEY decided they wanted to ban L1 from the class, except for occasional, brief and discreet whispers to a classmate: "How do you say X in our language?" But do they stick to that rule? Heck, no. The minute my back is turned... no, not even. Right in front of me they just babble away in the L1.

One source of this challenge is clear to me. Given the generation and culture of origin of the majority, I assume they have been inexorably steeped in the grammar-translation method of second language acquisition. We have talked about that. I've offered myself as an example since I've studied languages as diverse as ASL, Demotic Greek, Latin, Japanese and Farsi. They nod in agreement when I say the grammar-translation method was apt and sufficient for my Latin studies, given the goal of being able to translate Ovid. Do they think this method rendered me able to order a beer in Latin or ask where the bathroom is? Of course not. We laugh.

In summary, I've given sermons about forging neural pathways (they are educated enough for this level of analysis) until I'm blue in the face. I've offered cute quotes like, "Do the uncomfortable until it feels comfortable." I've given testimonials from my own history as a successful polyglot. Nothing ever works for long.

Today I am starting over. I have decided I will do whatever it takes to get buy-in. I will try to work with instead of against the barriers. We must solve this problem. Below will be my journal where I will keep an account of what works and what fails.

12 January Tricked groups into making oral presentations without looking down at paper by surprising them with the assignment and not allowing them to bring paper with them to the front of the class. Of course they did just fine, and it was much more engaging than when they know about a presentation ahead of time and spend all night MEMORIZING their parts (gah!) or read from paper (double gah).

13 January We are seeing eye-to-eye regarding over-dependence on dictionaries. We made a compromise: dictionaries were allowed for the first 20 minutes after I had passed out the text (the needs assessment itself). After break, no dictionaries were allowed, only conversation about the questionnaire. Almost everyone cooperated, and I gave violators a choice between tucking the machines away in a satchel or letting me put them on top of the file cabinet. At the end of class, they were smiling. They said they liked the tactic and want to continue down this road.

14 January I want to sell them on the notion of guessing the meaning of words from context, so I'm giving them this text, "The Shillybog." We'll see how it goes.

15 January The activity re guessing the meaning of words from context went over very well. They get the point of it. On Monday we start our new project called "Kelly's Listening Boot Camp." The idea is that I am their personal trainer whose goal it is to help them develop and exercise the listening "muscles." It's my job to inspire and motivate while providing ways for them to strengthen these underdeveloped faculties. It won't always be fun. It may often be uncomfortable. But hopefully the end will justify the means!

Here are the text and discussion questions I'm using to kick off Listening Boot Camp on Monday.

It is my hope that I can help the learners build a tool box of strategies for improving their listening, including improving prosody through practice with the stress-timed nature of English (making the stressed vowel in content words longer, stronger, clearer), and in turn listening for content words in others' speech and realizing that catching every word is unnecessary. We will have many gambits for restoring faltering communication posted around the classroom, such as "Can you speak more slowly?" and "Can you say that using different words?" Thus we emphasize that communication is a two-way street, always able to be repaired when both parties take ownership of it.

I'd love to hear your ideas for my dilemma. What else can I do? How can I help these students with their listening skills? (Click the purple # Comments: link below.)