Teachable Moments

Today was the last class before spring break.  When the students come back, they're going to have a test on past tense verbs.  On Wednesday, Katie put the students in pairs and had them write 2-3 minute speeches.  (She changed it to an individual activity at the end--they weren't doing their own work.)  So today, we spent the whole class period working on the speeches.

Katie and I walked around the room for almost the first hour, monitoring students.  We helped them with pronunciation and grammar.  The next hour, each student gave his or her speech.  In between, Katie went over how the students were graded and had each person watch for one thing.  We had a mini-discussion of strengths and weaknesses after each speaker.

I definitely saw improvement in the students I had monitored, which made me feel great.  There were still areas where I was unsure about the effectiveness of my teaching, though.  Katie and I had a short meeting after class, when I asked her if we had missed anyone as we checked students' work.  There were two students who had more mistakes than the other seven.  Katie said we might have, but she didn't grade them terribly hard.  She keeps telling me that each teacher will have a different style.  I think if I was teaching by myself, I would make a big effort to get to everyone so that grading would be fair.

During the meeting, Katie and I also talked about different forms of assessment.  The students had done very well on the test they took on Monday.  It was controlled practice.  The speeches were much harder, though--she told the class that.  I saw the difference between getting grammar and pronunciation right on a simple listening test and trying to actually talk like a native speaker.

We talked about how to find a balance between the needs of the outgoing Arab men (six students) and the others (one Arab woman, a Korean woman, and a Bhutanese man).  The Arab woman is taking the class for the third time.  She's very shy, but Katie said in class that she is a strong woman for going in front of the class to speak.  The Korean woman is very serious and intrinsically motivated, but it can be hard to get her to write creative stories and speeches.  The Bhutanese man is older than the college-bound students, and set an example today.  He presented a story with a moral: selflessness.  Afterward, the rest of the class sat in awe.  They said the story was "beautiful."  Katie used it as an example: "He doesn't just do this because he has to, it's because he loves it.  You guys should do what you love."

It was really nice for me to witness a teachable moment.  It's one of the things I want to focus on in my professional growth--thinking on my feet.  I think Katie is really good at shaping the young Arabs as people in this culture, and I hope I do that someday, too.  It must be a great motivator for them.

Practicum

Now, I am participating in a practicum at an intensive ESL program at my university.  My class consists of mostly young men from the Middle East, one Arab woman, a Korean woman, and an Asian man.  It's a middle intermediate class on listening and speaking.

I missed the first two classes when I was taking comps, so my first class began with a quick test.  I feel that I learned a lot from my supervisor, Katie (not her real name), about how to introduce a listening test.  She had clearly listened to the CD ahead of time.  She knew that it goes extremely fast, so she played it two or three times in each section.  She also read some of the directions aloud even though they were written for the students.  When I started teaching before graduate school, I never questioned tests or textbooks--but Katie knew the test's flaws.  One section wasn't well organized; that was the one she played the greatest number of times.  Afterward, the students seemed comfortable with how it had gone.

Next, Katie handed out a list of present and past tense English verbs.  The class went over the different forms as well as the rules--there are many of them!  She gave everyone an index card and asked us to write a present tense form of a verb on it.  After checking to make sure that no two people had the same verb, she had us stand in a circle, holding our cards in front of us for everyone to see.

We made a story together.  Each person had to make a sentence with his or her verb in it, in past tense, and repeat all the other sentences from the beginning.  I started it, about a dog.  As the story evolved, the dog became a model student!  I noticed that Katie had been emphasizing American educational values throughout the class--she made a big deal out of telling the students to keep their eyes on their own tests, for example.  The students seemed to have fun making the dog get up early every day, go to class, and do well on his English test (with some prompting from the teacher).  I hope that I can take advantage of teachable moments like that, silly ways to maximize learning opportunities.

Lastly, we got into small groups, each with a baggie full of sentences.  Some were correct, Katie explained, others not.  She had us gamble for pennies, which seemed to motivate the students.  My group consisted of the Korean, the Arab girl, and one Middle Eastern man.  The girls were much quicker than the guy at giving answers.  He would wait for them to say whether the sentence was correct, then still hesitate to give his opinion--I prompted him.  I started only letting the penny go to the first person who got it right, and that seemed to make him go faster.  My reasoning was that culturally, students are used to working together, so he needed guidance to own his individual work--the American way.

Overall, I am very excited about my practicum.  I have enjoyed getting to know the students so far, seeing what Katie does, and trying out some concepts I have learned in my classes.  I look forward to doing some informal research on this class!

Headaches, Armaches and Legaches

Yesterday, Min and I talked about parts of the body.  She drew me a picture and labeled the many different parts in Chinese.  I asked her if there was a song for kids with the parts of the body in Chinese, since there are so many in English (Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes, The Hokey Pokey, etc.).  She said no, but she used to play a game with her son when he was little: she would say a part of the body, and he would touch it.  We played that for a while.


Min had suggested a lesson on parts of the body in case I needed to go to the doctor while in China.  She introduced me to a Chinese friend of hers, a neighbor whose husband is studying here.  As we studied, Min and the friend asked me questions about how tell a doctor what is wrong in English.  For example, people can have a toothache, headache, stomachache, etc. but not an armache or legache.  Why?  I have no idea.  We have to say "My arm/leg aches."

Min said it's cheap and convenient to go to the doctor or hospital in China, and that many Chinese Americans move back for that reason when they grow old.  She could not believe that people have to wait three weeks for an appointment here!   She said it would only cost about $20 to have a dentist pull a tooth, too.

She pointed out that sometimes the same spoken word corresponds to different characters, which is something to watch out for.  She said when she was growing up, she had to take a class in Chinese calligraphy, but her 12-year-old son does not do that now.  It's always interesting for me to learn about Chinese writing, even though I can't read it!

Food

Today's Mandarin lesson was at my place.  At my kitchen table, Min quizzed me on this week's flashcards.  It's helpful to learn how lexemes fit together.  For example, the word "fan," "meal," is contained in the words for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  I realized as I studied the past few days that I had been getting the tones wrong, so I recorded most of today's lesson.  That way, I'll be able to imitate Min's pronunciation in the future.

Min introduced lots of food words, and we did a skit in which she pretended to own a restaurant and I ordered food.  She explained some rules about eating in China: the number of dishes at a formal meal is usually a multiple of four, and the first one is soup.  There are some conventions about the order in which people eat hot or cold dishes, too.  She gave me words for the five tastes, including bitter.  In the summer, Chinese people eat a bitter cucumber-like squash to prevent marks from forming near their mouths due to dehydration.  We agreed that there probably isn't a word for those marks in English, because the Chinese word reflects traditional Eastern medicine.

I'm learning a lot about daily life in China.  For example, there are snack carts in cities.  There are Western restaurants with food such as hamburgers, and people can use knives and forks at  such places.  In fact, it is possible to ask for a fork (instead of chopsticks) at a Chinese restaurant, too.  I'm glad that Min is helping me, because she pointed out something about the word for "waitress" in my guidebook.  Ten years ago, the term listed was acceptable; now it is slang for prostitute!  It's good that I won't use that term out of ignorance!!

On to Grammar

In the week between the last lesson and this one, I tried to practice a lot.  I made flashcards for all the words and expressions Min and I had gone over; I think I quizzed myself every day except one or two.  It felt like taking private music lessons: my teacher would be able to tell however much or little I had repeated these words to myself!

I learned a lot of simple words such as numbers, please, thank you, etc.  There were also full expressions on the list, and those were by far the hardest for me.  If I'm hoping to live in China, I might as well learn some common phrases besides "Do you speak English?" and "Where is the ATM?"  So today, I asked Min to teach me some Chinese grammar.

She gave me a list of personal subject pronouns; there is a "you" plural in Mandarin, and there is a plural suffix that only works for people (on "we," "they," etc.).  There are no case-marking particles, so the word for "ball," for example, would be the same whether it is the subject or the object of a sentence.   Min also wrote down some expressions that are related to words I already know--"Good morning" and "good afternoon," for example, are close to "hello."  Min taught me how to ask how much something costs, and to bargain.  We're planning to try a skit next lesson, after I get a chance to study all my new expressions.

Even though I'm starting to see how Chinese fits together, some aspects of it are still hard.  My phrasebook listed two words for "no," to be used in different contexts.  I asked Min for some practice on how to figure out which word to use when.  She explained that there is an entire verb for negation!  In some ways, Chinese grammar is simpler than English, though: there is no passive voice in Chinese.  Learning these things makes me appreciate the challenges that Chinese students of English have to deal with.

On Writing

The whole time I've been studying Chinese, I have been wondering what it's like for Chinese students of English to learn our writing system.  Learning Chinese characters seems hard to me, but at least they look like pictures of what they mean.  Whenever linguists in my graduate program have talked about English orthography, we have commiserated about how much harder it is than languages like Spanish or French.  People don't have weekly spelling tests in their native tongues all around the world.

 So I asked Min about that, and she said that Chinese students tend to find the English writing system easier than Chinese--at least English has an alphabet!  She began learning English at twelve years old, but most Chinese people today begin at four or five.  They start learning grammar around age twelve.  Min added that she is writing two articles about teaching for publication, and she is getting help from a professor that we both had, so she can write in the American English style.  I hope I can see her original version, in a more Chinese writing style, as well as the revised, American one.  That would be a window into Chinese culture for me.

Similarities and Differences

Today Min and I went over numbers.  I had practiced pronunciation twice with a website since our previous meeting.  It was still hard, though!  To me, counting from 1-10 in Chinese sounded like a song.  When Min asked me what individual numbers were, I really had to go through my song and pick each one out.  Also, she showed me hand gestures for these numbers, saying they are widely used in China.  These gestures are different from American ones--a fist means 10, for example.  Doing the gestures helps me remember the numbers, so I hope I can find a website that helps me review that way.

What I did improve on when I practiced without Min, I think, was reading Pinyin.  She expects more from me than that, though!

There are some interesting patterns in Chinese.  For example, Monday is literally "1 day," Tuesday "2 day," etc.   Also, any number with a hundred and a teen has a one in between.  Two hundred eleven in Mandarin, then, is literally "two hundred one eleven."  Min pointed out that Chinese syntax is very different from English, and we noticed that Mandarin has no copular verb.  I expected to find myriad differences between the two languages.  Yet so far, I haven't come across any phonemes that are absent from English--in fact, Mandarin even has English retroflex /r/, which is rare cross-linguistically.  I wonder if that will help me teach Chinese EFL learners to distinguish between /r/ and /l/ in the future.

Min had some questions for me about English and American culture.  She wanted to take a pragmatics class, but unfortunately the pragmatics professor at our school is away this semester.  She said she understands graduate students and professors when she has conversations with them, but she can't understand undergraduates.  So she asked me to teach her some slang, and I told her she could come with examples of words she doesn't understand in the future.  I gave her a copy of our college newspaper, which has slang in columns sometimes.  

She also inquired about what parts of the human hand are called in English.  When we went over the names of the fingers, she asked why the pinky finger is called that.  I laughed--I didn't know!  That's just what kids are told in this country!  I'm sure there are moments like that when she teaches me, too.  She said Chinese children are taught that if they don't say "excuse me" when they ask for directions, the person they ask will give them wrong directions on purpose.  Politeness seems very important in Chinese culture.