Out of the book

A couple things went well today.  Got outside of the book, fleshed out my inductive/deductive approach a bit, managed a lot of student interaction and gave them a lot of PPIPP, was able to work with some of the weaker students one-on-one and only ended up a day behind.

The major success today was that I got outside of the book.  This is one thing I have been struggling with all semester and I finally made the space for myself.  Some of the book is being glossed over, some foisted on the students.  This is especially true with the vocabulary.  I have been going over the listening and definition exercises in the book with the students, but today it went very quickly.  For the idiom definition section of the book I made sure they had the correct definitions and told them what I expected of them: they must able to find meaning by using the context.  I pointed out that the test may demand something more, and that was beyond my power.  This is a pain in the ass and I hate the standard test already, although I am fairly certain I will apply my own grading criteria to correct its inequities.

After that cursory stuff I was able to devote almost the whole day to the grammar lessons and use.  Much if this is stuff they kind of know already, so I gave some demonstrations for activation, asked some open questions to get feedback about their level of understanding and for them to generate the rules. This was easiest in the class about Can and Could as ability modals.  Students knew other modals, used the book exercise to identify past and present use, I expanded the book work to include the form of the main verb, they could generate simple sentences and from all of this I wrote out the rules and sentence structure on the board in a clear and explicit manner.  I really like working this way.  I find it has a good rhythm and seems to construct itself.  The activation always seems to reinforce other aspects of grammar and help make connections to other forms.  Students are also able to make contributions, and I have found them to be generally helpful in part because they are often simpler. (James mentioned “be + able to” as having the same meaning; in the class on count and non-count nouns Junbeum pointed out that when you cut an apple into pieces apple becomes non-count noun.  Both insights were helpful to the class and to me as an instructor and would not have been realized if we just read the book.) 

With the rules established I gave them some very focused and partial practice to do using the sentence structure I wrote on the board.  This they worked on individually for a few minutes before finding other classmates to interview and find out about.  This was not timed and that turned out to be a blessing.  It allowed me to identify the students who struggled with exercise since they remained seated and to give them some specific help with problems they had while still practicing (not all could be resolved) it also allowed me to pair up the stronger students with these weaker students to give both some challenge.  Naturally the stronger students had finished first and had already practiced with one another.

I don’t think I was able to get to truly productive work today (the plan was to have them report on what they learned from others, but we ran out of time)  but we are pretty well set up for next class.  And only a day behind!

There were a few other things I wanted to add:

-          This method was a lot more interesting.  Class was fun and boisterous and time flew by.  This is definitely how I want to run the class.

-          Students were highly engaged and mostly motivated.  They were all engaged in much more useful and practical interactions today.

-          I had a major worry this morning when I saw that my notes from last semester were geared to the second writing assignment which has been discontinued.  To make up for this I prepared two assignments for each class, but only conducted one.  I am over-prepared for next time.