Methodology – Week 11 – Blog Reflection (vocabulary focus)

For this weeks lesson I brought in the idea of using the snakes and ladders board game to change up my regular format a little bit. (I usually don’t use board games). This week’s target vocabulary is on the weather. So this week I went with two intro music videos (activating schema –TD), then a PowerPoint showing target language where Ss would have to hunt for specifics (TD/BU activity), leading into the snakes and ladders speaking game. (BU)

The students get into groups of four. Then split into two teams. One team rolls and the dice and lands on a weather picture. The students must then use that weather picture to form a short dialogue.

Team 1: How’s the weather?

Team 2: It’s windy.

Team 2: How’s the weather?

Team 1: It’s sunny.

In line with this week’s SLA reading Doughty, (1985) claims that Ss in smaller groups, or dyads will more effectively modify interaction further aiding second language acquisition. Although in this case the questions are closed display type questions. So all the students already know the answer by looking at the weather picture, and there is little negotiation for meaning.

 

Still, it is a student focused exercise where there is little T talk and the Ss are given more opportunity to speak. They are once again being given the floor in the classroom. I’ve been slowly slipping in more S on S talk time. I’ve been weaning them off of teacher focused lessons, and having them drink at the student conversation trough. They’re used to it at this point right? It’s been at least a solid two months of these new CI techniques in action. They practically teach themselves at this point right? Right?

Wrong. 

I taught this class nine times. I have eight other videos showing the same thing. Pandemonium.

Now I remember why I don’t play board games in class. The excitement of playing the game took priority over anything else. In most cases the students completely abandoned the target vocabulary to get on with the fun stuff (rolling the dice). All nine classes started off civilized and then quickly descended into madness.

Why? I have been giving them more S focused tasks, however for the last two weeks our lessons have been interrupted due to field trips and tests. So there has been a break from our routine. I’d like to think this is the only reason, but looking back at previous posts I see that these 3^rd and 4^th grade classes were never that fantastic at self control in the first place.

Dialogic discourse may be the holy grail of classroom interaction in linguistics, but I’m finding it extremely difficult to implement in a large, low level public school class. I have to raise the question, is dialogic discourse warranted if it promotes anarchy in the classroom? My principal walks around the school looking in windows to see if teachers are ‘doing their job’. If she had stuck her head in any of my classes this week (and she might have and I just missed it) there is the very real possibility that she would consider me a poor teacher (for the appearance of chaos in class).

Not all classes were as bad as the first, but they were still unruly enough to make me uncomfortable as a teacher. I got the sense that my Korean co-teacher felt the same way. As far as getting students to practice and produce the target vocabulary, I felt the S on S portion of the lesson was a failure. The focus was on winning the game, not producing the vocab.