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!
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