Cross Cultural Reading: Part II: Journals and Discussions

Journals

I think every teacher who has seen or read The Freedom Writers has wanted to use journals in a classroom as effectively as Mrs. Gruwell.  I cannot say that my own foray into journal use in the classroom was nearly as enlightening, but I was very happy with how they worked with our course.

Writing courses in China are skill specific, with a heavy emphasis on using higher level vocabulary and certain key phrases.   In the many tests they have to take throughout high school and college, they do better on these tests when they use (and often misuse) higher level vocabulary and stick to these prefabricated phrases.  For instance, my students will often begin a paper (irregardless of the topic) with the these point-gatherers: "In our modern society" or "With our rapidly developing technology and economies." It could be an essay on the pros and cons of pets, and this would be how they begin their essay.  They would also interject common phrases such as: "As we all know", "In a word...", "common phenomenon", and "...will make your life more colorful", to name a few examples.

A common phenomenon...

When we ask our students to write, regardless of the format, they are more inclined to give us what they think we want to hear, which is something that is filled with these catch phrases and upper level vocabulary.  The content, what they are actually saying, seems to take a back burner.  I did not want the writing in our cross cultural reading class to be these canned, rehearsed essays; I wanted to see their reflections and thoughts on the readings and what we discussed in class.  I wanted their honest opinions, thoughts, and connections. So I introduced the journal on our second day of class.

I explained that journals were informal, a space for your thoughts on what we read. I told them several times (life long habits are hard to break) that I did not care about grammar or spelling, only their thoughts.  I told them that I would be collecting the journals and reading them, but their grades would be based only on participation.  If they responded regularly and demonstrated that they had devoted time and attention to their entries, they would do fine.  If they gave me a series of entries that were only a few sentences long, they would not do well.

Now, it turns out that they were not familiar with a free response kind of journaling.   I kept getting entries about what they were feeling or about things not relating to our class or the readings.  So I began to give them very broad questions or ideas to discuss in each entry.  Some questions asked for them to think about the reading material, some asked them to relate the material to other texts, and some asked them to relate the material to their own lives.  I would usually give them 2-3 topics that they could choose from to discuss in each of their entries.  After giving them some direction in what to write about in each entry, the majority of the students began to give me insightful journal entries that discussed the characters and stories that we were reading.

They would write about how lovely the historic West Lake was on a sunny day, for example...

I had 25 students in this class, so I could not realistically collect all of the journals each week.  Additionally, I wanted to make sure students were keeping up faithfully with the journals, and not simply cramming in a bunch of entries before the due date.  Because, when given the opportunity, myself included, who doesn't do that? I told them that I would be randomly collecting five journals each week.  I would call out students names at the end of each class, and since they were graded on participation, they would lose credit if they had missing entries.  This seemed to work, in that most of my students kept their journals up-to-date and brought them to class each week.

I did collect all of the journals all at once twice during the semester, once at their midterm and once at the end of the semester.  Each week when I collected the five journals, I would take them back with me and I would read each entry throughout the course of the week.  I would comment on their writing, ask them further questions so that they might expand even further on their insights, and give them general feedback on how they were doing on the content of their journals (were they a little light or were they talking about non-related material?).  This became a good space for me and my students to communicate about the reading in an informal way; a way for me to read their thoughts and share my own in a one-to-one setting.  I also felt like I got to know my students a little bit better through these journals as well.

...Or they would write about how they and their friends went bike riding around campus...

Over the course of the semester, for most of my students, I noticed that they journal entries began to change.  They began as very superficial responses to the reading; if they liked the reading, the characters, etc.  It then changed to them expression their feelings or concerns about the characters  and asking questions of the reading.  In their final entries, the students no longer only asked questions of the reading, but also posited possible answers, related the story to their lives, and made connections to other readings.  The responses got longer and more detailed, and they were less concerned with fancy vocabulary, and I stopped seeing all those canned phrases.

A sample of a journal from one of my students.  You'll notice she uses some upper level vocabulary that is not wrong, but not quite right, either.  However, you will also notice that this entry is about the reading, as she analyses the characters and the society they live in. 

I really loved the journals in this course, as a teacher.  It gave me a unique opportunity to get to know my students minds in a way that was not possible before. I gave them a lot of supportive feedback, particularly in the beginning, and they began to believe that I was not tricking them when I said that I did not care about spelling and grammar.  As I said earlier, in addition to simply finding another way to help students relate to the content, this was also a wonderful way in which to get to know my students a little better.  We communicated on a one on one basis through writing, and I got to know their thought processes, their opinions, their writing styles, and a bit about themselves as well through journals.

Discussion

I also really wanted this class to be a discussion class.  But, having worked for the past year with Chinese students, discussions can be difficult, especially if you are expecting the response to a discussion class to be similar to a class in the States.  Now, any class, regardless of where you teach it, is going to be quiet at first, until trust is built, and until students become comfortable with the class, the teacher, each other, and the material they are discussing.  However, in colleges in America, in a discussion class, you would probably have at least 3-5 students who love the idea of discussions   Students who will not stop talking; each class they have something to say--even when the quality of their contributions are sub-par, they will keep going.  These students took the class because it was a discussion course and they can get a good grade by participating.

This person is almost non-existent in China.  Yes, there are 2-3 students who will finally speak up if you give them enough time and are willing to wait.  But so many of their classes are either lecture or independent work, that getting them to speak in class takes a great deal of work. Also ,there is a lot of pressure on them to only speak when they have the 'right' answer.

The first step that I took in making discussions a part of our class was making their overall grade heavily dependent on participation.  They are very concerned with their grades, and so making participation weigh heavily will motivate some students to contribute more to discussions.  For the purpose of this class I split participation equally between journal entries and in class discussions (I wanted all students to discuss, but I did not want to be especially punitive to those who really struggled with expressing their thoughts verbally).

Getting their discussion on. 

The second step in this process is, of course, modeling.  Show them what you mean by discussions.  Video you and your friends having a discussion on a reading and show it to them; really demonstrate what you want them to do and how you want them to do it, especially when you are asking them to do something that they do not have a lot of familiarity doing.  I would also provide them with a discussion question to prompt dialogue.

The final step is building trust, which takes time and a lot of positive feedback.  In the beginning, I found that pretty much accepting all answers, even some fairly outrageous ones, during the discussion part to be helpful.  I would not give the outrageous responses a great deal of praise, but I would not shut them down either.  As we progressed, when students would give outrageous answers, I would begin to ask them questions that would help them further clarify their meaning or think a little deeper on the subject.  Or I would ask the class what they thought about that response in order to get us on track when discussing the readings.  By the end of the semester, my students were discussing experts.  They would start talking, ask each other questions, ask me questions, argue with each other; by the end, during the discussion section, I felt pretty useless, as they were able to pretty much carry the discussion without me.  Which was nice change from the beginning, where they were all quiet and staring at me...

Saturdays in Shanghai

"Hey, you want to go into Shanghai on Saturday?"

Shanghai Skyline

This question would always provoke in me an internal, and sometimes external, series of hysterics.  Because never, not once in my entire life, had I thought that I would consider spending Saturday in Shanghai with the same nonchalance that I would have had towards going to the mall back in my hometown.  I mean, Saturdays in Shanghai was so far outside of where I thought my life was going, that when I was confronted with the reality, I would occasionally burst into laughter or stare off into the distance as my mind exploded.

Yup, you guessed it, I am taking a pedagogical break again.  This time to talk about Shanghai, our oft frequented metropolis.  Shanghai is only about 40 minutes away from Hangzhou via high speed train, 3 hours if you are driving or taking a bus.   The high speed train is very cheap, only about 78.00 RMB, which is about 13.00 USD, for a one-way ticket.   And these trains run back and forth between Hangzhou and Shanghai about every 30 minutes from about 6:00 am to about 10:00 pm.

The train ticket on the left is actually from a trip to Nanjing, but the ticket to Shanghai looks the same, just a different price. On the right is Pat and I on the high speed train to Shanghai!

We were drawn to Shanghai for many reasons.  The first and foremost of those reasons is that it is a very international city and it is a hub for international business.  This means that it has many stores and restaurants that cater to western tastes.  For example they have a Krispy Kreme, a Carls Jr, a Hershey's store, a Morton's of Chicago, and a grocery store that is well stocked with imported snacks and foods.  So we would head into Shanghai when we felt the need for some American luxuries that we just couldn't get in Hangzhou.  We would even occasionally go into Shanghai for no other reason than to get some kind of western food fix.  We went once just so we could eat at Krispy Kreme and then literally walk next door and eat a burger at Carls Jr.   We would run into a grocery store with a large imports section solely for Diet Coke and Cool Ranch Doritos, and some ingredients to make chocolate chip cookies.

I think we had seen this sign before without ever really putting two and two together.  When we realized what this meant, we bee-lined for the Reese's  Mmmmmm, chocolate covered peanut butter. 

Krispy Kreme, Carl's Jr, and Diet Coke, all on the same pedestrian street! I would advise checking out Nanjing Xi Lu, there's lots of good stuff on that street! (I have learned recently that street's name is actually Wujiang Lu, off of Nanjing Xi Lu). 

Another thing that drew us to Shanghai was the shopping, and not just for the food.  Now, there are quite a lot of legitimate high end department stores all over China, Shanghai (and Hangzhou) included. I am talking Gucci, Fendi, Armani, etc. But, those are extremely expensive.  Most large cities also have popular  not-so-expensive western brands too, such as H&M and Zara's   Shanghai even recently opened a Forever 21, which we stumbled onto accidentally,  much to our delight.  But even though these stores are fairly reasonable back home, they can be pricey in China, especially when earning a Chinese income.  But hey, every good shopper knows how to budget...and how to throw the budget out the window when presented with wonderful clothes that look awesome and fit (finding sizes that fit Americans in Chinese stores can be challenging).

The sound we me made when we saw this...we'd been having a disappointing day (Krispy Kreme and Dunkin closed and we did not know their new locations)  But we cured our disappointment by a shopping binge in this newly opened, 4 floored, shopping heaven. 

However, if you take the subway a few stops away from Shanghai's city center (the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum Stop on line 2) you wind up in this underground warren of stalls that sell everything, real and knock offs, souvenir items, pearls, clothes, t-shirts, electronics...everything.  Just imagine a maze of 12x12 stalls (some are larger) that are stuffed with merchandise, and separated by about 4 ft wide aisles.  Inside, the merchandise is packed in so that there is barely enough room to walk around. The sales person is stuffed in the corner of this store, sitting on a stool.

The best part about this underground shopping center is that you can bargain.  Since Shanghai is such an international city, most of the shopkeepers are well versed enough in English to communicate business transactions.  Although it does tend to go better for you, as the buyer, if you know a certain amount of Chinese.  Usually, if you go to these places, you will be shouted at from a variety of vendors, in English and Chinese, inviting you to come in and look at the merchandise.  These vendors are going to be very friendly because you are foreign, which means there is a good chance that you work for one of the large, wealthy, foreign companies, and so you have a lot of money to spend.  This also means that many of them are going to charge you 6x what they would charge a Chinese shopper.   Because, for many of the foreigners shopping in China, the price they ask is still lower than what they would pay in their home country for that product.  However, as teachers, who were being paid by a Chinese company in Chinese currency, we would bargain the shit out of these vendors.

Tai Gui Le!, we would shout indignantly when they would throw a price out at as.  This means 'too expensive.'  They would usually then counter with a 'special' price, due to our "Chinese being so good!" They would throw another price out at us that was lower, but not where we wanted it.  Thus began the bargaining war.   They would then ask us what price we wanted, and we would throw out a price that was as ridiculously low as their's was unreasonably high.  They would then shake their heads and wave their hands and say "impossible!" And we would then argue back and forth and then sometimes commence with the walk away strategy, and they would usually cave at whatever our last price was.  You can also try stating your final price in a very firm manner, indicating that you will not budge past it.  I once walked into a vendor, pointed at what I wanted, told him it was going to be 120 RMB.  He went to argue, but I restated the price in a non-negotiable tone of voice.  He looked like he wanted to argue with me, but then nodded and started to wrap the package. Win one for the buyer! One of the best compliments I had ever received was by a vendor in Shanghai who told me I bargained very well, for someone so young.  I guess you get more discerning and stingy when you get older...it's nice to know I got a head start on frugal.

Bargaining can be a bit stressful, when you are not sure of what a good asking price is for the goods (I suggest doing some research if there are specific items you want) and when you are conducting the bargaining in your non-native tongue.  However, with experience, you get better at knowing how low most vendors will lower their prices and how to finagle the price you want.  Eventually, you might even begin to enjoy bargaining. And remember, if they won't give you the price you want, there are literally going to be 20 other vendors with the same merchandise, so feel free to shop around.

Shanghai Scenes

A third reason that we would go to Shanghai was to appreciate the skyline.  Shanghai, being a port city, has a lot of different influences in architecture from various times in Shanghai's history.  There are western influences, eastern influences, traditional Chinese influence, and some interesting modern influences.  You can take a hop on/hop off bus for about 30 RMB, that is good for an entire day, and you can tour various districts of the city, go shopping, visit museums, and take tons of pictures of different parts of the city. Shanghai reminds me a lot of New York City; it's huge, there are people everywhere, influences from all over the world, and an awesome skyline.  The city has a really great skyline (see above) and lots of great places where you can stop and admire the view and take some pictures.  If you are on the hop on/hop off bus, it will stop at these places.  Or you can take the subway and walk a bit; I suggest getting off at the East Nanjing stop and walking towards the river, especially around sunset on a clear day; it's a pretty awesome sight.

On one trip to Shanghai, in which Dave wanted to try and find somewhere to buy some super specific brand of protein powder, and all 3 of us wanted to get a nice American meal at Pete's Tex Mex and Grill, Liv and I went to the Shanghai history museum.  We learned a great deal about the history of Shanghai and about how to make wax figures even creepier.  If you are into museums, there are several available in Shanghai, and many of them are free or low cost.

I mean, really, what would you do, if presented with a miniature town?  And yes, we are yelling Godzilla while we pretend to rampage. 

The final reason to visit Shanghai is for the nightlife.  I did most of my partying in Hangzhou, so I cannot personally speak to the nightlife in Shanghai.  The one time we when we were going to be in Shanghai and had no evening plans, we were just too exhausted to really get into the clubbing state of mind.  But I have heard great things from people who have visited Shanghai and have partaken of the nightlife.  Going out in China is a lot of fun, and I will have to do a blog entry on that experience at some later date, so if you are in Shanghai, and have the time, check out the nightlife.

If you are living anywhere near Shanghai, I highly recommend a visit. Of course, if you live anywhere near Shanghai, it will likely be the airport you come through when you arrive in China, and will likely be the airport anyone who visits you will go through too, so chances are you will be spending some time in this city.  If you ever have to overnight and are looking for a clean and inexpensive place to stay, I recommend checking out hostelworld.com. I personally recommend either the Mingtown International Youth Hostel or the Le Tour Traveler's Rest Youth Hostel.

A 3-Bed Private Room, with Private Bath. To the right is the exterior of the hostel. 

Cross Cultural Reading: Part I

I have been waiting to write about this course, because I taught it the second year, and I had a whole first year to sum up.  When I was asked in the spring to teach some different courses in the fall, I was a little hesitant.  I had spent a frustrating year trying to get the hang of the courses I was already teaching, and after that year, I was finally feeling comfortable with Integrated English and Oral English.  I really did not want to screw up that nice feeling of finally knowing what was going on.  But how could I not teach a class called Cross Cultural Reading?

For those of you who don't know me outside of this blog, you should know that...

I.  Love.  Reading.

Although, recently, I usually get most my reading done on my kindle.  It travels better than my hard copy library. 

Back when I was less extroverted and considerably more socially awkward, and much less exposed to the great wide world, my idea of a perfect day was as follows:  a comfortable chair, a nice, quiet, well-lit section of the library, and a really good book.  And while a lot about me has changed over the years, I still love a good book (although now I'd rather read it on a beach in Thailand, while sipping something made from coconut and nursing last night's hangover, filling time before going off on some new adventure with friends).  So naturally, the idea of teaching a reading class was very appealing.

Okay, so this is not Thailand, but it's a beach (in China!) and it's till a heck of a better sight than stuffy library shelves. 

Another draw for me towards teaching this course was the 'cross-cultural' component.  After having spent a year in China, I had come to a few cultural realizations.  Okay, more like a thousand cultural realizations, but I am going to only focus on a couple. As I learned more and more about China and Chinese culture, I also realized my students had a very narrow view of American culture.  What they knew of America came from shows such as Gossip Girls, Vampire Diaries, Friends, and The Simpsons.  Therefore, many of them regarded Americans, on a whole, as beautiful, slutty, mostly Caucasian, gun-toting party animals, who were not too smart (except for Steve Jobs), kinda lazy, who ate nothing but McDonald's.  Of course, not all of our students believed this, but enough of them would ask us questions about America that would shove these stereotypes that they had of Americans at us on a fairly regular basis.  Cross Cultural Reading would give me the chance to expose them, through literature, to a more diverse America.

After a great deal of debate about what direction I wanted this course to go in I decided to focus on the theme of identity.  One, because it is a nice broad theme which would fit with several different literary works. But more importantly, I had noticed some characteristics among my students (other than their limited notion of American identity) that I really wanted to explore through different texts.  My classes are always predominately female (and in the case of this class, all-female) and I had noticed something about most Chinese girls over the past year.  There seems to be a very prescribed future for many of my students; they go college, get a good job that can support their family, get married by 25, and then have their child by 27.  Now, there is nothing wrong with this life projection, but not very many of my students expressed alternative futures.  My students would actually express some concern for myself, who is 25 and single and not planning on changing that anytime soon.  When I told them that I wasn't 100% sold on the idea of marriage and was pretty sure I did not want to have children, half of them were horrified and half of them thought I was 'cool.' So I focused on identity and I wanted to get them to recognize the forces that have shaped their identity as Chinese women by also examining some other characters and looking at what shaped their identities.

My Cross Cultural Reading Ladies

So I had two goals: Exploring the creation of different identities of women and exploring American identities.  Since the course would be conducted wholly in English, (my Chinese is much too  limited to explain literary complexities) I did not want to give them texts that were going to be too difficult both in language and in ability to relate to characters and content.  So, I decided to start in a happy medium; I chose to focus on Chinese American Literature for our two major books.  I figured that my students would be able to find some commonalities between themselves and the cultural background of the Chinese American characters.  I also knew that my students did not know much about the experience of Chinese Americans and so it would introduce them to a pocket of America that is not featured on Gossip Girl and Vampire Diaries. I also decided to focus on female identity with our short stories.  I figured I would combat language difficulties and maybe some difficulties relating to cultural context, with their ability to relate to female characters and through using shorter, easier to digest stories.

For this class we read: American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang; The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan; Lamb to the Slaughter, by Roald Dahl; Hills Like White Elephants, by Ernest Hemingway; and Girl, by Jamaica Kincaid.

We began our first class (after explaining the course and the syllabus) with a writing activity where I asked them to write on the topic "Who am I."  This caused some consternation among my students, since they get worried about making sure their grammar/spelling is perfect and whether or not they are giving me the "right" answer.  And no amount of me telling them that I do not care about grammar for this assignment, and there is no "wrong" answer will convince them to calm down.  This was my pre-assessment, and as I expected, many of them gave me fairly shallow, broad answers to who they were.   We then finished our first class with a brainstorm activity.  I asked them to consider this question: What is a girl?  They then listed the various things they felt made up a girl or woman.  They listed things like quiet, neat, well groomed, serene, peaceful, nice, polite, smart, humble, sweet, kind, gentle, well-dressed, etc.  After brainstorming, I realized we were out of time for this class, so I asked them to write all of the ideas we'd brainstormed down and we would continue next week.  And thus concludes the first day of what did turn out to be one of my favorite courses.

Don't worry, I will be talking about this course in some detail.

Me and Shirley after our last class. 

Slowing Things Down

Several times during these blogs, I have mentioned how I was speaking too quickly and that I needed to slow it down, and I want to be clear about what I mean by slowing things down and being clear when teaching in an EFL classroom. 

These are my Sophomores, I have taught them every semester for the past 2 years. 

I am not talking about slowing things down the way you would talk to your great Aunt Judy when her hearing aid fails.  I was not elongating syllables in each and every word.  Because doing this is just as confusing as speaking like an auctioneer. Especially when your student's primary language is Chinese, where each syllable is a new word, the last thing you want to do is stand up there and slowly sound out each word (unless your teaching syllable stress and intonation, which in that case, segment all you wish).  Elongating each syllable of every single word is actually going to impede the comprehension of your students. 

I am talking about slowing down your overall speaking speed.  This is really difficult to do at first.  You need to add more pauses between words and phrases, even if these pauses initially seem somewhat awkward and unnatural. If you are visual learner, think of your speech as being spattered with semi-colons or commas. Pretend that every three or four words you say are deeply profound and you need to pause to let their profundity sink in to your audience.  It takes practice.  And each class is going to be different, depending on their abilities.  One of my students actually complained that one of the foreign teacher's talked too slowly.  So it takes some practice, and as your students adapt to your accent and speech patterns and you adapt to the needs of your students. 

Of course visuals always helps with comprehension, especially when that visual is food.  Xiaoqin brought in  an American staple to share with her students: Peanut Butter and Jelly. 

One way to slow yourself down is to fully pronounce each word.  As native English speakers, we do not fully pronounce each word in a sentence, we combine the end and beginning sounds of words, we combine words, all for expediency.  This is not even something we are usually aware of doing, and even when we are speaking slowly, we will still use these expedient forms of speaking.  I myself did not fully understand how pervasive this is until one of my older students gave a presentation on it in one of my freshmen classes.  For example: "Have you seen Mark? No, is he in his office?  When native English speakers say "is he in his office", we drop that 'h' sound, so it sounds like this: "izzy in is office?" For non-native English speakers, this sentence makes no sense, and for native English speakers, we do not even immediately hear the problem.  We will say things like "D'ya wanna go shopping?" rather than the more formal "Do you want to go shopping." So remembering to fully pronounce each word individually (again, without elongating syllables) will help you in two ways: it will slow you down, and it will stop you from blurring all your words together in ways that are completely natural to you, but incomprehensible to your students. 

But even more difficult than slowing things down and remembering to try and not blur all your words together, is also trying to use vocabulary that is easily understood by your students.   As a native English speaker you have the command of zillions of words (especially if you read a lot).  And when you are describing or explaining something, you might know that perfect word to describe the exact idea you are trying to express.  However, that particular word might not be a high frequency word learned by EFL students.  Trying to explain the meaning of that word so that you can then continue your lesson may take valuable time and energy away from the goals you are trying to complete for that lesson.   So you will sometimes find yourself mid-sentence trying to explain an idea and you are frozen because you realize that the word you want to use is probably not going to be understood by the majority of your students.  And you do not want to take the time to explain that new word at that moment.  Trying to use multiple, high frequency, less complex words to describe the same idea that one single word would express, is difficult to do.  

And what is not made a little bit more comprehensible with coffee?  I brought some in for my students when we had  a day where we shared our creative writing stories in our cross cultural reading course.  Snaps and cookies and coffee for everyone!

You have two options, either continue to use more complex vocabulary and risk your students not fully understanding your meaning, or begin to simplify your language.  This is where some amount of rehearsal comes in handy when prepping for your class.  While you are in the shower, commuting  cooking dinner, etc, visualize your classroom.  Run through  your lesson plan. Pretend you are talking to your students.  This is a good way to catch troublesome vocabulary before you get in front of your students, and you can have alternative ways of expressing yourself prepared.  This will minimize those frozen moments you have once you are in front of the students, trying to think of another way of expressing yourself.  You would think it would be easier to simplify language, but it is surprisingly difficult.  Rehearsing helps, and with time, you will get better at coming up with alternate words on-the-spot.  Trust me, eventually you will become an expert at it.  

Anyway, I wanted to post about this because it took me a really long time to really understand how to find a good speed.  When I first arrived, of course I knew I would need to speak somewhat slower as I was teaching a foreign language.  And I did not know any Chinese when I first arrived, so it was not like I could fall back on explaining the concepts in Chinese. However, even being aware of this, I was still talking too fast.  In America, as a native English speaker, everyone understands you, for the most part, and it takes a while to realize the adjustments you need to make in order to make sure your students learning is maximized. If you're ever teaching EFL, I am hoping this helps. 

I told them I would give them extra credit if they dressed up on Halloween!

I apologize for the randomness of the pictures for this blog; I did not really have any that fit with the topic, so I posed pics of my students and my classrooms.

Oral English: First Year Flaws

After six years of learning how to be a teacher, I am a little embarrassed at the mistakes I made during my first year of teaching, even though I have been reassured by far more experienced educators that these rookie mistakes are common; you learn and you do better next time.  What follows is the errors made in terms of my Oral Speaking Class; I'll save the other classes for a later blog.

From Left to Right: Me, Shirley, Justin.  One of our final rehearsals before their final exam.   And if your wondering at our less than professional attire, we were rehearsing in class that day, which meant a lot of dramatic falls to the ground and faux sword fighting, so we were teacher casual that day. 

One of the biggest mistakes we made was to make it very clear to our students exactly what we expected of them, not just throughout the semester, but of their final project.  Now, this might have been further impacted by the language barrier, but we definitely could have been clearer.

Of course, we thought we were being perfectly clear, when we handed out an outline of our final project and syllabus on the first day of class and took the students through it.  But we talked fairly quickly, in our excitement and our desire to get on with the course, and we just figured the students would read the syllabus and somehow, all of our thoughts and desires for the course would get downloaded into their brains. This did not work as we had planned, largely because we were not sure exactly what we wanted for this course, at least not realistically.  We had a lot of ideas and this wonderful ideal of where we wanted to end up, but not a lot of direction on how we were going to get there.  So, not only did we breeze through the syllabus, we were somewhat light on the concrete details of how we were going to arrive at our final goal.

Me, Leehom, Justin

Another way in which I was unclear in my expectations for my students was my lack of modeling what I expected of them, and in retrospect, I can't believe how long it took me to do that effectively and consistently.  I used multiple ways to explain a topic or idea, including pictures and video when applicable.  But when it came to explaining skits, and explaining body language, and intonation, it took me a long time to realize that I needed to model some of these things, not only to rely on video and pictures.  I explained the concepts of skits, but never modeled what I expected of them or how to perform a skit.  Overtime, I gradually got better at modeling, especially once I came to the realization that modeling something once was not enough.  Eventually I became adept at modeling everything; I modeled the various facial expressions and body language I wanted them to use; I modeled different intonation; I modeled entire skits.  Not only did this make it clear about what I was expecting from them, but when I was willing to share my work, and in the case of skits, to be a little silly and maybe embarrassed,  my students were so much more willing to do the same. I slowly began to spread that modeling to my other courses, so in my integrated English course, rather than simply telling them what and how to write when we did writing, I gave them several examples, we wrote things together in class, and I walked them through my writing process.

Me, Emerson, Justin

The other mistake that we made, especially evident in the second semester and is specific to co-teaching, was not making sure that each teacher in the group had the same idea of where this course was going. Now, it is difficult to plan a course when your three teachers are all over the world, literally.  Over the summer and winter holidays, the three of us bounced back and forth between the United States and China, trying to multitask visiting family, relaxing, and prepping for the next semester.  This meant we were not always in the same time zone or in the same mental zone on any given day.  So we communicated largely through email and then met in person a few days before the semester began to really hammer out any issues.  Now maybe if you had 3 teachers who had been working in EFL together for a dozen years, this would have been okay, but 2 of us were newbies, and in the case of the second semester, none of us had ever tried to teach an oral English class centered on the creation of an adapted script.

Chocolate, me, Big Barbara, Justin, Emerson

In short the mistakes I made were from lack of experience and from a lack of knowing how to prepare for an EFL classroom, and I got better at those things with each successive semester, although I am still far from perfect.  And despite these mistakes, and some frustrations with myself and the course, I had a wonderful time and our students showed tremendous growth in our targeted areas.  They did such a great job on their final exam and we were so proud of them.  And all of them passed their overall English exam that year.

Below is one of the final exam videos.  This is Romeo and Juliet that has been rewritten in the horror genre by the English majors.  ( I posted this one in an updated version of an earlier entry as well, but in case you haven't seen it yet, here it is).