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.