Edited Class Notes IV

I’ve missed nearly two weeks of notes because of a sudden change in course. Briefly, the management decided that ALL students would undertake C&G examinations at the beginning of May. This means that our methodical plod through International Express was replaced by urgent trotting through the C&G achiever book – which isn’t a text really suitable for communicative learning, so I’ve been spending time adapting the materials for classroom use.

This week is testing week at the end of block one, so I also had a test to design.

And we’ve managed to move from the temporary-temporary classrooms to the temporary ones.

Yesterday we had testing. Today I’m having the students re-write work for their portfolios – which I should have had in place earlier, but am instituting this week.

A standard error correction was introduced last week, too. This morning, the students got their first work back marked according to the code. The new classroom is nice and big in the local style so we able to have a table at the back to do one-to-one error correction and discussion, whilst the rest of the class get on with other work. It’s all beginning to shape up nicely.

So much so that I think we can dispense with the unkind comical names now – a teacher’s self defence against a prima facie rather daunting class. We are all on-side now, as it were. However, I still need to maintain anonymity for blogging and academic purposes. And, I do not want to edit past entries because that would feel like dishonesty and would anyway mask a commonly used but little discussed psychological technique.

So from now on, Old Gomez is “Nouri”; Fester is Abu Hamza; Young Gomez is El Mansur; Pugsley is Farouk and Mustafa – always a kind man who didn’t need satirising – is still Mustafa. I’ll maintain those identities in the research I do for my MA.

Which brings me to the placement test. The difference in marks between candidates is tiny – about 3%. And the errors are all in the same area, (grammar – the present perfect and question forms). Which means that the teaching of those points has not succeeded.

Working through the corrections for the assignments it’s clear that Abu Hamza in particular needs to work on articles. And also basic concepts of sentence structure, (S>V>O), and tenses. It's interesting in that it raises some potentially big questions about communicative teaching: he would say that he never learned any grammar during his time in England, and the methodology employed was no doubt communicative. Is there the glimmer of a case here for overt grammar teaching for some learners, in some contexts?

Edited Class Notes III

Stage	Content	Time (all approx)
Intro	Lesson Aims	5m
1	Used To extra materials	5m
2	Sunday’s vocab.: hangman;	10
3	IE Unit 2 (to p23)	120m
4	Present Perfect Homework intro	5m
5	Subject/Object Questions homework	5m

Punctuality at the start of the lesson and at the teabreak has not improved. Indeed, after the 30 minute teabreak, some friend of the class, not a student here, joined them in the classroom and seemed to be ready to join the class. I’m beginning to wonder about the college’s approach to punctuality, my own, and the bigger pedagogic picture.

That apart, the lesson proceeded very well. I’ve found a strategy to prevent Old Gomez from taking us down paths of getting me to give detailed, time wasting explanations of grammatical rules. Any grammar that comes up, that he wants to explore above and beyond the scope necessary for this class, I copy the relevant section from a grammar text book, and give it to him for homework. This should ease his anxiety, and save precious hours in the class room.

The class had indicated that they felt that listening was one of their weak skills. I do not consider that it is, and had told them so. We had agreed, therefore, that I would let them have more idea of what would be expected of them in the exam, and today I played a section of the sample listening test; (I didn’t want to give them too much of this because we’ve only got two or three sample papers, and need to avoid queering the pitch for mock exams). Unfortunately, I blundered in not giving them the accompanying paper test – and the sound only file was perhaps confusing. However, they did seem a little reassured, and I’ll make up for my blunder next week by giving a very short extract from the paper.

All of the work I’m doing on anxiety mitigation appears to be bearing fruit. They were able to agree that we leapfrog some sections of the book which have no direct relevance to them (there's a whole lot of listening in International Express Intermediate Unit 2 – an excessive amount, I’d say).

We finished with a discussion about homework. Most produced some, though not all, of what they’d been asked for. Mustafa produced all of it. They promised, sincerely and apologetically to have it done by next week. They were frankly rather charming about this and I was disarmed. I explained that it was vital that they did homework, and indeed it was part of my contract with the company that I give it and chase it up. (I’m not entirely sure if this is 100% true, but I have a feeling there’s something along those lines in my contract). If I didn’t do it therefore, I’d be in breach of contract and flying back to England. “Don’t fly! Don’t fly!” chorused Old Gomez and Fester

Edited Class Notes II

Outline LP:

Intro	Lesson Aims	5m
1	Explain error correction proposal; discuss	5m
2	Yesterday’s vocab.: hangman; gap fill; new sentences	30m
3	IE Unit 2 (to p19)	90m
4	Set up writing assignment	30m approx

The class were a couple of minutes late, and I let this pass. After the concept of Lesson Aims was introduced they appeared to be relieved and Mustafa said that during their whole time in England they had never been given a “map” of their studies, and that it was very important to them to have one.

The error correction procedure was outlined and approved.

We began unit two of the SB, which “reviewed” the present perfect. This led to us getting mired down in an explanation of this tense, which the whole class seemed to understand only vaguely. (I have copied some exercises for their homework.)

We got into similar difficulties with used to + verb, which is inadequately presented in International Express.

The class claimed to believe that the homework due today was actually due tomorrow.

I gave the second instalment of the writing assignment (significant people).

Edited Class Notes I

The whole class were ten minutes late. I heard them outside chatting and laughing. I didn’t say anything, but marked them late.

We worked on explaining the curriculum, using a worksheet I’d prepared.

The teabreak stretched out to half an hour. Again, they were outside the classroom, but I did not try to round them up because the ill-feeling and resentment this causes is counter-productive.

We then worked on the background to their writing assignment. This is based on the City and Guilds’ descriptor, “I can write descriptions of personally significant events, people or experiences.” They have had and easy time so far regarding homework, and the plan is to get them up to speed by breaking this descriptor into three tasks over the course of the week. The first one, given out today and due back tomorrow is: Write a description of a personally significant event.

Festa objected that we had not used the book all day. I’ll spend much of tomorrow with it to ease his anxiety.

Another source of anxiety is error correction. Both Young Gomez and Old Gomez told me during this lesson that I “must tell them when they make mistakes”. I had thought of telling them that error-correction has produced thousands of academic words, but instead I’ll do a ten minute lesson on the point[1].

NB: I'm going to start blogging the notes I write about the classes I teach. They are edited for anonymity. I've started to write these as part of my lesson prep this week for several reasons:

Professional: To give me a space to reflect on the learning that has been, and should be taking place. To identify problems. To make a note of agreements and learner requests in the classroom.

Academic: This class will hopefully yield a Second Language Acquisition research paper for my MA, and this is part of the data collection process.

Arse-covering: I am acutely aware that failing students often blame their teacher, and I'm trying to paint a round unvarnished and contemporaneous picture of the class day by day, should it prove necessary in the future for the purposes of a what-the-fuck-went-wrong? managerial post mortem. Inshallah, this self-preservation motive will prove unnecessary. The need to arse-cover notwithstanding, I hope I'm being honest and objective.

Finally, I should like to explain that my rather unkind nicknames for several of the students are a common teaching phenomenon, a bit like picturing the office bully in his bath: a humorous psychological safety valve. I'd be mortified if they or anyone else put two and two together. This is an anonymous blog after all.

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[1] After talking it over with DJ, will instead use a notebook to overtly mark down any errors, and set aside ten (?) mins at end of lesson.