As you may know, ELI is piloting a new program this semester, a "conversation club." Debra Basler is overseeing it, and I was lucky enough to get a section for my service learning this semester. The class meets from 5-6 pm on Mondays; there is another section that meet at (I think) 10 am on Wednesdays. We're in Room 200 in Trimble. First session was about 30 students. Attendance is voluntary, the idea is to be able to chat with native English speakers. The class began in late January, and has levelled off to a repeat crew of about 15-18 students of various levels (generally 3 & 4 on a scale of 1-6, with a few 5's and 2's).
In the first session, students said that they would like to talk about dating and parties. That made me think about this great presentation Kari did last fall in the SLA class ... and she very graciously agreed to reprise it for the ELI group last Monday night. Well, she was a rip-roaring success. This was, it became obvious, a topic of critical interest to the students. After introducing the topic, we broke into pairs to practice social chat and asking the partner for a date, or to hang-out and get to know you.
It is great to know that you have achieved at least two very important objectives with your students: hitting the targeted task - in this case, converation, and hitting a matter of great importance in their lives, especially in this rather strange and different place in which they currently live.
Facilitating this class gave me the opportunity to both participate and observe, and to reflect on the benefits of team-teaching, and of finding issues and concerns of my students and using that as the vehicle to carry the structure and tasks of the language lesson at hand. I like the idea of periodically inviting colleagues to contribute to the class. It is good for the students. As a teacher I benefit from learning from others and it gives me new and fresh perspectives as to how I can best approach the language lessons at hand. And let's face it ... there are some topics that benefit from a teacher's additional "street cred" with the students.
My thanks to Kari for her time, energy, and a fabulous class.
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Thanks for sharing. Enjoyed reading this blog and hearning about the experience in class Tuesday night. This sounds like a great program.
ReplyDeleteI think that this is a great idea because this is the kind of lesson that students really want to learn. They want to be able to ask friends go hang out, or ask that cute college student to lunch at the UC. An important thing to remember is that at ELI most students are communicating through English, a second language for both students. I remember while doing my undergraduate study, I had a friend from Japan who dated a Taiwanese girl. Neither knew the other's language, so they used English. I remember thinking how amazing that was, that they could have a relationship like that through an L2.
ReplyDeleteLove overcomes all, I guess?
I really like the idea of a visitor program, especially as it concerns a conversation class. I feel that might actually be one of the best ways to run a conversation class since one cannot teach speaking without addressing listening and students should be given as many examples of their L2 speech as possible. In addition, it seems that having visiting teachers would better appeal to all types of learning because the students are receiving all types of teaching.
ReplyDeleteThis idea reminds me of the idea of using an "enlightened, eclectic approach" to L2 instruction (Brown, 2001/ page 33 in Ferris and Hedgcock). It could better address "divergent learner needs" to have multiple teachers teaching on a plethora of topics in different styles. However, visiting teacher programs might not be appropriate for a reading/writing course as it would be much more difficult to assure goals are being met when there are multiple teachers.