On My Own

Having spent a week or so observing various classes, I have noticed a trend across all classes. There is simply no curriculum. The standards are implemented by the state, and that is attendance rosters, online testing throughout the year, and daily plan provided on the board at the start of the class. Beyond that it's entirely up to the teachers individually. Now there are definitely pros and cons to this. Each teacher is allowed to create the class they want, without top-down interference. The freedom can be used to stay flexible with students, and work on the fly based on the atmosphere and personalities of the classroom. There are other issues that arise though. The two main issues I notice are materials and continuity.

Materials

Each instructor comes with their own supplies, and whatever materials they can utilize from the university. A lot of the university materials are slightly outdated, but quite usable nonetheless. However there are at least one major flaw in almost ALL materials: appropriate level material. Beginners texts used have large gaps in knowledge, and are required to have a lot of supplementation at the teacher's discretion. Intermediate students can understand more, but there is a big gap for intermediate language learners across most second languages. There's a lot of material that is too easy, and a lot of material too difficult. I think graded readers would be a great way to bridge the gap for the school, and might help all teachers of all levels.

Continuity

When there are few guidelines on individual classes, the students will find a lot of knowledge gaps from class to class. I'm sure this is common in almost any community language program, and it certainly is here. I had a discussion with the beginners instructor about students being uncomfortable progressing. A few of Professor Kolcun's students expressed discomfort in the next level of class despite passing their state sponsored test that shows they're ready for the next level. I'm very curious to see how this topic progresses into the next semester, which is approaching rapidly.

First Class

The night prior to class this week Dr. Britton asked if I would be able to prepare a short lesson (any duration of my choosing) discussing parts of speech for her intermediate class. We were simply doing an end of semester wrap up on using adverbs and adjectives in addition to the basic parts of speech they learned in beginner's class (hopefully). I sat for a bit to ponder what I would teach? I'm a big fan of input based classes, using videos, audio samples, and extended reading (Steven Krashen fan here) to improve language acquisition in a +1 fashion. Fortunately this intermediate class follows an input based approach with learning checks after reading and listening (a lot of video and reading based lessons from various sources). Then I wondered where I would pull my resources from? Would I make a lesson from scratch or something? No that wouldn't be time efficient since I needed to teach it in 12 hours and I don't own a printer at home. I decided to make use of materials the class is already comfortable with. I pulled the Easy English News that are used in the classes. I decided on using a short article on a cheese catching event in England as a base. This allows that +1 zone of development, since it's not new material, simple a new article on a level they already work with. We read it out loud taking turns as a class. Then I had students underline adverbs and adjectives from the article. We wrote them on the board, and made new sentences with them. After that I pulled a youtube video up with the exact interview used in the article. Then we read it again for understanding. There were definitely a few awkward moments, but the lesson went through without any major hiccups. Being in front of a class for ESL is definitely different than my last classroom environment (middle school band), and I remembered why I used to always have several backup activities because I found myself freestyling by the end, and it went alright, but not as smooth as the first part of the activity. Good lessons learned.

P.S. The exact article was used the next day in a different intermediate class. It was nice to see how that teacher implemented the same lesson plan, and the continuity piece across classrooms.

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