This morning I was teaching a Buisness English class (pre-intermediate level, 60 minutes long, one student turns up on time the rest appear over the course of the next hour session) on presenting visual information. The lesson included identifying the names of certain charts/diagrams, filling in some information on the charts and also learning some vocabulary to describe the charts/information on the chart. The lesson was running slightly faster than I anticipated and so I set a final task of getting students to draw a personal graph/pie chart and then describe the information on it. This could be about business or their personal life and so unsurprisingly they choose their personal life (often a nice change after a work intensive lesson). What was very interesting was what they choose to display in their graphs.
Most choose to go for pie charts of some sort, this was possibly because I made an example of the break down of the lesson including the 15% where there was only 1 student, or possibly some other factor. One chose to show how she spends here time during an average day. I instantly realised that this would have been a great task to set and would have been really interesting to see how similar/different peoples days were, what their responsibilities at work were (vocab we had just looked at) and also what they did in their spare time. I made a quick note on some paper so that I would make a more permanent note.
The other was a students break down of the lesson time. He identified the amount of time spent talking in Russian, the amount of time I spent talking, the amount of time we did feedbacks/checking answers and also the amount of time spent on communicative activities (though he didn't put it like that). The good point was that his chart said that I spent very little time talking! (always encouraging when the aim is to get the students to speak as much as possible). The bad was how much time he identified as Russian speaking time.
After I saw his chart (which luckily he didn't show the rest of the class) I had to accept that he was roughly right, there was a lot of time spent speaking in Russian. This was partially due to the presence of a student who very rarely attends, when she does she is late and also gets very embarrassed about being behind the other students (which doesn't help with her attendance record). There is also another student who with the exception of saying an English word or doing a communicative task REFUSES to speak in English. I have tried explaining to her the benefits of spending as much time as possible talking in English and reminded her during lessons but she still refuses to budge. From speaking to other teachers this seams to be a pre-existing condition and problem that must be tackled. In addition to that the student who came up with this Pie chart also often discusses in Russian (which does of course raise the question, Does he actually think 30% is too much time or not enough??).
Having previously only taught in a Multi-lingual context (with perhaps only a couple people speaking the same language, who were easy to separate.) the issue of L1 (first langauge) is one that has certainly been a struggle to cope with. At first I almost tore my hair out if a single word was uttered in L1 (even when children who could barely speak a word of English spoke in russian) but then there has been the question of have I now gone too far the other way and accepted defeat.
In an effort to help understand why students speak in L1 and when it can be helpful I picked up a few articles and will write a post [series of posts] covering my thoughts on L1, when it's useful, when not, and how we can maximise the amount of English our students learn through careful use/tactics to avoid L1.
No comments:
Post a Comment