English Conversation Hour_Final Class!

December 3, 2013

            The last class has shown itself! I really wasn’t expecting a lot of people to show up since it was the last class but to my surprise we had the largest class ever. A total of eleven people came to the conversation hour. Since it was the final class we decided to use one subject and center our activities on that. Last class one of our students expressed her want of knowing more idioms and their meanings so we decided to just use that as the lesson for our last class. First we talked about what idioms were and how they are used. We had each one read one from the many handouts we gave them and discussed the meaning behind them. In order for them to have a deeper understanding we split them up into various groups so they could discuss new ones and give their opinion on what they might think each one is to allow room for intelligible input. Excited discussions broke out through the groups so I believe they were enjoying themselves. Whenever a student had a question about a particular word they didn’t understand they would ask for help from each other which I thought was really good since they were doing this while speaking in English, allowing for great conversation. Improvements have been made! Before when they had questions they would ask each other in Spanish. After they spent time on that activity we told them to now come up with situations in which you would use those phrases and afterwards we would come back and share.

            The overall class went really well, the environment was nice and everyone was really interested in the lesson. Some things I noticed from not only this class but from the others as well is that as a teacher giving instructions or help to language learning students can be really tricky. Personally, I am used to explaining some things in an ‘extravagant’ way so I noticed that with the students I usually get I have to explain in a simpler form. This is not to say that they aren’t advanced it’s just that they aren’t used to the way Americans explain things or the way we ‘twist words’ to give meaning. I can definitely tell as I observed my regular students that they have made some progress when speaking English conversationally. One our students used to struggle to get words out in the beginning but now they seem to come much easier. It does a teachers heart good!       

Shaunice Ivana Walters

Teaching Journal

Lesson 5
25 November 2013

Basic English

Our class this week felt more like our first class than how our classes have gone the last few weeks due to our lack of confidence and our relative disorganization. Perhaps because our class has been so predictable the past couple of weeks, we got a little too comfortable with our lesson plan, adapting a “we’ll be fine, our class is great” attitude. We’ve had the same four students since the beginning and then out of the blue two more showed up this week. We didn’t have enough copies of handouts because we’d just sort of assumed that by the fifth lesson we’d have established our regulars. Truly though, with a class as free-form as ‘free English at la biblioteca publica’, we should be extra ready to adapt. That lessons should be adaptable is advice that we can carry to every lesson we plan in the future.

Though I left the library more dissatisfied than satisfied with our fifth lesson, after some reflection as to what exactly was not right, I feel confident that the three main causes of the breakdown were that the content of the lesson was too advanced, that we tried to teach too much and the students were quickly overwhelmed, and that too much Spanish was spoken—by both the students and teachers. It’s important to mention that our beginner class is just that—a beginner class. Conversations take a long time and what they are able to say in English is based on chunking and language learned from exposure to English speakers rather than explicit grammar instruction. Our elder students studied French in grade school and for this reason, my partner and I found explicit grammar to be a helpful vehicle for our lessons. Our basic model has been to supply new vocabulary, a basic grammar lesson and then activities to practice both. This week we chose a theme of ‘current events’ and gave vocab lists with words about the media, the news, and common verbs used to define the state of affairs; our grammar portion consisted of simple past tense and using the passive voice. We chose this topic because we wanted to give our adult students the tools they would need to talk about the things they are actually interested in, rather than something dull, such as the weather. The truth is, that might be closer to the level that they are ready for. The passive voice posed a challenge for us to explain and also for them to understand. Additionally, looking at the lesson in hindsight, passive voice seems sort of irrelevant for a basic conversation class. The next challenge was definitely the amount of information we gave to the students. We would have been fine to provide only the simple past tense conjugation and it seemed like while they were still grasping that conjugation were moving on to single and plural subject passive voice conjugation which meant we had to conjugate ‘to be’ and also provide the past participle of the verbs. Just too much.

Finally, we realized how easy it is to resort to the L1 when there is any sort of confusion. What ended up occurring was one of us would give directions or explanations in English and then the other would translate directly, which is just counterproductive in a language class. It discourages trying to listen to English when you know you’ll hear it in Spanish shortly after. Really though, it’s much better to speak English and use rephrasing and copious comprehension checks to get the point across. When I consider my Spanish classes in the past, my teachers really never spoke English to us.