How much effort does a teacher need to put in?

Paul Nation, in one of his presentations at Kotesol mentioned that the best vocabulary activities do not require a lot of effort from the teacher.  Does increased effort by the teacher result in increased learning or does it just assuage the nagging guilty feelings that you have about being a good teacher?  After all, it's not the teacher who doesn't know the material, it's the students, so shouldn't they be the ones struggling away to learn it?

I'll extrapolate this modicum and apply it in a broad stroke to all teaching that is not content based.  By this, I mean mostly conversational or speech kinds of classes (and writing to some degree as well).  Of course, if you're teaching a Western culture class, then you'd need to do a significant amount of preparation. 

So your classes? Ideally, the students would leave, having used their brains a significant amount.  And hopefully, your voice would be barely strained because you'd only have talked for a few minutes out of every hour.  And in theory, everything you do in class would be simple enough that you'd never have to take more than a couple minutes to explain it.  If this is the case, I think that the students will have learned at least a little bit.  Or, worked on their fluency, practicing using what they already knew.

A graded reader listening exercise

I went to a session at the Kotesol National Conference with Paul Nation where he talked about the 10 most effective activities for vocab acquisition.  The list included such things as extensive reading, well-designed book work, intensive reading, and speed reading.

The one thing that most interested me, but that I've never done before is the idea of listening to stories.  The idea is to get a graded reader which is at the student's level and read a bit to them each class.  When the story gets exciting, you end it with a "to be continued."  At the beginning, you can read each sentence 2 times, once slowly, and the second time more quickly.  Write words they may not know on the board.  Towards the end of the book, read each sentence only once and a bit more quickly and it becomes more of a fluency exercise vs. a meaning-focused input one.  He recommended "Of Mice and Men" and "The Phantom of the Opera" in graded reader form.

I plan to do this next semester in all my classes.  Perhaps the last 5 minutes of class or so.  I do like the idea of students reading graded readers on their own, but with 9 classes of 20-25 students this just doesn't seem so feasible (money or logistics wise) for me to carry out, which is why I like the idea of me reading the story to them.  I'll keep you updated with results.

Rote Memorization for vocab learning

I went to a couple sessions with Paul Nation, who is generally considered to be the expert on vocabulary acquisition.  I'll probably do another post with some details from him, but the one thing that resonated with me deeply was his emphasis on rote memorization of vocab as an essential part of learning another language.  It's quick, easy and effective.

From my own experience in studying Korean and Greek, I understood intuitively what he was saying.  I've picked up some Korean words simply by being exposed to it to such an extent that it'd be impossible to not remember it.  Hello, here, thank you, it's okay.  I knew the Korean word by sound even before I knew the meaning of it.  But, most of my vocab acquisition in Korea came through flashcards.  And what I know of Greek was exclusively through flashcards.  And it's actually the stuff that I still remember.  The videos I watch or the books I study seem like grains of sand slipping through my fingers.  It's there, somewhere, but not in a place that I can easily access it when I need or want to.  Vocab that I've studied with flashcards is there, right in front of me, and comes to me almost instantly with little recall effort. 

And so I tell my students, especially the ones that actually want to learn English but are quite weak on vocab this but they don't seem that excited by the idea.  For some reason they love to write out the word over and over and make lists with them.  I'm not sure this is so helpful because it's usually not random, which is a much greater challenge for the brain to accomplish.

Anyway, time for me to study!  Where are those flashcards I made?!

Kotesol Conference...the good

So the good things:

1. Networking opportunities abounded.  If you were in the market for a uni job, then this would definitely have been the place to be.

2. The venue was ideal.  Sookmyung university is the perfect place to hold a conference, very close to major public transport points and a plethora of food and drink options just outside the main gate. 

3. The students volunteers were great.  They could speak English very well and were quite helpful.

4. Some engaging presentations.  I particularly enjoyed Andrew Finch on Postmodernism, as well as Paul Nation on Vocab Acquisition. I also attended one about alternative assessment by someone who wasn't a luminary but came away with a few helpful ideas.  I'll talk about them in a later post.

Kotesol Conference...the bad

So I've just returned home from a busy weekend at the annual Kotesol Conference in Seoul.  I liked a lot of things but I have a few complaints.  I'll start with the complaints first and then end on a positive note, since I'm such an optimistic person :)

1. Registration.  Why should your desk be so hard to find?  The one arrow pointing the way could have led up the stairs, or just straight.  I chose straight and was quite lost.

2. Registration, part 2.  Thank your for having my name-tag in a nice, organized pile since I pre-registered.  Except maybe you should have told me that I needed to go around the corner and  down the stairs to pick up my little package.  Good thing I overheard some other confused guy asking what to do. In fact,  it's almost like you could have given me my nametag AND my package at the same time.

3. Speakers.  Hit and miss most definitely.  The conference seemed pretty heavy on people just presenting findings from their research.  Since I'm all about practical, apply it to the classroom kind of thing, I felt extremely frustrated.  And I even asked a couple of questions along this line, and got: "Oh, I don't really know off the top of my head."  So, if someone does all this research about the most effective ways to to teach ESL and can't give me a couple of activities for the classroom, do they really even know what they're talking about?  A total waste of my time.

4. Speakers, part 2.  Why do so many of you have such poor time management skills?  Are you really teachers?  I find this quite hard to believe.  And do you really think reading off a powerpoint is a good way to do a presentation?   And do you think having at least a simple hand-out with your presentation outline or business card with your name and title and email would be a good thing?  No, you don't it seems. 

Anyway, some were so bad that I felt inspired to present at next year's conference.  Seriously.  I'm no star presenter but I'm sure I could a better job than them.  I have an idea about student motivation and reward systems that I'm working on now.

5. Scheduling.  At some points, there were only 3 concurrent sessions.  This is fine.  Except there were over 1000 participants at the event.  Now, basic math would tell me that I should have 3 classrooms with enough seating for at least 333 people in each one.  Perhaps even rooms for 400 or so because you never know what will be popular.  Perhaps you were as baffled as I was to find classrooms with only about 100 seats.  Strange.  And do you really think 50 handouts will be sufficient for all these people?  We could share with our 6 closest seat-mates?

Vocabulary

Check out this book review of Paul Nation's, "Learning Vocabulary in Another Language" for some background information, or better yet, just read the book.

In my own studies of Korean and teaching English, here in Korea I've become increasingly convinced that it's all about vocabulary. The number that gets tossed around frequently is 2000. That is, if you know the 2000 most common words in a language, you can get by with basic conversation and daily life stuff. And of course, this makes sense, because you can know all the grammar but if you don't know the vocab of what you're hearing or reading, you can't make any sense of it. And for writing or speaking, if you don't want to look/sound like a 3 year old, you probably need to know a few more words than they do.

So these days, I've been really into studying vocab, as my form of studying Korean. And now that I know a lot more vocab, grammar is intuitively working itself into my brain as I see and hear the vocab being used around me in the correct grammatical way. I think the best way to learn new vocab is to write out the words on flashcards, with Korean on one side and English on the other. Then start out learning the Korean-English and once you're proficient at that, switch to the harder one, having to reproduce the words in a language that's not your own. Of course, mix up the cards each time you go through them so you don't start to rely on patterns.

And for teaching? I really don't teach vocab in my classes because I'm kind of at a loss as to how to do it. Some stuff comes up in the book each unit, but it's not substantial. And how to test it as well? But I see the importance of it and would like to start. Please help with any ideas!