More of the same, but better

This week has been interesting so far.  My classes have their writing assignments due next Monday or Tuesday depending on their class time.  To prepare for the papers I have been spending about a half hour per class teaching and preparing writing.  This requires some background.

It should probably be mentioned that the university has cut back on the writing requirement.  Previously, students had to write two short assignments during the semester.  This has been reduced to one assignment that counts for only five percent of the grade.  For perspective, attendance counts as for ten percent, twice as important as writing.  Although this means the school thinks writing is not important I do think it is a necessary skill. All of the teachers constantly receive horrible emails from the students, basically illegible, horrible formatting, etc.  This, I feel, reflects as poorly on the school as it does the students, so I took it upon myself to help correct some of the major problems.  Writing a clear email has been the assignment this quarter.

Teaching writing has been alright.  It started with a lot of examples and fixed expressions, some stuff about format.  This week they actually got to writing and I think it worked well.  I taught them to outline (a skill that is surprisingly weak) last time and today they wrote their emails freehand.  The first class I messed up a little bit.  I only gave them oral instructions and wrote a little on the board.  This proved to be a mistake. 

I needed to show them paragraph format.

but many kept writing sentences.

like this.

I had to correct students one on one and even then I don't think it was very effective.  In later classes I used PPT and examples generated in word and projected onto the board.  This worked great and seemed to help the whole class.

A nice thing that came out of the lesson was that I was able to do a lot of one on one work with the students.  Working with them personally was a nice change and it seems to help them more.  They were asking more questions this way, and this was both a great way to teach them and to get feedback on things I may have forgotten, overlooked, or not presented clearly.  Space was a challenge because of the seating arrangement but I managed to meet with each student and give some corrections.  I did my best to balance the time but had some difficulties doing this because the good students had so many questions and the poor students needed so much guidance.

We also worked on short skits today in the classes.  In one class the students needed to make a skit using words from a book chapter (the were related to crime, so there were many murders) the other needed to make an ad for some product.  This required them to work in groups of four or five and work cooperatively to produce a script.  They managed to do this pretty well and they required very little feedback from me.  Some of the groups required more facilitation than others because not everyone would contribute (or the group was dominated by one or two stronger-skilled students) or they would slip into a lot of Korean, or just to get them focused and working on the task at hand.  Usually I just needed to use some referential questions to get the conversation going.  Occasionally, I would use examples or modeling to get them going.  I gave almost no feedback on grammar or spelling unless it affected the meaning of what they were trying to say.

The result was that the groups were able to negotiate the meanings of the statements they contributed to the skit.  The generated a lot of English sentences and gave each other a lot of correction and sometimes even scaffolding to create what they wanted to say. 

The skit performance was really good.  The students spoke well and were very engaged.  After each performance I would ask the class or individuals some display questions to see if they understood the skit and follow up with a few referential questions about why things happened or about an opinion about something that happened.

All together I think everything went well.  I spoke very little in a monological manner.  I managed to engage in dialog with all of the students in my classes.  The only problem was that I did almost none of the book work that I have to do.  I'll get that done next week.