Post Info TOPIC: teaching Listening and Speaking (Spring 2019) - Week 6 Reflections for Amazing


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teaching Listening and Speaking (Spring 2019) - Week 6 Reflections for Amazing
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Amazing

This is the place for the Week 6 refections for the group called Amazing.

Amazing people - post your Week 6 reflections here. Hit 'reply'

And remember to reflect on both things we did in class on Wednesday. So, write 2 reflections. 

 



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Stephen
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RE: teaching Listening and Speaking (Spring 2019) - Week 6 Reflections for Amazing
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1. Make a short story with who I am!

 In week 6, I acted as a host of the material. This host was an advanced version of the one before. The last one had included only the questioning and answering part. However, the activity, this time, included various features, not only listening to others opinions and explanations, but also reflecting others and finally, making a short story & storytelling time.

This was expected to generate a lot of useful practices which were explaining word such as abstract ones to non-abstract one. Through information gaps between Person A and Person Bs, students should not include the word on the card in their utterances. Thus, I thought this would be a great practice to make an explanation like English-English Dictionary. However, there was a problem with it, and I will mention in the other part. Anyway, Person A could have speaking practice to answer like I think it is ~ because ~ from what she has heard from the Person Bs. This was kind of reflecting, retelling, or moreover, paraphrasing practices. After that, with gained word cards, in each group, they could have a discussion on how to compose a short story. The only rule was that students dont have to be stuck in each words meaning and that just make a creative story freely by themselves. It could improve their communicative sill, and also because it has a part of having fun with storytelling, I thought, this was a pretty meaning works. In the feedback on the last hosting, there were some precious words about the instruction. Therefore, I decided to make more concrete instruction paper and to read the paper with my group members for the first time. Additionally, I gave more instructions on the parts which tended to be more confused in a spoken way, as well as in a written one and add some examples on especially composing a story in the paper so as to make it a lot easier for them to process the materials. Also, for my performance in the task, I was very satisfied with my better ability to progress the materials than before. For example, when I should let Person Bs see the word card, I came up with how I can do it without Person A knowing it, and I decided to show it by myself behind Person A in order to show it to only Person Bs. Lastly, it was very successful. For others performance in the task, I was generally pleased with their practices, but when they explained the word to Person A, I felt something was missing because they said too simple utterances. Sure, I could have put more limitation or rules in selecting the words of their explanation, but it couldnt be helped now. For instance, when they had to explain Language, with using the word speak, it is too easy to progress the game. I thought I should consider these kinds of errors in my next host.

After all, in the activities, the pedagogical goals were realized by practicing the speaking strategies, which are paraphrasing & retelling skills after listening to others, sharing own opinions in the discussion & combining the thoughts, and making a story probable to happen & storytelling in front of the (small) public.

 

 

 2. So, what would you do? (Role-play)

 The next part of todays hosts was So, what would you do? (Role-play) When I first heard of this name, I couldnt grasp how the materials were organized. However, after reading the instruction together, I noticed that it was a very simple activity creating various dialogues. It was because the stages of the process were very clear and concise to read, and it was essentially making a dialogue with a partner about the situation.

 This generated useful practice overall even in the vocabulary part. With reading a lot of realistic situation description cards, I could learn some words which I had not known before in the readings. These words were common things, but so trivial that we dont usually forget them easily. I think this could be helpful for reminding of those ones. Moreover, sharing a dialogue twice in the same situation was very meaningful because according to whos person A or B, there could be a number of dialogue cases uttered with a variety of responses. For my performance in the practice, in the types of situations, there was something that I havent experienced or that was very controversial by each role. There was an impressing and fairly controversial one which was that because her daddy has promised her to buy anything when her graduation, now she wants him to buy a new one for a graduation gift though he bought her brand-new laptop 6 months ago. For my partners performance, I was very satisfied with her practices and responses to me. When making each dialogue, it felt like a comic talk in a conte for me. We acted our roles as if we were indeed those roles in reality, so it was a really fun and interesting activity so far. In addition, it helped me to make a creative dialogue with my partner. I think this could even result in very novel ones which were even quite different from the hosts intention. (but its still positively good.) I could also develop the ability to convince my partner with own opinions and experience the real situation with my friend in the small quarrels.

 After all, I think, rather than a pedagogical one, this is a very real-world task. For the problems encountered during the practice, I suggest, there was something boring after we took our turns and kept going. It was because the topic of the dialogue was so repetitive that there was a lack of sources with continuing the conversation. I think, if there could be an additional source or a limitation to the existing topic, it would be more meaningful practice.



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Anonymous

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RE: teaching Listening and Speaking (Spring 2019) - Week 6 Reflections for Amazing
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Make a short story with who I am

 

 Minju introduced a revised activity about guessing words and making a story by using these words. The instruction about the activity was detailed but a little complicated, so it took me a while to understand. There were many word cards which students needed to pick, and then the selected card could not be seen by the person who drew it. Other people took turns explaining the meaning and use of the word and had to guess the word based on it. If one guesses the word on the card, she can have the card, or she cannot have the card. After playing card matching game, we were divided to two groups and made a story using gathered word cards.

 Through this activity, students could learn how to express and explain the meaning of the words, and how to make a story well. Especially, when I first explained the word belong, it was difficult to describe because this word is abstract. I picked a relatively easy word card so I could guess the word tasty easily through other peoples explanations. In conclusion, we used five words intelligent, language, English, sanitary, and tasty to create a short story. I think the goal of this activity fulfilled both a real-world goal and a pedagogical goal because the given words were easy words used a lot in everyday life, but making a story required a variety of words, grammatical knowledge, and even creativity.

 However, there are some points to improve. First, I would like to make sure reminding the rules such as restating answer with reasons. We forget to abide by the rules. From now on, I will try to keep even the detailed rules. I think restating with reasons is also important in this activity because it has educational effects and can play an important role in speaking practice. Moreover, it took too long time to get a word right, so we could not get many word cards. If the words were categorized and gave prior information, students could guess the word faster and create interesting story with more word cards.

 Even thought there were some points to improve, Minju planned well to do various tasks in one activity. This was a significant activity that not only improved our fluency in speaking, but also improved our understanding of words and even creativity.

 

 

 

So, What would you do?

 

 Harin introduced a meaningful speaking activity which was a kind of role-play with various situational background. She gave us detailed instruction about the procedure of this activity. We found a partner, did role-play with the partner, and played various situations on the paper she gave us. She suggested situations that can occur in everyday life such as between friends and family. The roles of A and B were also given on the paper card, and we played A and B roles as we went on and on.

Through this activity, I felt that the level of results of the activities could vary depending on how good the instructor gives. Interestingly, it was amazing that she made and came up with nine detailed situations by herself. The content was really detailed and meaningful in that it was a story that required a lot of thought and meaningful thought. Thanks to meaningful input, I and my partner were able to enjoy this activity. The most memorable situation was making a conversation between head of the construction company and resident of the apartment. I was embarrassed at first because it was a topic I had not thought about, but I was able to do successful role-play.

 However, there was one thing to improve. It was a little hard because I had to do so many tasks only for two people. If she had let the group make a presentation in turn, we could have reduced the burden and could have been a great chance to listen creative conversation from other groups.

Nevertheless, this activity made students improve their ability to communicate with others, and allowed them to participate passionately through the role-playing method. Additionally, I could get closer by role-playing with partner. Also, the goal of this activity fulfilled a real-world goal, rather than pedagogical goal because we mad real-world conversation about given situations. Therefore, I think this is more fluency oriented speaking activity.



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Anonymous

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RE: teaching Listening and Speaking (Spring 2019) - Week 6 Reflections for Amazing
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\

 

 

<Make a short story with who I am !>

 

I joined this activity as a participant. The idea that getting a correct word by the help of the other people was same to the activity that host had done before. This time, it was bit different in that I get a card which everyone knows except me and members give each different clues about the word. There were various words with different part of speech. I got the word, belong and it was bit difficult to get the word, I actually got right. Everyone tried to answer what they know with the limitation of not telling the whole answer.

It was a great activity for rest of the group members to practice speaking by giving the clues of the word. Also, it was good for the person who had to get the answer to organize the ideas. Whats more, the last activity was to make small group of 2-3 people in a group and making a 5 sentence story by using the word that they got. It was difficult to have a natural story but it was meaningful in that we were able to do an extra activity with the card we had used before the second activity.

 

<So, What would you do?(Role-play)>

This activity was different from the activity that the host had brought us before.

It was similar in that she used a card but it was a card with specific situation written on it.

We had to do a conversation in pairs appropriate for the situation written on the card.

A and B could be switched , so the content of the conversation could be different even if its done vice versa. It was a good chance for us to practice conversation in real situations and it was fun. Also, we spent quite adequate time doing the activity.

 



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Anonymous

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RE: teaching Listening and Speaking (Spring 2019) - Week 6 Reflections for Amazing
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Reflection

 

It was our first time taking a revised version of an activity. The first one was hosted by Minju. I was really surprised that she reflected most of the feedback I and other teammates gave her. According to her activity three weeks ago, the 20 question game, it was educationally effective in that it encouraged participants to get used to make an interrogative sentence in turn, but still had some to be advanced. However, in this activity, the host added a story-making activity in the end so that the participants were also able to engage in creating work.

These are the feedbacks I suggested on my reflection:

 1. It would be better if the host had given a clearer notice before the game started.

=> This point was fully improved that I felt so grateful to Minju for reflecting my ideas on her revision. She prepared a piece of paper describing the whole procedure and direction of the activity. Especially, the examples written down was really helpful for the participants to understand how to do the game briefly. I think it will be also great to let students read directions in turn other than host reads it from the start to the end. For younger participants (ex. elementary L2 learners) are having a low concentration that they might not focus on what an educator says during the introduction. By letting one of the participants to read it, it makes them much more enthusiastic to listen to what their classmates says.

 2. the expressions that participants used seemed to be too repetitive. It could be   

     better if the activity has broadened the range of its conversational expressions.

=> This one was also fully reflected. In the previous activity, all of the team members were divided into two groups and repeated question-answer conversation. Since we were divided into two-three, the conversation we had was quite monotonous and repetitive. However, in the revised version, the host didnt divided the team into half so that we could listen to various expressions from different members. Since speaking is containing an element of listening, it must be much more helpful for learners to broaden their speaking lexicon by listening to what others say.

Moreover, the host even added one more activity, which made the game much more abundant. Last time, we just ended up questioning and getting the right answer from the card, however, in the revised version, we were able to make sentences using the word cards we got. The words I got was subway, women, belong, perfume. Since those four are irrelevant, it required us to think profoundly to make the sentence having an unawkward meaning. This is the sentence we made:

Last week, I was in the subway and saw a striking scene. There was a man sitting on the seat and also a women next to him. Suddenly, the man started to spray perfume belonging to him, which made the women feel displeased. She stood up from her seat and shouted at him, get out! .

The next activity was hosted by Harin. The revised version was having a same educational purpose with the original one but in a totally different form. According to the original version, the participants had to choose three photo cards and make the stories by using and linking the cards. The problem of the activity was that it wasnt requiring the learners to have a conversation but just telling their stories in an one-directed way. Nevertheless, the story-telling form of the activity was really nice, which let the participants to make their own stories by using the lexicons and grammatical knowledge.

In the revised version, the host focused on the communicational element of the activity. She provided us cards which was describing the situation between A and B. For instance, I become a resident of the apartment and my partner becomes a head of the construction company. There is a peaceful lake near my apartment which is beloved by all of the residents, but a construction company is trying to get rid of it and build a department store. My partner and I took a role of each one and had a conversation of how to deal with the situation. I thought that this revised version was amazingly helpful for L2 learners to engage in a descriptive speaking without feeling any awkwardness. Since L2 learners, especially Korean, are often feeling awkward to speak in English (including other foreign languages) because of their lack of confidence. However, the activity from Harin is providing the participants a detailed situation so that they can just take a role from it and speak what they think in the given situation. According to a thesis from Choi(2001), it is said that L2 beginners and toddlers are mostly reluctant to speak English in front of other people since they are afraid of making mistakes. To get rid of this fear, the role-play activity is considerably effective since it helps learners to not being afraid of mistakes and applying the expressions they learned during the play.



 





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Anonymous

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RE: teaching Listening and Speaking (Spring 2019) - Week 6 Reflections for Amazing
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Making a short story with who I am

 

Just like any other class, two members of our group including me hosted materials for todays class. This was our second round which we had to revise our materials based on the feedbacks from our group members about what we had hosted on the first round. Making a short story with who I am was the first activity. 

 

What I want to point out first is creativity. For both of the two rounds: first and second time hosting, it was clear that our host had tried to organize her materials in a manner which made it possible for us to be more creativeAfter we had chosen five to six words per each group of two or three members, we had to make a story together using the words and share those stories with the other two or three people. 

 

Another thing I really appreciated was time management. Our host was constantly looking at the clock and checking how much time had past and how many minutes were left. This definitely showed me that she had meticulously planned how she would allocate certain amount of time for each step she intended to introduce us

 

I believe this activity was mostly related to reaching pedagogical goals. We had to come up with sentences using the specific given words though this process also allowed us to do creative thinking. However if I had to make one suggestion, I would have included more words within the syntactic category of adjectives and verbs considering that this activity took place in a class with intermediate to relatively high level of English speaking students. Some of the nouns were somewhat very easy for us to guess right away. The rest was totally fine. She did a great job!

 

So, What would you do? (Role-Play)

 

Continuing the next half of our class, I was the host for this activity. In a nutshell, what we had to do was role-play. Slightly different from my intention for how I had hosted my previous activitythis activity was designed focusing more on attaining real, more practical goals rather than pedagogical goalsThus, I tried to allocate more time on speaking practicerelated with the themes I had come up myself which were thought to be perhaps possible to take place once in our lives.I have thought a million times whether to include picture cards again and extend my first activity; yet, real-life conversation practice is my main goal here, and therefore I not only decided to change the pictures but just exclude picture cards. Picture cards were not seemed to take that much substantial part as for this activity. This was to make the activity as similar as possible to real-life situations since we usually do not use a great amount of time to ask or tell when we engage in conversation. We dont usually meticulously plan what to say before we speak; moreover, in most cases, we dont even play games to move forward conversation(s)with others. 

 

I believe the minimum proficiency level for this activityshould be at least intermediate and the minimum age should be around ten or up (in terms of Korean age). The main reason may be due to the fact that learners engaging in this activity should be able to understand those conflict situations as well as be old enough for negotiation. As for the time management issue, we did not have considerable amount of time at the end; this was very different from the first time I hosted. Therefore, it was thankful that nobody was sitting around feeling bored and doing nothing just because we had finished too early. However, it would have been better if I had given chance for each of our group members to talk more besides her assigned partner. I wanted to have the partners changed and go one more round, yet unfortunately there was not enough time to cover that much. Adding one last thing, I should have took some more time monitoring other two pairs if they are doing all right; I mostly had to talk with my own partner since we had odd number of students besides me. I guess I need to have lots of things to improve.



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Anonymous

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RE: teaching Listening and Speaking (Spring 2019) - Week 6 Reflections for Amazing
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1. Upgraded version of Guess what it is

First, there were no problems of the instruction. All the things were clear and nice. However, most of us did not catch the hosts intention. She intended to make us speak a lot by restating all the explanations. For example, if the word was language, she wanted us to say I guessed the word was Language, because she said it is the thing we speak, and she said there are many this in the world, and lastly she said we learn the theory of this in our major and suddenly introduction to linguistics just came out in my mind, so I definitely thought language was the answer. It was an appropriate way to improve speaking skills rather than just guessing the word. The problem was that even though the host explained it in the beginning, everyone forgot the fact that we should restate it, not just speak out the answer, because the main purpose of the activity was not to pick out the best guesser but to paying attention and memorize what others describe and saying it again by myself to improve the speaking skills.

  Still, in the way that this activity allowed learners to produce spoken language mainly in single sentence turns for description, and make the story with the cards, it was a helpful activity. Additionally, since the repetition is not allowed, we know that what others speak, and we use that single sentence to improve my own performance, it was a good chance for the meaning focused speaking. This activity made us learn through comprehending, noticing, and comparing.  

2.The role-play

           The second activity we had was having a role-play based on 9 different situations. Honestly, I think this role-play activity is one of the most important activities to improve both listening and speaking. Since it is an interactional listening, paying attention to what she is talking about would be most important, and at the same time, I should think of the answer based on what Ive heard to keep going on the conversation. All the situations were interesting enough to attract the learners attention. As the role-play continued I began to predict what she is going say and that let me know how to answer better. This could be one of the benefits from training in communication strategies; a strategy to assist comprehension. Mostly, this activity helps us for developing fluency. As I said previously, all the situations were interesting and familiar, since the discourse requirements of the activity were mostly within my experience, it was useful for the better development of fluency. Lastly, this activity involves meaning-focused speaking with clear communication outcomes, that made us improve listening and speaking skills.

Anyhow, there is no doubt that It was worthwhile in the aspect that every single person took part in the activity passionately to have each of their conversations based on the detailed, interesting situations that the host prepared.



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Anonymous

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RE: teaching Listening and Speaking (Spring 2019) - Week 6 Reflections for Amazing
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Reflection

1715917 Yeongin

 

Secret Words Game

It was again the time for me to be a host, and I prepared a revised version of the activity reflecting the feedbacks from my teammates. The brief explanation of the game I introduced was like this :  Students are given a random topic and a random word unrelated to the topic. The students must hide the word in a speech about the topic theyre trying to make sure the other students cant guess the secret word. The other students listen carefully to the speech and attempt to guess the secret word.

Since I thought it is really crucial to reflect others reflections and revise the defects of my activities, I summarized all of the feedbacks given to me and tried to reflect them as much as possible. These are the feedbacks I categorized.

 

  1. Score

Student A : I would like to revise the rules related to the score. It was not easy to find out all three secret words, so it would be nice if she reduces the number of secret words or gives each one a point.

-> I thought that the way I score participants would be also one of the important ways to motivate students. Even though the activity itself might be interesting, it becomes offset if there are no systemized rules. Therefore, I made a specific score chart and attached it on a paper. This helped student understand more thoroughly about the activity and lead it into their enthusiastic participation.

SCORE

 

0 revealed

1 revealed

2 revealed

3 revealed

secret words

4 point

2 point

1 point

0 point

topic

If revealed, you get 2 point

 

2. Difficulty of Level

Student B: I felt that the topic and some secret words were too unrelated, so it was hard for me to create one entire story relevant with all those secret words in the limited time.

-> Since I was too passionate last time, I couldnt consider the participants ability to deal with the activity. I provided too much unrelated words which made students feel difficult to make well-organized stories. Therefore, for this time, I tried to provide words with an intermediate-level and to think of words which the students might be interested in. For instance, there were words like Sookmyung, Hawaii, or Instagram. Since they were words which was much more friendly to students, it helped them to get rid of burdens of the complicated process and feel like it was game not studying.

 

3. Contents of the Activity

Student C: I think it would have been a bit better if our host had also made us describe the topic word by using three secret words and let the other players match what exactly the topic was.

-> This was the point which students suggested the most on their feedback. I think it was a bit monotonous to let participants to only guess what the secret word is, not the topic. Therefore, I tried to encourage students to guess both of the topic and secret words. The additional rule made the activity much more abundant and more interesting.

 

In the revised version, I tried to target both of the improvement of reading and listening, and also a thinking power(insight). Since students need to write down and concentrate intensively on others stories to get secret words, listening becomes an essential part of the game. Moreover, by connecting words and making them into a one full story describing the topic, speaking also comes as a crucial process. Since I added the rule of guessing the topic, it made the game a bit more complicated but as well as encouraged students to use more of their insights on their speaking.

 

 

To be continued. (It says it's too long to be uploaded so I divided into two)



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Anonymous

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RE: teaching Listening and Speaking (Spring 2019) - Week 6 Reflections for Amazing
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Guess by the description

This activity was hosted by Terra, which I thought was pretty much changed compared to the one she did three weeks ago. I could make sure that she put a plenty amount of efforts on modifying and revising her activity by first looking at her well-organized introduction paper. I gave her a feedback that it would be better if the participants could use the link between the subject and predicate words. This part was amazingly improved. She prepared a card which two pictures were drawn, one which stands for subject and one for predicate. For instance, the card I chose was a deer(subject) and punch(predicate). Since the mission was to make a story by not using the words given and letting others get what the words are, it required a deep consideration. This is the way I made my sentence :  I am an animal with two horns, but not regarded as an aggressive animal. I have a dark yellow skin. One day, I met a tiger in the jungle and started to run away from him. However, soon he did this on my face with his big hand, which made my chin swollen up.

Moreover, I thought it would be helpful for learners to check their vocabularies and lexicons through using the word cards and making them into sentences. For instance, if the learner couldnt come up with the word deer and punch on the picture, she may not be able to make a full sentences describing them. In addition, according to a thesis from Park&Song(2012), it is said that an activity using picture cards is much more beneficial for remembering words. The chart below is an outcome of the research comparing the degree of memorization depending on the material used in the educational environment. Among Simplification, Storytelling, Using Picture, and Personification, the method using picture turned out to be most effective (42%).



lOLlMV-CcKILajwzL__ckIWw8TPs7zpRzuvKKjej

 

The overall activity was really nice but to think of a feedback as hard as I can, I think it would be really great if the host gave us a clear instruction before starting the activity. There was a rule of limiting the number of sentences while describing the words, but most of the participants were almost disregarding the rule. Other than that point, most of the elements were perfect and made me think and learn a lot.




References

 

Soyeon Park, Minjeong Song,(2012).The study on toddlers' memorization depending on the types of illustration of flash cards - Focused on English flash cards -,12(2),259-268.



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