Note: This site contains information on an assignment in Prof. John Schafer's English 435.
"It's great to have a friend where the rules of the relationship are different, and I get to learn about them as I go along."
"Working with N. helps to put a face on the 'they' we speak about when we talk about L2 learners and LEP [Limited English Proficient] students. It has humanized ESL or actually EFL. It has really been a great experience."
"I believe I will be better off as a teacher because of this experience; it has given me the opportunity to see first hand how difficult learning a language truly can be. I will have a better understanding of my English language learners and I believe I will be able to empathize with them more efficiently now. This whole learning process has not only improved my teaching skills; it has been a life-altering experience."
"Probably the one thing I value the most from my whole experience as a conversation partner is not that I earned a grade or valuable future work experience but that I made a friend from the other end of the earth; and hopefully my friendship with N. will help contribute positively to a worldwide movement of peace, love and unification."
These are comments by four students who took this course and elected to be a conversation partner with a student at the International English Language Institute. As you read through this rather detailed handout, with due dates and do's and don't's (and, I hope, some useful suggestions), remember these comments by your fellow students. They'll help to keep you focused on the big picture: being a conversation partner can be a great experience. The details below are designed to ensure it's valuable for both you and your partner.
Due dates:
Thurs., Sept. 18: Turn in log for my reaction and suggestions.
Thurs., Oct. 23: Class observation report due for students in the top half of the (alphabetical) class attendance list.
Thurs., Nov. 20: Class observation report due for students in the bottom half of the (alphabetical) class attendance list.
Thurs., Dec. 4: Log book due (with final summarizing entry completed)
Time: You should converse with your partner at least 2 hrs. per week for six weeks. It is best to meet in two separate sessions, not one 2-hr. session.
What to Help the Student with: According to past experience, what the students most want and need is conversation practice. You can help them most by giving them a chance to practice the vocabulary and structures they are learning in their more formal classroom situation. But you can ask your partner what he/she wants to work on and take it from there. If your partner is Japanese, Korean, or Cantonese-speaking, you should look over one of the following handbooks all of which are on reserve:
Handbook for Teaching Japanese-Speaking Students
Handbook for Teaching Korean-American Students
Handbook for Teaching Cantonese-Speaking Students
These handbooks were prepared for teachers working with students who are in California public schools, not for teachers of foreign students only temporarily in this country. (In other words, they are for ESL not EFL teachers.) But they contain useful information about the language, culture, and educational system in Japan, Korea, or China. These handbooks will teach you something about the language and culture of your partner and also suggest topics that you can discuss during your conversations.
If you have a Japanese partner, you can check out the Japan Information Network. This site, maintained by the Japanese government, is a good entry site for a great deal of information about Japanese life and culture. Perhaps the most useful section of this network is Japan Access where you can find information about everything from kabuki to healthcare. For a brief and readable overview of the Japanese language, check out the language section of Japan Access.
If you have a Korean partner, you can look at Korea Net, a government-maintained site with links to a great deal of information on Korea. Most countries maintain similar sites which you can find using the search engine Google.
What to Do in First Meetings
Since you're a conversation partner, not a tutor, you can do the kind of things that you would normally do when you are getting to know someone. There are, of course, differences in intercultural communication--that's why we have courses by that name!--but remember your partner is visiting the U.S., wants to know more about American culture, and expects you to act American--to behave according to your own customs. So if you act courteously and in a friendly manner, you will do fine, but do keep in mind that your partner is learning English. It will help if you don't speak too quickly (but don't speak unnaturally slowly either) and when possible use drawings, gestures or "realia" (real objects) in your conversation. For example, when you talk about your daily schedules, it would be a good idea to make a chart or refer to a pocket calendar.
Here are some suggestions for early meetings:
1. Daily Charts, Schedules. This would be a natural activity to do at your first meeting when it's a good idea to clarify when you will meet. Show your partner a chart or weekly calendar of your daily schedule, talk about it, and then indicate some times when you could meet. Then ask your partner about her daily schedule. Perhaps have her construct a chart of her schedule. Determine when you both are free and can meet.
2. Family Photos. A good way to become acquainted is to show photos of your family. Many English 435 students have done this in the past and it seems to work well. The photos provide something concrete to talk about and it's a nice way to convey to your partner who you are.
3. Drink and/or Snack at the Depot. This can be combined with #1 and #2 above. This is a natural thing for students to do and the ordering, consuming, etc. provides lots of things to talk about. Do you drink coffee or only tea? Do Koreans drink coffee in the morning as we do? Are American soft drinks popular in your country? Etc.
4. Walk Around the Campus. Sometimes it's more relaxing to converse as you walk. Walking has the advantage of presenting things to talk about as you pass by them and so conversation gets generated in a natural way. You can take your partner to some parts of the campus that you find pretty or interesting.
Here are some other activities you might wish to try:
1. Activity from Culturally Speaking: A Conversation and Culture Text for Learners of English (authors: Genzel and Cummings): This is the title of a book I've put on reserve. It's designed to provide conversation practice and also teach students about the culture of English speakers in the U.S. It contains information about the right thing to say and do in various circumstances. Choose a chapter that you think might interest your partner and go over it with her. Most chapters contain a cultural quiz that you can give your partner. Example of a quiz question: When you go on a date, should you bring your date a present? These quizzes can generate a great deal of conversation.
2. Ask your partner questions about some aspect of her culture. The handbooks (See above) that I've put on reserve can be useful here as are the two books on Japanese education (if your partner is Japanese) mentioned below. Government information web pages, like those mentioned above for Japan and Korea, are also convenient places to look for information. When you read the relevant handbook (or longer book or web page), make a note of some aspect of your partner's language or culture that interests you and discuss it with your partner. For example, if your partner is Japanese, you could read pp. 39-43 where characteristics of the Japanese written language are discussed. Then you could ask your partner to show you the difference between kana, hiragana, and katakana characters. On pp. 49-50 is a list of non-verbal behaviors that differ from those used by English speakers. For example, according to the Handbook, Japanese wave one hand in front of the face to signal "no." You could check with your partner to see if this is accurate. Then, using Culturally Speaking (see #1 above), you might show your partner pictures of gestures used by English speakers.
3. Have your partner show you where she is from. Find some maps in the library of your partner's country and ask your partner to indicate her hometown. (If your partner is Japanese, you can use these sites, part of the Japan Information Network mentioned above, to find maps: Japan Atlas and Regions and Cities. See also Travel Japan.)
4. Picture books: The library has some picture books about Japan and other countries that you and your partner could look at together. The pictures should provoke questions that your partner could answer. See, for example, A Day in the Life of Japan. I didn't put it on reserve but you can find it the stacks. Its call number is DS811/D35/1985. There are other picture books about Japan near it. Or you can find pictures on the internet. For pictures of Japan and Korea, see the web sites mentioned in #3 above.
5. Idioms: Most IELI students are interested in idioms. An idiom is a phrase which has a meaning different from the meanings of its component parts. Many idioms are two-word verbs--look up and put out, for example. Idioms are very common in conversation but often foreign students don't know them. So they say things like "Please extinguish your cigarette," instead of "Please put out your cigarette." Nothing wrong with "extinguish" but it sounds very formal in some situations. The IELI teachers teach idioms but students can always profit from learning more and reviewing the ones they already know. I've placed two books on reserve that TESL teaches have used to teach idioms. One is Essential Idioms in English by Robert J. Dixon; this one used to be used at the IELI. Another is All Clear! Idioms in Context by Helen Fragiadakis. You could check one of these out and go over a chapter with your partner. Several sites on the World Wide Web have activities on idioms. See #7-b below.
6. Proverbs: Teach your partner a common American proverb and ask your partner to teach you one from her culture. Ask your partner if his language has a proverb similar to the American one you've selected. Explore proverbs on the internet (see #7-e below). Here are some common American proverbs:
An apple a day keeps the doctor away.
First come, first served.
Haste makes waste.
Honesty is the best policy.
Many hands make light work.
Out of the frying pan into the fire.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Two's company, three's a crowd.
7. Explore the Internet together. The World Wide Web has quite a bit to offer the ESL student and it could be fun to explore the Web together, perhaps using a terminal in the library or in one of the labs when a class is not in session. On your English 435 web syllabus I've listed some good entry sites for all kinds of information relating to ESL. Many of them either contain activities you could do with your partner, or at least links to other sites that have these activities. Here are some sites with specific activities that you might wish to do with your partner:
a. Activities for ESL Students
This web page is a part of the Internet TESL Journal. Recommendations: Check out the Idioms, Phrasal Verbs, and Slang Quizzes page and do the "Animal Idioms" quiz.
Recommendations: Check out Dave's ESL Slang Page where students can learn about words like "airhead" and "awesome" (and other slang words beginning with other letters of the alphabet). Dave also has a good idioms page. You might point out also the ESL Cafe's Help Center where students can ask questions about English and get answers from ESL teachers.
c. Pronunciation and Listening Activities
Here's a list of sites focusing on pronunciation and listening that you could explore with your partner, particularly if he or she wishes to work on these two skills:
d. The British Council's Learn English Page
Recommendations: Play the word mixer game, or the drinks machine for phrasal verbs, or go to the magazine where you and your partner can learn about the "World Cup," "Limericks," "Learning to Glide in Romania" and other topics.
This site has over 230 common proverbs sorted alphabetically.
f. Jim Duber's Interactive Activities
These are intriguing multi-media activities which employ some new interactive technologies--QuickTime, Flash, Shockwave, RealMedia,etc.(free browser plug-ins that can be downloaded if they're not loaded already in your computer).
Keep a log in which you describe what you did in each conversation session and your reactions, reflections as to how it went. Bear in mind that his log is not a private diary and that I will read it. Therefore don't make it excessively personal and don't write in a kind of shorthand that only you can read.
WHAT TO WRITE ABOUT IN YOUR LOG: SUGGESTIONS
Earlier Entries
1. Describe your first impressions of your partner. Even if we've never met anyone from a particular country, we usually have expectations, shaped usually by the popular media or perhaps by our reading, regarding people from that country. Did your partner confirm or disconfirm your expectations?
2. Comment on how your conversations proceeded. Were you able to get your meaning across? Could your partner get her/his meaning across? If you ran into some difficulties communicating, could you solve them? How?
3. Record some pronunciation, vocabulary, or grammar issues that arose during your conversations--perhaps a word your partner had trouble pronouncing, perhaps a slang expression that confused your partner, or a grammar mistake that you noticed. These examples will be useful when you do your mini-contrastive analsysis (see below). Make a mental note of these while you're conversing and write them down later. Taking notes during your conversation would be unnatural.
4. Describe some early meetings--what you did, what activities you found useful in terms of putting both of you at ease and generating some conversation.
Later Entries
1. Describe your partner's language background and school and out-of-school experience with English.
2. Describe your partner's strengths and weaknesses. What can he do successfully in English? What problems does he have?
3. Describe any interesting cross-cultural differences in perspective that arise. Were you surprised by your partner's attitudes, manners, methods of learning? Was she surprised by your attitudes and approaches?
4. Make some connections between your experience as a conversation partner and your reading and course work in English 435. What did you read or hear about in your course work that helped you understand your partner and her language learning experiences?
5. What were your partner's impressions of Arcata, HSU, the U.S? Was your partner surprised by some aspect of American culture?
6. In your entries, don't reveal any private information but do mention interesting things and describe them in some detail. Sometimes students write, "And then my partner told me about a fascinating aspect of his culture," but never explain what the fascinating aspect was.
WHAT TO WRITE ABOUT IN YOUR LOG: REQUIREMENTS
1. Contrastive analysis: Do a mini-contrastive analysis of your partner's speech in English. Read the description of your partner's language in one of the handbooks on reserve or in a book edited by Michael Swan and Bernard Smith that I've put on reserve, Learner English: A Teacher's Guide to Interference and Other Problems, and see if it provides a plausible explanation for the way your partner speaks English. For example, on p. 38 the handbook for teachers of Japanese students lists seven English consonant sounds that do not occur in Japanese. Does your partner have difficulty with these sounds? Does your partner substitute other sounds for them? On p. 31 of this same handbook it is explained that "Japanese nouns are not preceded by an article such as the or a in English." Does your partner leave out the articles the and a in his speech and/or writing? On p. 48 it is explained that Japanese typically respond differently to negatively phrased questions like "You don't have a pencil?" Does your partner say "Yes" to such questions when he means "No"? The handbooks for other nationalities have similar information that you can use to do your mini analysis. Note: You don't need to involve your partner in this analysis. This is something you do on your own.
2. Exercise on /l/ and /r/. If you have a Japanese student as a partner, I'd like you to read an on-line handout "Learning Difficult Sounds in Japanese and English" that explains a problem Japanese students have distinguishing the English sounds /l/ and /r/. ESL experts strongly recommend not beginning with or overemphasizing this difficulty in a pronunciation class. Doing so simply discourages Japanese students. To equal things a bit, my handout has you first try to distinguish two sounds in Japanese that give English speakers learning Japanese a lot of trouble. Then there are some exercises for your partner to do related to the English /l/ and /r/ sounds. Some 435 students find that their partners enjoy this activity, but don't do it if you feel it will embarrass your partner. Even if you don't do the exercise with your partner, I'd still like you to read the handout and comment on it and your partner's pronunciation of /l/ and /r/. See the section of the handout called Log Entry for suggestions on what to discuss in your log.
3. Entry based on reading. Read something somewhere about the history and/or culture of the homeland of your partner. The handbooks on reserve will be a fairly good source for those of you with a Chinese, Korean, or Japanese partner, but you may wish to consult another source as well. Use the library! Relate the information you find in your reading to your experience with your partner. If you have a partner from a country for which there is no handbook, use the library and find an article or book that describes some aspect of your partner's history or culture. You do not need to discuss your reading with your partner, but you may wish to. Recently most IELI students have come from Japan, so I've put the following two books about Japanese education on reserve. A recruiter from the Japanese Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme recommended these books:
If you have a Japanese conversation partner, you might read about the Japanese government's new "Action Plan" to improve English Education.
3. Final summarizing entry. In a final entry draw some conclusions about your experience acting as a conversation partner. Here are some approaches you might wish to take in this entry:
1. Describe the approach you used in your sessions and mention how it seemed to work.
2. Compare your partner's competence in English at the end of your meetings with his earlier competence? Has he made progress? In what areas? What area some remaining problems?
3. Summarize what you have learned about the history and culture of the country that is the home of your partner.
4. Often we gain insights into our own culture by seeing it from the perspective of a visitor from another land. When your partner expresses surprise at some aspect of American life, her surprise may lead you to question something that you've always taken for granted. If something like this occurred, explain the experience and suggest what it taught you about your culture and the culture of your partner.
4. Explain, based on your experience, what you think is the best way to learn a second language? What did you do that seemed to help your partner the most?
5. Explain how your experience acting as a conversation partner has influenced your thinking--your thinking about teaching, about learning other languages, about other cultures, American culture, etc.
After two or three meetings with your partner, you should make arrangements to visit a class at the I.E.L.E.. If your schedules allow, it's best to visit a class with your partner. Doing so will give you both something to talk about afterwards and you'll learn from seeing your partner in the I.E.L.I. learning environment. It's important to first check with your partner's teacher and get his or her approval first. You can ask your partner to ask his or her teacher if it's all right if you come on a certain date. If your partner is a beginner and doesn't understand what you are asking, you could write a note and ask your partner to deliver it to his or her teacher. As a last resort, you can call Tom Wallendy, Supervising Teacher at the I.E.L.I.(phone #: 826-3715), but he shouldn't be asked to make arrangements for you unless everything else has failed. The I.E.L.I. teachers are expecting you and are glad to have you observe; they simply want to be notified first so not too many of you show up at the same time and so you won't arrive and find students are taking a written test, away on a field trip, etc.) After you visit, you should write a report of your visit. This report is due Thurs., Oct. 23 for students in the top half of the (alphabetical) class attendance list; and Thurs., Nov. 20 for students in the bottom half of the list.
Before you visit a class, you should look over Chap. 23 in TBP. Look especially at Figure 23.1 "Teacher Observation Form A: Observing Other Teachers" on pp. 432-34. Although I don't expect you to fill this out, it can become a good source of things to discuss in your report.
You should do these things in your observation report:
1. Describe the classroom situation--how many students, the seating arrangement, etc.
2. Explain what the purpose or focus of the lesson or activity was. (In other words, explain what aspect of language use the teacher was attempting to help students master.) In this regard, you should clarify whether the primary focus was on form (pronunciation, grammar or vocabulary) or on practicing communication (see TBL, Chap. 20, for a discussion of form-focused instruction). If the primary focus is on communication, you can mention whether there was any form-based instruction at all and, if there was some attention to form, when that instruction occurred--before, during, or after the communicative activity.
3. Comment on the teacher's approach to errors. If a student makes an error, does the teacher react to it? If so, what form does this reaction take? In other words, does the teacher simply recast the student's utterance in correct form; or does she repeat the error, hoping the student will correct it; or does she stop and explain the error, giving the rule that was broken, for example, if it was a grammar error. We'll discuss in class these and other possible responses to errors.
4. Explain the strategy or procedures the teacher employed to help students master that aspect of the English language that was the focus of instruction. Please be specific here. Don't say simply, "The teacher read a story out loud." Give the name of the story and mention what it was about. If the teacher goes over an exercise, include some sample items in your report. If the exercises were based on a handout, try to get a copy (but don't press if the teacher is reluctant to part with one).
5. Comment on your partner's role in the class. Did she/he participate? Did she/he act as you expected based on your previous meetings with your partner?
6. Explain how the class differed from classes you are accustomed to. Did it resemble foreign language (French, Spanish, German) classes you have taken?
7. Relate, if you can (I realize you may visit the I.E.L.I. before we have progressed very far in 435), what you observed in the I.E.L.I. class to what you are learning in our class--English 435. Here are some things to look for:
a. Perhaps the teacher is using a method that we have discussed--audio-lingual, natural approach, TPR, communicative, etc.? You could describe what the teacher did that indicated to you the teacher was applying a particular method.
b. Almost certainly the I.E.L.I. teacher will adapt her speech in certain ways and employ other techniques (visual aids, e.g.) to make herself understandable. We will be talking about these adaptations a great deal in 435. You can notice and comment on these adaptations.
c. You can relate the way the teacher you observe teaches a particular skill (speaking, listening, reading, writing) to discussions in 435 about ways to teach this skill. If we haven't discussed a skill yet, you can still find the relevant chapter in TBP and compare what Brown says with what you observed. I'll expect you to have read the chapter in TBP on the particular skill taught in the class you visit. In your report you should compare what you observed with Brown's suggestions and comments about the teaching of that particular skill (listening, speaking, reading, writing).
8. Mention anything else you feel is noteworthy.