Teaching English in Korea - ESL blog

Lesson on Chinese superstitions

I. Overview of the lesson
The lesson, titled ‘Chinese Superstitions’, is designed for 10 adult students, whose overall proficiency range from intermediate low to intermediate mid. By the end of the lesson, students should be familiar with vocabulary related to superstitions and be able to ask for and give opinions, following teacher’s model. The warm-up stage begins with students guessing the meaning of the keyword ‘superstition’. Then, students are asked to think of words related to superstitions which are collected on the whiteboard in a mind map. Finally, students are asked to describe their favorite Korean superstition in a think-pair-share activity. In the presentation stage, students listen to a Chinese woman who gives examples of famous Chinese superstitions and explains why she thinks they are popular among the Chinese, even today. While listening, students are asked to perform a listening task of ‘matching’ in groups of 4 as a competition. Afterwards, students engage in speaking activity where they, in pairs, take turns asking questions about the underlying meaning of each Chinese superstition, e.g. “Why do you think Chinese use red envelopes when giving money?” The activity begins with the teacher modeling the required language.

II. Theoretical justification of the activities
1) Facilitative Anxiety
Facilitative anxiety is promoted in three dimensions; inclusion of a competitive student activity, lots of TSST, and a frequent use of open type questions. The listening task is given as a competition (without a reward), in which groups must try to complete the matching task as quickly and as accurately as possible. The competition factor helps students stay alert, pay better attention to the listening text and more prepared to participate in the group work. However, because it’s a competition among groups and not an individual one, chances are low that the anxiety about the competition will turn into a debilitative one. As Krashen claims, group activities lower the affective filter (or the anxiety level) of the students. Second, TSST is a frequently used classroom interaction in this lesson. For example, at the very beginning of the lesson, a TSST is used for having students guess the meaning of the word superstition which creates more anxiety than having students come up with the definition in pairs or groups, as TSST requires individuals to create language on their own. In addition, in order to encourage more student talk in the classroom, the lesson involves a lot of open type questions, especially in the speaking activity, when students are asked to explain why they think a certain Chinese superstition has a certain meaning, which creates higher anxiety for the students than closed questions.
2) Intrinsic Motivation
With regards to promoting intrinsic motivation, the lesson is successful in some aspects and unsuccessful in other aspects. In the warm-up stage, students are given the opportunity to personalize the topic, when the teacher makes them do a think-pair-share activity about their favorite Korean superstitions. However, although the topic is not of an academic nature, the context is set in China and in this sense, the lesson could be demotivating for those unfamiliar with the Chinese culture or those uninterested in learning about the Chinese culture. The listening text, the main input in this lesson, mainly describes the different Chinese superstitions and does not have advice, opinion or conflict which can make it more motivating for the students. However, the listening task is a positive factor because according to Malone and Lepper, competitions, where learners feel satisfaction by comparing their performance favorably to that of others, create an intrinsically motivating environment. The communication activity in this lesson, where students exchange opinions in pairs, has a clear opinion gap. However, clear goals are not given in the speaking activity.
3) Input Hypothesis
Making input comprehensible is important for this student profile, because their language proficiency levels vary slightly. In this lesson, the language input is mainly provided in two ways, through the listening text and teacher talk in the classroom. In order to make the listening text more comprehensible to students, key vocabulary is introduced in the warm-up stage. Because without pre-teaching key vocabulary such as ‘superstition’, which is in fact the topic of the whole lesson, students are expected to have a hard time understanding the listening text. More importantly, the warm-up activates students’ linguistic and content schemata, and as a result students can use their background knowledge or experience to better comprehend the listening text. Linguistic schema is activated by creating a mind-map of words related to superstitions such as ‘fortune’. Content schema is activated by having students think about Korean superstitions. Pictures relating to superstitions of China are prepared as lesson materials and are posted on the wall in the front of the classroom. This will also assist students in comprehending input in the presentation stage.
Throughout the whole lesson, the teacher uses various techniques to make teacher talk more comprehensible. In the beginning of each stage, the teacher uses the technique of ‘preview’ by telling the students what will happen next. In all activities and tasks, key parts of the directions being given by the teacher are repeated or rephrased in more easy language. As for the speaking activity, the teacher gives an example of the questions and the answers to be created by the students, such as “Why do you think Chinese use red envelopes when giving money?” and “I think it’s because red is a lucky color in China.”, and then have students repeat the modeled language chorally to make sure that directions for the activity are comprehensible to all students.

III. Conclusion
The lesson plan was evaluated based on three ideas from SLA, namely ‘facilitative anxiety’, ‘intrinsic motivation’, and Krashen’s ‘Input Hypothesis’. The analysis shows that the lesson is successful to a certain extent, in encouraging facilitative anxiety and providing comprehensible input. However, the lesson requires more improvements from an ‘intrinsic motivation’ perspective.

Submitted by Hae Jin