I didn't expect too much from evaluations, but I was looking forward to some useful comments since most of my students are teachers. I really didn't get too many useful ones, but one has stuck in my mind: "Don't orget about the low-level students like me".
It's always an issue with a group that has mixed proficiencies (as most groups do). We have to remember to teach to the weaker students since they need our help more than the stronger students (and the stronger students might get something out of the class as we teach to the weaker students anyway).
Well it may be a few more days before I'm back on schedule as I still have about half of my 110 SLA midterms to correct. I know I won't be winning any awards for most updated blog here (although possibly on my travel blog which I do update daily or more) The 15 objective questions don't take much time, but the 3 essays are another story.
Anyway, it's always nice to read good work and I jsut awarded a 99 to a good student who performed really well. Interestingly, her quiz score was in the A- or B+ range so you wouldn't normally expect a near-perfect midterm. Reading her essays made my day. Hopefully that will give me the motivation I need to do the 50 or so I have left...
Pamela Rogers, 28 and a former elementary school teacher, spent six months in jail for having sex with a 13-year-old student. Recently, she was arrested again, for allegedly communicating with the boy on MySpace.
As a warm-up for a lesson on coursebook evaluation today we were reviewing 6 principles of CLT, one of them being "Students discover their own learning styles and strategies." Seemed pretty standard so I didn't give any special consideration on how to explain that one. This was supposed to be a review.
In one class, it was. But another class had no idea what this meant. I explained, "Think about MI and right brain activation. A book should encourage students to reflect on how they learn best." I checked.
A student said, "So a book has to activate multiple intelligences?".
I answered, "That's only half of it. Students also have to think about which intelligences work best for them."
They had trouble getting this concept. I tried giving a few examples but I could see I wasn't getting anywhere. Giving exmaples is especially hard since so few books do this well. I agve the example of students taking a MI quiz or discussiong learning styles.
We still didn't seem to be getting anywhere. We worked through the entire ten minute break but no luck. So I'll probably try again later. Any advice? How would you explain this concept of CLT and relate it to coursebook evaluation?
I'm sure that you've heard the old language teaching will be obsolete in 20 years line. A Star Trek-like universal translator will make interpersonal communication between people who speak different languages easy.
Of course the problem has been that machine translations have trouble with many aspects of language. You have to program so many language nuances into a machine (for exmaple "he's a heavy smoker" - what does heavy mean in that sentence?).
Here's an online translator, but the translation is still done by real people. I typed in "Hi, my name is Jim." I know it's a stupid test... and said I wanted to translate from English to Korea. The price:
Text Translation by Non-Native translators 0.30 USD
Text Translation by Native translators 0.40 USD
Text Translation by Professional translators 0.50 USD
A longer text (the rules for the travel writing contest I blogged about a while back) would be:
Text Translation by Non-Native translators 6.96 USD
Text Translation by Native translators 9.28 USD
Text Translation by Professional translators 11.60 USD
That is inexpensive! They also have a free machine translation service available online. Of course they have to warn you "Free translation is machine translated text and should only be used an indication as to the meaning of the orginal text."
NonNative - People who are fluent in a language pair but do not have certification and are not a native speaker of that language.
Native - People who are fluent in a language pair AND are a native speaker in that language pair
Professional - People who have had at least 5 years industry experience in that language pair
Anyway, it should be a usefule site so check it out when you need some translating done.
A Korean student recently emailed me after receiving a very poor grade on a homework assignment. The grade was due to answers being copied out of journals. The student asked: is reading journals and paraphrasing the ideas a good way to answer homework questions?
When you quote a journal you have to use "quotation marks" and then explain the quote in your own words. To be honest, I didn't see many paraphrases or explantions in your homework. I saw mostly quotes.
As you know, in a graduate level program quotes are not enough. You need to contribute your own ideas. So my best advice is to share your ideas whan writing about a subject.