Methodology – Reflection Week 6

I once again had most of this week’s classes canceled due to school events or the public holiday. This has given me time to deal with STG assignments, but as I work multiple part-time contracts, if I don’t work I don’t get paid.

Nonetheless, I did have some classes and managed to record the one 6^th grade class for my lesson plan assignment. With all the cancelled classes this week I only had one shot at the recording. Furthermore, I had to interrupt the class scheduled textbook activity, to insert a more dialogic discourse activity.

Having limited time and opportunity to get this homework assignment done, I found myself rushing a little bit. When showing the PowerPoint and asking a question to activate the students schema, I would then rapidly fire off the answer or echo the students answer, in order to move the lesson on more rapidly.

We then moved on to the main activity of having three opposing teams of students describe an image to their team artist. No Korean was allowed to communicate, but the students were allowed to point out the location of nouns on the paper. With the co-teacher and I moderating the game, it went fairly well. I was a little frustrated to see that under pressure, some of my star students reverted back to very basic sentences, or just answering with single words. They are usually able to better express themselves, in a more relaxed setting. I should keep this in mind for future discussion activities.

In retrospect I should have had the students engage in more pair work in order to enable more authentic interaction. By simply asking the students to come up with five nouns and five adjectives, after explaining those concepts, they would better remember the target language I was trying to teach. I justified the long PPT vocabulary refresher with the fact that the main activity was strong in dialogic discourse, but this doesn't excuse the opportunity cost of my monologic introduction.