Reflection #1

Rachel Jonker
July 12-16, 2010
July 18, 2010
Journal #1
13.3 hours teaching, 20 hours preparing
Yum Kwang Church

Part 1: Summary of your recent time in the classroom (one-two paragraphs)
As this was my first week teaching EFL in Korea, a significant portion of my experience was figuring out the ropes of the program. We spent several hours on Saturday, July 10 in preparatory informational meetings in which we learned about the structure of the YK Summer English Camp, divided classroom responsibilities, and designed student pre-assessments. These level-tests were employed on Monday to place our students into the level-appropriate classes. I was surprised by how readily we were able to determine students’ English proficiency via such brief reading, writing, listening and speaking activities.
On Tuesday classes officially began and I assumed the role of ‘Teacher Rachel’, instructor of seven upper elementary student “Brown Camels” and five high school/middle school student “Blue Elephants”. As both of my classes are the highest level for their age group, I have several students who are essentially fluent in English. This pleasant surprise has turned out to be the source of my most significant classroom challenges, as I learn to work with the dynamics of a mixed-ability level classroom. Throughout this week I sought to incorporate topics and activities which engaged my advanced students while still meeting the language needs of my lower-level students. While I assuredly improved in this endeavor throughout the course of the week, I still recognize room for the most significant improvement in this area.

Part 2: Reflection on TESOL Themes
1. Discuss one approach you used or observed which you felt worked well and received positive response from both students and teacher. Support your observations with references from your TESOL texts.
After class on Tuesday my teaching assistant told me that the class had been “asleep” throughout the lesson, referring to the drowsy environment in which student participation was minimal. I recognized my responsibility in the creation of this phenomenon by creating a very teacher-centered class in an attempt to keep the class moving.
For this reason on Wednesday I devoted a significant portion of the class to student discussion and interaction with several texts related to the topic “How do We Love the Poor?” While this fostered much better discussion than the day before, I recognized a deficiency in that some of my students’ inhibitions and lower-language skills limited their participation in the discussion. Harmer aptly describes my classroom experience: “Whole-class teaching is less effective if we want to encourage individual contributions and discussion, since speaking out in front of a whole class is often more demanding—and therefore more inhibiting—than speaking in smaller groups (43).”
Based on my experience with this class on Tuesday and Wednesday, I determined that whole-class discussions were not effectively giving every student an opportunity to practice their speaking skills. So, on Thursday I divided the class into pairs, each of which read two paragraphs written by teenagers seeking advice for personal life problems. In pairs the students discussed the issue in response to six questions which I provided, and then reported their conclusions to the whole class. The structure of this activity worked particularly well because the students were motivated to communicate in pairs in order to give advice to the teenager who wrote the paragraph and subsequently to the whole class in response to the natural information gap regarding the information in their paragraphs. Through this experience I experienced Harmer’s observation that in pairwork “students tend to participate more actively, and they also have more chance to experiment with the language than is possible in a whole-class arrangement (43).” This arrangement also gave me the opportunity to work directly with the students with lower-language levels without “boring” my more advanced students, who continued working during the time that I was offering this additional support (44).

2. Discuss one approach you used or observed which you felt did not work well and received negative response from either students or teacher. Support your observations with references from your TESOL texts.
One of my most frustrating experiences this week was with the lack of student cooperativeness in completing assigned homework. This occurred with several assignments, most frequently with the blogs which I set up for each of my classes. I set up these blogs to be used for additional listening and written response practice via daily YouTube clips related to the Bible story or discussion topic of the day. As of Friday, one of my twelve students had completed the assignments—and she only responded to two of the three movie clips.
This experience has exasperated me on several counts. First, I invested several hours in researching, designing and organizing the blog before the week began. Last Sunday I learned how to structure such a classroom blog from an American EFL teacher who used it effectively during the past 5 weeks while he taught here in Korea. Before I decided to use the blog I asked several of the Korean teaching assistants if it was reasonable to expect my students to have the internet access necessary to complete the assignments, and was repeatedly assured that I could assume that every student would have access to the internet. In addition, I spent several hours selecting topic and level appropriate movie clips which I hoped would effectively complement my classroom learning activities. Throughout the week I repeatedly reminded the students of the blog address and assignments, asking them to check the page before the next day’s class.
But since then, none of it has gone as well as I anticipated. On Tuesday I was confronted with the problem of a student who claimed not to have access to the internet at home, school, or the library. I was unsure what to do, since I did not want to tell him that it was fine if he skipped the assignment. In the end I told him to find a way to access it via some other venue, even though I do not know if it is practical to expect him to do so. When none of the students had completed the assignment on Wednesday, I realized that I had told the students that the blog address began with www when it actually was just http://. I communicated my mistake to them, but it did not make a difference. I gave students my email address and instructed them to contact me if they had any problems completing the assignment, but the only student who did so was the one who completed the assignments. Each day I have asked the students why they have not completed the blog assignments. I have heard several excuses, ranging from a lack of time to forgetfulness, an unsuccessful attempt and a simple “I didn’t try.”
Thus I am convinced that even though my mistake had the potential to prohibit students from completing the assignment, the deeper issue is a lack of student initiative. Harmer comments on this in his discussion of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (20). I recognize that the majority of my students are extrinsically motivated by parents, etc. to enroll in this English Camp. As a result, I think that that their negligence with the blog homework is the result of a lack of personal motivation to succeed in English. For this reason it is likely that my attempt to persuade the students to do their homework because it will help them improve their English skills will continue to be ineffective, and that I should look for other ways (such as giving candy to those who complete their assignment) to motivate my students. Harmer insightfully notes that in order for students to succeed with homework assignments, is important for teachers to “choose the right kind of task” (21). I am beginning to doubt that this blog is such an assignment.
My biggest source of frustration with this issue is that I am unsure how I should proceed. I do not want to invest more time in a project which will not be effective for student learning. However, I do not want to communicate to my students’ that they have the power to force me to lower my expectations if they refuse to cooperate. Most importantly, I have limited resources by which to motivate my students. As these courses do not include grades, I am unable to “hold that over my students’ heads.” I am uncomfortable using the physical punishment suggested to me by our Korean teaching assistants, and do not want to call their parents because I do not consider this to be an issue worthy of such a measure. In the end, I need to determine if this issue is sufficiently important to me to warrant further measures.

3. Discuss a cultural dynamic that you saw playing out in the classroom. How did you respond to this dynamic? What resources could you consult to gain deeper insight into this?

Perhaps the most interesting cultural dynamic which I observed this week in my classrooms was my students’ inclination to speak to each other in Korean at every opportunity. This has occurred in both classes, but is more prevalent with my younger students, the “Brown Camels.” I consistently respond to this by asking the students to repeat what they said in English and reminding them that this is an English classroom in which we speak English whenever possible. I do not want to proscribe Korean in the classroom, because I recognize from working with my older class—the Blue Elephants—that the inclusion of the students’ L1 can be beneficial for language learning.
While the tendency of ELLs to use a common L1 in the EFL classroom is by no means an exclusively Korean phenomenon, I am inclined to label it as a cultural dynamic because of the experiences I have had with the Korean language assistants throughout this week. On every occasion, these assistants speak to each other in Korean, even though they all know English as well. On Thursday I went shopping with two of them, and they continued to speak Korean when speaking to each other, using English only when speaking to me. I understand that this is easier and more comfortable for those students with low English proficiency, but these Koreans have high-level English proficiencies. When I asked someone about it later, he told me that they did this because there might be someone around who would not understand if they spoke in English. When I explained my shopping situation in which this was not the case, he simply shrugged his shoulders and admitted that it was likely done simply because it was easier.
I am attune to this issue because my most fruitful language learning experience occurred this spring while living in Spain and intentionally speaking Spanish in every possible situation. I am convinced that this is the best way to improve one’s fluency in an L2. However, I also want to make effective and respectful use of my Korean teaching assistants. Thus far the majority of their involvement has been through translation. As I proceed in this situation, I desire to find other ways to incorporate my teaching assistants into meaningful classroom interaction so as to minimize the possibility that they will feel ignored or unappreciated. In order to do so, I plan to ask for their input in evaluating the success of classroom activities, soliciting their help in classroom management and incorporating them into teaching activities whenever possible. I will also look for opportunities to discuss effective use of teaching assistants with the other Taylor students who may be having similar experiences. By seeking input from the teaching assistants themselves, I hope to clarify my position and learn from their personal experience with this cultural issue.