Details Details Details...

Back for yet another installment in the pedagogical development of John Teacher! This reflection is in response to the Language Learner Project and what it had revealed to me about my students. Our study looked at how students are able to ask and give details about a picture. We had altered a previous study about Accelerating Oral Language with Academic Conversation that looked at English language learners and the lack of opportunities they have to engage in longer, more meaningful discussions at school; mainly focusing on getting students to critically think and construct there ideas academically with others. Understandably, this is an unrealistic goal for the level of proficiency of our students and that’s where we had to tweak it.

While implementing the study, it became painful clear that my students had no communicative skills for finding out details about something, or even how to start the interaction by asking a simple question like, "What is it?" I had a couple of students try and use Korean, which wasn't allowed, however  they were going to use a detail-asking question. So, it's not like they don't understand the task, they just don't have the means to complete it. I felt really bad for the students because they looked extremely frustrated. I believe that being able to ask for details is a skill definitely used in authentic discourse.

In reflecting on reasons that might have contributed to this, I thought about missed opportunities that I could’ve elicited this kind of behavior from the students. And it occurred to me that my classroom discourse is still very monologic, in the way that the students rarely if ever initiate the interactions. It always begins with me asking a question, e.g., “What is it?” or “What are they doing?” when presenting new or old vocabulary. However I have started having the students ask each other after my initial question, cutting down on excessive teacher talk.

So, how can I go about changing this aspect of my classroom discourse? I believe that games are the best starting point to help students start developing communicative skills. Like in original Karate Kid with ‘Wax on… Wax off’, the students think that they are just playing a fun and harmless game, when secretly you’re teaching them to be Cobra Kia killing machines and by Cobra Kai killing machines, I mean some communicative competence! The game 21 questions would be a great way of introducing this kind of question asking strategy for finding out details. Start off by scaffolding how to properly ask questions for detail; take a TD approach by starting big with categories (nouns) and narrowing down (adjectives) from there, e.g., animals, food, big, scary, etc.… until they have it. This could also be a fun way of introducing new vocabulary too. Once they grasp onto this concept, I can slowly start having them ask higher proficiency questions (scaffolding/modeling first); instead of ‘Is it food?’ they might ask ‘Can you eat it?’ 

On the flip side of this would be giving details. A way to tackle this would be to counter ‘21 Questions’ with ‘What am I’; giving the students a flash card and then having them describe it with saying what it is. Slowly implementing these into a lesson plan throughout the school year could have a significant effect on the students’ L2 proficiency!

Hey... That's Me!

These these decorations me easily over 40 hours to make! 

Ever since I started decorating my classroom, I’ve been so far behind on my reflections. However I’ve still been recording my classes, at least once a week. So, for this reflection I used a video from three weeks ago. This was interesting because I didn’t know what to expect, like watching a stranger at first, but after a little bit I actually remembered teaching this class; because it was the second time trying pair work and I was pretty happy that it was a little easier than the first time. We still have a long way to go, but a small step forward is still going forward!

A positive thing that I noticed was I used preview, present, and practice. First I previewed the material by showing them flashcards of the vocabulary words. Despite straying from my objective of having the students say hello to each character; I feel that this was okay since the students were still engaged and motivated during the preview. During the present stage, I was successful at cutting down unnecessary teacher talk through scaffolding and role-play to have them use the TL. This was the first time that I tried a role-play exercise to present the TL from the workbook. They seemed to really enjoy it. Unfortunately I didn’t capture all of this because my camera wasn’t pointing in my direction, but it sounds like I am doing a great job! I was trying to use as many CI’s as I could through recast and some non-verbal cueing: facial expressions and body movement. For the practice stage, I broke the students up into pairs and had them ask each other the TL from their workbook before they put the sticker on. Like I said before, I was happy that some pairs were actually able to do this task without much guidance from me. 

As we know... For every yin there is a yang!
Now for the best part... what do I need to work on? For starters, after I do the greeting song I had the students pair off and act out the greeting song with their partner. When I saw that two of my students had done it correctly, I tried to have them model the correct actions and utterances for the class; to try cut down on teacher talk. While doing this I had turned my back to a table of students and blocked them from being able to see. Next time, I will have the students come to the front of class to model what to do: this will insure that all the students have a chance to see. Also, I need to be aware of my positioning relative to the students, I don’t want to seem closed off to them.
Another thing I noticed was that the students have a lot of dead time while I’m working with other pairs. I need to give the students a task to do after they are finished or since they are so young and handling unsupervised task are difficult; instead of using pairs for this activity I could divide them into two big groups, and we can do the task together. The tables are already separated, so this could easily be implemented. I feel that this would be a more efficient use of classroom interaction.

Tech Tool

At first, I had no clue what I was going to do for this Tech Tool blog. Luckily for me my classroom looked like a jail cell and needed some decorations. While searching online for ideas and clipart I came across a lot of useful sites. One site was Teachers Pay Teachers http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/, which is an online marketplace where teachers buy and sell original downloadable educational materials, hard goods and used educational resources. When I found this site I thought that it was a great idea. You can search by grades, subject, price, and top resource type. The prices are reasonable; considering the time and effort that it took to make these resources, basically the price of a beer or coffee. I really like this site because it’s not your big corporation (down with “the man” hahahaha) trying to get rich, but individuals like you and me trying to make a little something extra for their hard work. However, I did not use this site, I just thought it was pretty cool and super useful. But you can use my tech tool to make and then post things on this site to make a little extra cash on the side.

My tech tool is probably the coolest thing ever. As I said before, I was searching online for ideas about decorating. Once I had an idea, I then had to find pictures or clipart to bring my idea to life. This is when I found http://www.clker.com/this is an online royalty free public domain clipart site. It’s a giant free clipart site, but what makes this site special is that you can edit other people’s clipart to meet your own needs; then the modified version now becomes a new free clipart piece for others to use as you did. The way it works is that you can edit the vector clipart is using the site’s paintbrush program; allowing you to make or add pretty much anything you want.

Here is a definition of vector clipart/graphics:

Vector graphics, such as clipart images, are formed by lots of individual objects. These objects, made up of lines, curves, and shapes, are placed on top of each other to create an image. Imagine many different pieces or parts of a clip layered to make one image.

So, my idea was to make a color wall using different color balloons as the color marker next to the word. Looking for balloon clipart is what led me to this site. I thought at first that it was just a free clipart site, but then when I clicked on the balloon, I found out that you could edit and change the clipart. I then adjusted and colored in the balloon, making a new clipart for each different color balloon I made. It saves the clipart in your account, so this site also acts as a database for all the work you create.

I found that little robot guy on this site too. You can make things like that using the paintbrush program, but that requires an artistic ability that I lack! 

The amount of unelicited (I searched if this was a word… found some places that said yes, so I went with it) L2 that is being used since I have decorated my classroom is mind blowing. They see them and just start randomly saying the colors. Also I’ve been able to use the color wall as a quick reference when I need to have them quickly understand what color crayon they need to get; as a result, it has helped in improving the efficiency of my classroom discourse. I can’t believe that it has taken me so long to decorate. My next project is to make a flower garden. I want to have different flowers showing different emotions like in my first MT. I’ve made a happy and sad flower but haven’t had time to finish the other ones. 

This tech tool does take some getting used to if you don’t have any experience with editing; but its not like Adobe Photoshop editing, more like using the Paintbrush program that has come standard on all PC’s for years. So, it is easy to understand after you play around with it, and the more you use it the faster and easier it will be.

Since the time I decorated till now, like a month, this site has just add an EXTREMELY COOL feature. Now when you upload any image larger than 1024x768, it will be automatically vectorized in your account. Basically this means that you can turn an authentic picture into vector clipart and then have the ability to move individual sections of the new clipart or make a frame version with no color. This would be great for making activities like color by number/letter/word/blend or cut and paste worksheets.