I’d like to introduce my class, which was 4 years ago, with 8 students who had entered one of foreign language high schools in Seoul. They were intelligent, enthusiastic about learning itself, and, needless to say, much interested in English. As foreign high school students, they seemed to acquire a great amount of their second language, English. However, because they wanted to learn English grammar intensively, I came to teach them Saturdays and Sundays for 1 and half hours each. While they studied and learned a lot about English, they seemed to feel something unclear in their language. Thus, I was asked to teach them especially a bit high-leveled English grammar intensively. One day, I taught the subjunctive deductively like Korean typical lesson; teacher oriented with students taking notes, sitting through the class time, and passively answering questions. For the students to follow the lesson easily, I got them to preview before class as usual. While explaining the rules of the subjunctive, I tried to make an authentic example for each rule in order for them to receive and acquire comprehensible input and for the input to last long (even though that time I didn’t know the concept of making input comprehensible).
Ⅱ. Theoretical justification of the activities
Right hemisphere participation
Since they all were high school students, it is obvious that they passed the critical period of puberty, which means, according to the cognitive theory, the right hemisphere didn’t take main part in language learning any more because the right hemisphere tends to harden around puberty. Therefore, they studied language by analyzing or categorizing, which is the way the left hemisphere of the brain works in, rather than standing ambiguity, or acquiring the language by emotions specialized in the right hemisphere like the way they learned the first language when they were little. I guess that due to this natural phenomenon, they couldn’t ignore the ambiguity of their second language, so they wanted to learn or fill it through analyzing or learning directly.
The affective filter, anxiety, and motivation
I think that the majority of them had moderate affective filter, which means low anxiety and fairly high intrinsic motivation. The rationale for the opinion is that my class was not much relevant to attaining high scores or any extrinsic prizes and they were apparently interested in improving their English capabilities. In addition, they seemed to enjoy taking my classes and making their own sentences in spite of a few opportunities, and enthusiastically asked questions which were not related to the day’s context showing their interest in the language. Likewise, the more they learned or acquired the more motivated and the more pleased they looked. However, one student who was the best in almost all subjects showed very high anxiety about his test scores at school and also English acquisition. Unlike Krashen’s hypothesis, he continued the position of the top at school and improved his language faster than any other student in the class by studying harder and harder.
Input and Output
I conveyed the knowledge or rules of the subjunctive mostly in the deductive way. Even though giving the chances to make their own sentences correctly and some authentic examples to them played comprehensible input, my lesson was not really making input comprehensible because the input of the lesson was focused on the rules of the subjunctive. That the students were given time to create and speak their own sentences according to the learned language probably played a good role in the hypothesis testing. However, there is no doubt that it was not enough for the students to practice the new language and find out and fix problems in their language. For comprehensible input and the hypothesis testing and noticing gaps in the output hypothesis, I should’ve asked the students to speak more and given more opportunities to make errors in the use of their language.
Ⅲ. Conclusion
The lesson I introduced was conducted 4 years ago when I didn’t realize there exist a number of factors and methods to improve or hinder second language learning. Although I can’t deny there is no perfect method for everybody, I now believe the typical Korean teaching style like I did in the class must be changed. It couldn’t make a big change overnight because teachers, parents, as well as students need time to get accustomed to it. For example, when one of my friends, an English teacher in a private institute too, tried to use part of the methodology she’s learned recently, asking the students ‘Now, guess what the meanings of these words would be with your partner.’ the students didn’t do pair work. Instead, they stared at the teacher, my friend, with the face perplexed. They had never done pair work, group work, brainstorming, etc. at least in private institutes, so they didn’t know exactly what they should do. The instruction was very simple though. Likewise, we should be careful of making and performing our lesson plans and should apply a lot of aspects such as time, multiple intelligence, input, output, anxiety, methods, etc. to class prudently.
Submitted by Jin
Posted by James Trotta at December 16, 2006 8:21 AMESL blog is one of many Blogs for learning English & teaching English. Translation services information.