Oral English: Part II

My first semester was a great deal of teaching by reaction.  I had little idea about what to expect from these courses and little direction in what I should be teaching.  Therefore, my lessons did not begin with a very clear plan and tended to change as I saw fit or as I discovered or learned more about the course or student interests and needs.  Therefore, my first semester was spent teaching the course, then spending a week researching ways to teach the material better.  So there was very little consistency from week to week, with the exception that they would perform a skit at the beginning of each class and it would be on the theme discussed the week before.

I believe I was grading final exams in this particular picture, but  I  am pretty sure I wore the same expression  when trying to formulate lesson plans. 

My second semester, was an entirely different matter.  At the end of the first semester, the three teachers discussed what we wished to do with them next semester.   We each talked about our successes and failures this semester and how we wanted to change for the following semester.  I talked about how the students, after some initial hesitation, showed enthusiasm for the skits, and improvement in some the areas I was able to focus on.  I suggested we make some kind of performance the basis for all three of our sections next semester.  After some debate, we all agreed.  We then talked about what we could do, and while, in hindsight, our plans were a tad too ambitious for one semester, we were certainly more prepared than the previous semester.

This was our plan.  We would do Romeo and Juliet, and before you roll your eyes, wait just a minute.  We would do Romeo and Juliet and each section (with each teacher) would choose a different genre and rewrite one part of the play in that genre.  We chose Action, Science Fiction, and Horror.  We would spend the first 5 weeks with the students discussing the genre, showing examples of the genre, and rewriting the script (after assigning the film as homefun--a cheerful alternate title for homework).  Similar to the first semester, we would also rotate teachers each 5 weeks.  The second 5 weeks we would work on the pronunciation  intonation, inflection, and memorization of your lines.  The final 5 weeks would include body language and facial expression.

Now, it turns out that you might not want to have students in an Oral Speaking course focus 5 full weeks on script development  but what can I say, I was fresh out of a University that spent 6 years telling me about student ownership of projects, and I thought students would be more invested and interested if they wrote their own work (which was true, we just did not really have the time for it)*.  I suggest if you are reading this and thinking, "hey, this sounds like a good idea for a speaking course!" to consider pre-writing scripts for your students, with the option for them to make changes as they like.

While this course certainly had its own set of frustrations, our students, as a whole, demonstrated remarkable improvement in pronunciation  intonation, and in particular, body language and facial expression.  And since  I taught some of the same students the following year as sophomores, I can tell you that they retained those skills.   Their final assessment was to perform their entire section of their play for the 3 of us and their classmates, and with a few exceptions, they did a very, very good job.  They were wonderfully creative their adaptations of the script to the new genre, they were humorous, and they demonstrated improvement in the areas we had targeted.  My mom, who came to China to visit during the semester and sat in on a few of my classes was equal parts entertained and impressed with their rehearsals.

Probably one of the more frustrating parts of this course was another lesson in Chinese culture.  Boys and girls in China who are not related and who are not dating...

do. not. touch.    Ever.

I had encountered this a little the previous semester, but I did not really think about it too much.  One, there are not really that many boys in the majority of our classes and two, they had written the scripts themselves! I figured if they wrote it down, they would be willing to perform it.  And I am by no means talking about anything scandalous; I am talking about hand holding and the occasional hug.  And these are college students.  We did not discover this problem until the last 5 week section, when we were actually up and moving about and rehearsing, and by then it was waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too late to change around characters or start deleting scenes, although we did some editing where possible.  It was in this section of teaching that I learned the value of modeling desired behavior.  Justin (one of the other teachers) and I spent a lot of time circulating between groups and demonstrating appropriate body language for the scenes, and about half of our reluctance issues were solved merely by us being willing to do the same thing.  The other half did not give up so easily and required a little more attention and rehearsal, and some script editing.

While in theory the idea to rotate teachers sounds nice--students are exposed to 3 different teaching styles and to the particular strengths each teacher brings to the table.  However, for the structure of this particular course, it might have been better to stick with the same teacher.  Each time we rotated, we would need to familiarize ourselves with the new scripts, the new students, and their set of issues, just as we had made progress with the last group!  And of course, we each had different ideas about each group, which would need to be communicated to the next teacher (or fail to be communicated, and instead entirely redone by the next teacher).  And we were, of course, more invested in our first group, as we helped them with their scripts and their initial ideas.

*While I stand by what I said, that having students spend so much time writing their scripts in an Oral English class, nothing will beat the collective reaction to when we presented them with their finished scripts and we reminded them that they wrote the whole thing.  That was a very rewarding day.

Our Finished Product!

A video from our Romeo and Juliet Skit Final: This is Act 1, Genre: Horror