In Pursuit of Authenticity..

Last class, we co-taught an activity from Harmer. Since then I have been thinking about how to make my teaching more authentic. We specifically talked about providing authentic reading activities as well as posing authentic questions. I tried to apply what I have learnt in my class and tried to ask authentic questions such as “Everybody’s clear?,” “Here comes the second number!!” etc. One thing remains very clear. I need to continue to put more time and thought into my lesson planning to work towards establish authenticity…

Last Sunday, as an ice-breaker, I started a short discussion about summer vacation and asked students to tell me what they have planned/what they wished to do during upcoming summer vacation. I am aware that as Korean school systems are highly competitive, parents often push their children in extreme ways which cause them to get very stressed.  Summer vacations are no exceptions either. Having knowledge of this beforehand, I prepared a simple handout providing some suggestions for fun yet educational things they could do with their friends and/or family. Some suggestions included going camping with family, visiting local art/science centers or museums with friends or family, going to a play or concert as well as picking up a new hobby. I also provided information on a nearby woodworking studio where they could take classes at a reasonable price to learn how to make simple things. They were all quite surprised to see that there was such a studio located so near. Personally, I feel that, as their teacher, I should care about their mental well-being and that I could make a positive contribution no matter how small in this regard. I suppose this thought for an ice-breaker was fueled by our reading about Stephen Krashen’s theory on SLA and one of his key hypotheses, which he refers to as the Affective Filter Hypothesis. Simply put, this hypothesis argues that emotional states, attitudes, motivation, and needs all play a big role in SLA and can inhibit (by acting as an “affective filter”, sort of like an “imaginary barrier”) or encourage a students’ learning of the target language.

As far as the lesson topic, we talked about big numbers. I had discovered a few weeks back that they had problems with reading big numbers. To go about doing so, I had planned two activities. First was bingo in an attempt to get my points across in a fun, interactive way. Students had to pick and write down nine numbers from a list of 25 I had provided. Then I called numbers randomly and read once or twice (upon their request) until someone called bingo. Subsequently, whoever called bingo had to read back all his nine numbers for my confirmation. However, my underlying aim with this was to get that particular student to practice reading numbers. They enjoyed bingo so much that they asked to play once more. I had absolutely no problem with this. I do want to allow them to self-select as much as possible a la Responsive-Collaborative Discourse in hopes of maximizing student-student interaction as well as students’ L2 use. We went ahead and played bingo one more time. Therefore, I decided to do the second activity I had prepared for them this coming Sunday instead and, this way, it will also serve to recycle TLC.

One interesting thing while playing bingo was that my reticent student was the dark horse. Rest of the students was surprised when he had called out “bingo!” first time we had played the game. They were more surprised to see me reward him (the winner) with a small bag of cookies. The race was on!! I could “see” their competitive side emerge even more. To “exploit” this golden opportunity to get this reticent student to talk, I asked him to come up and call numbers with me. I gradually stepped back and he was calling the numbers all by himself with the exception of stepping in a few times to model how to stress the second syllable when pronouncing numbers such as “sixteen” and “sixty” so the rest of the students could tell clearly what number was called. Afterwards, I summarized the lesson topic in the following way: 1) order of large numbers is thousand, million, billion, trillion {they did know up to billion; I stopped after trillion as it is highly unlikely that they will encounter larger numbers), 2} use commas to separate thousands, millions, etc., 3) use “and” before the last number.  Lastly, we practiced reading 123,042, 83214 and 1,256,721 to finish off. Another thing I realized during bingo was that most of the time they are not using complete sentences when they ask me a question or answer me (“one more time”, “cross?” were a few I noticed when I watched the video). I need to remind them again to use complete sentences when asking questions or answering me.

We have just read about extensive/listening in Chapter 18, Harmer. I really loved the idea of playing music in the background while students are working on activities. I already know that majority of them like listening to music (I had asked them a few weeks back to write down three things they like). This coming Sunday, I am planning to ask them if they would be ok with listening to music while working on activities. I will be suggesting easy listening music such as Michael Bublé, Frank Sinatra, Laura Fygi and alike. This would make the class more relaxed and fun. Furthermore, music should contribute to the development of their listening skills, improve their concentration and even motivate them further. If they are ok with my suggestion, perhaps down the road I could try using different types of music as well as incorporating music to beyond activity time.