A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how the standard practice of forcing beginners to answer "in sentences" seemed to devoid the grammar of meaning.
It was inspired by trying to teach past continuous (he was running etc) and revise times (target: at five o'clock, he was running in the park, at half past eight, he was eating dinner in the dining room etc). Unfortunately, the weaker students would look at a time and say "it's five o'clock", and they would look at the action and say "he's running", and they would look at the location and say "he's in the park". The he's, it's etc structure was drummed so heavily into their heads that they didn't dare diverge from it.
This week, I observed a related problem, as I was giving an exam to some secondary school pupils.
They're preparing for a Trinity GESE exam (spoken English), and one of the features of the level they're at is that they're expected to answer to prompts that aren't actually questions. "Tell me about a time when you..." etc. This is considered a more advanced function because it requires abstraction.
But isn't it true that when we teach students to "answer in sentences", we do so by training them to recycle the words of the question...? Well, guess what. My students were regurgitating my words. I wrote Write about a past holiday, and many of the answers started In my past holiday... Obviously this is not natural English.
Is it the student's fault? Is the student incapable of abstraction? Certainly not! Instead, it seems to me that we as teachers actually train abstraction out of our students as soon as we start this "answer in sentences" thing, because it's a skill they have already learned in their first language, and we actively militate against them using it in the new language.
On the occasions where we do answer in sentences, natural language often uses non-symmetrical forms, such as answering What is your name? with I'm Niall.
Our second-language instruction, then, seems to teach language in a way that is quite contrary to nature....
Showing posts with label classroom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label classroom. Show all posts
06 February 2013
A corpus in the class...
This week I got my first opportunity to try out corpus linguistics in the classroom. It was a class of technically-oriented students (computers and media), and it was a small enough group that I could get them all in front of a computer for a bit, so I thought I'd give it a go.
(See below for a brief summary of what corpus linguistics actually is if you don't already know.)
I didn't think to check beforehand whether they understood the concept of regular expressions (a computing term, not a linguistic one). Not a major mistake. It turned out that they haven't been taught that in their courses, so I ended up teaching a little bit about regular expressions. There's nothing wrong with teaching a bit of computing in an English class, as long as you are teaching it through English, after all!
I didn't prepare enough good examples to pull out anything interesting from, as I wanted to work with whatever the students suggested. Why? Well, the whole point of corpus linguistics is that it's full of things you don't expect, and wouldn't be able to guess. With the first class, this resulted in findings so dull that I can't even remember what words we used. But in the second, someone said "amazing" (which may well have been a sarcastic reaction to my geeky enthusiasm for corpus linguistics!) and I searched for it in the British National Corpus. As I was looking at the computer screen and reading out a few of the words appearing around "amazing", I spotted a pattern: beach... bar... hotel... wait! The word "amazing" appears very frequently in adverts for package holidays. You learn something new every day.
So the spontaneous examples from the class are definitely a good thing, but next time I'll have a list of other examples that show interesting results.
Overall, though, I felt the lesson went really well for a first attempt. I focused on two tasks, the first of which was shamelessly ripped off of the first assessed task I carried out with a corpus back at uni: checking the frequency of occurence of must, have to, and 've got to in English, then drilling down to see differences in register. The second task was far more freeform and exploratory, asking them to look for common phrasal verbs. It was far more of an open-ended task than I would usually set, and I was quite unsure of myself setting it. It worked well with the first group and not so well with the second. Basically, there wasn't enough support to kick off the phrasal verb task. I should have given them a more gradual introduction by starting with a specific phrasal verb, then asking them to find phrasal verbs with a specific verb, and then verbs that go with a particular particle, then leave them to explore openly for the last 20 minutes or so.
But, yeah... if I ever find myself in front of a class who that sort of thing would appeal to, and where the facilities are available, I'll give it another go.
What is corpus linguistics?
"Corpus linguistics" is the analysis of a large body (corpus) of texts using computers. It allows us to search for patterns in language statistically, rather than relying on our intuition or simply trusting the grammar book. You use a piece of software called a concordancer to extract the information, and there's a great concordancer free on Brigham Young University's website, with access to several different English-language corpora, as well as Spanish and Portuguese.
(See below for a brief summary of what corpus linguistics actually is if you don't already know.)
I didn't think to check beforehand whether they understood the concept of regular expressions (a computing term, not a linguistic one). Not a major mistake. It turned out that they haven't been taught that in their courses, so I ended up teaching a little bit about regular expressions. There's nothing wrong with teaching a bit of computing in an English class, as long as you are teaching it through English, after all!
I didn't prepare enough good examples to pull out anything interesting from, as I wanted to work with whatever the students suggested. Why? Well, the whole point of corpus linguistics is that it's full of things you don't expect, and wouldn't be able to guess. With the first class, this resulted in findings so dull that I can't even remember what words we used. But in the second, someone said "amazing" (which may well have been a sarcastic reaction to my geeky enthusiasm for corpus linguistics!) and I searched for it in the British National Corpus. As I was looking at the computer screen and reading out a few of the words appearing around "amazing", I spotted a pattern: beach... bar... hotel... wait! The word "amazing" appears very frequently in adverts for package holidays. You learn something new every day.
So the spontaneous examples from the class are definitely a good thing, but next time I'll have a list of other examples that show interesting results.
Overall, though, I felt the lesson went really well for a first attempt. I focused on two tasks, the first of which was shamelessly ripped off of the first assessed task I carried out with a corpus back at uni: checking the frequency of occurence of must, have to, and 've got to in English, then drilling down to see differences in register. The second task was far more freeform and exploratory, asking them to look for common phrasal verbs. It was far more of an open-ended task than I would usually set, and I was quite unsure of myself setting it. It worked well with the first group and not so well with the second. Basically, there wasn't enough support to kick off the phrasal verb task. I should have given them a more gradual introduction by starting with a specific phrasal verb, then asking them to find phrasal verbs with a specific verb, and then verbs that go with a particular particle, then leave them to explore openly for the last 20 minutes or so.
But, yeah... if I ever find myself in front of a class who that sort of thing would appeal to, and where the facilities are available, I'll give it another go.
What is corpus linguistics?
"Corpus linguistics" is the analysis of a large body (corpus) of texts using computers. It allows us to search for patterns in language statistically, rather than relying on our intuition or simply trusting the grammar book. You use a piece of software called a concordancer to extract the information, and there's a great concordancer free on Brigham Young University's website, with access to several different English-language corpora, as well as Spanish and Portuguese.
05 February 2013
Groupwork in action...?
So a couple of days ago I commented on the idea of peer instruction, and noted how it said that peer explanation worked because a student who had just learned something recently was often able to explain it to a peer. I compared this with my rant against groupwork from a year or so ago.
I found myself feeling more open to groupwork, now that I had a context, and when I found myself in a room with fewer computers than I expected and an internet-based lesson plan, I needed to test my confidence in it.
And yes, the first group seemed to get something out of it. One of the students with the best English was sitting with one of the guys with a pretty basic level, and he was bringing him up. Most of the pairs were working cooperatively and discovering stuff. Success!... I thought.
The second group weren't as good. Every pair seemed to have one person working and the other doing nothing. Or one person checking their email, or playing a game, or browsing the net.
But I can't say that this was due to the "groupwork" thing, because there was a rather major difference between the two groups: most of the second group bring a laptop with them, and so they weren't working on the uni desktop machines. Was it the seating arrangements, the screen size or maybe the lack of mice (everyone was using the touchpad) that made the whole thing seem more "solo" to them? Or was it simply that "my laptop" is "my territory"?
This is the group I'm most likely to experiment with in terms of teamwork, though, as they seem to be a fairly tight group and work on lots of activities together in other classes. It will be interesting to challenge my own preconceptions.
I found myself feeling more open to groupwork, now that I had a context, and when I found myself in a room with fewer computers than I expected and an internet-based lesson plan, I needed to test my confidence in it.
And yes, the first group seemed to get something out of it. One of the students with the best English was sitting with one of the guys with a pretty basic level, and he was bringing him up. Most of the pairs were working cooperatively and discovering stuff. Success!... I thought.
The second group weren't as good. Every pair seemed to have one person working and the other doing nothing. Or one person checking their email, or playing a game, or browsing the net.
But I can't say that this was due to the "groupwork" thing, because there was a rather major difference between the two groups: most of the second group bring a laptop with them, and so they weren't working on the uni desktop machines. Was it the seating arrangements, the screen size or maybe the lack of mice (everyone was using the touchpad) that made the whole thing seem more "solo" to them? Or was it simply that "my laptop" is "my territory"?
This is the group I'm most likely to experiment with in terms of teamwork, though, as they seem to be a fairly tight group and work on lots of activities together in other classes. It will be interesting to challenge my own preconceptions.
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