OSU-PNU 2006

Today in class we did a couple of follow up activities. One of these was about yesterday's experiential learning activity. The other was about part of the Simpsons episode we watched last Friday in class. How I had students discuss yesterday's activity was I put them in groups with students who were absent and had them share what they experienced and how this helped them with their English. The feedback that I got about the activity was mixed. Some of the students said that it was a good chance to get to know the teachers and other students better and to practice their English. Some also said they liked the chance to learn to talk about their surroundings in English. Others, who didn't like the activity, thought it didn't provide enough time for them to talk with the teachers because there were so many students. Also, they seemed to need a bit more structure to practice using English, like what's found in the classroom. One student had an interesting observation about the students in group P. He said that they seemed almost like native speakers when they spoke in English and that he was a bit envious of them.

If we were to do this again, we would need to change a couple things. First, I think it would be better to solicit from the students places they think would be interesting to go to practice their English. Second, we would need to provide students with more vocabulary to talk about the experience. This was one of the criticisms that a couple students in the N and U classes had. They didn't feel that they had the vocabulary to talk about their experience in English. Finally, in order to provide structure for those students who need it, we should come up with some discussion questions that we could ask students, particularly those who are more reticient to speak, while doing the activity.

Overall, the teachers were quite happy with how the activity went yesterday. However, I don't think it's common for university students to do this, so that may be another reason why there was some resistance to the idea.

The other follow-up activity we did today was role plays with the dialogs students created with key words from part of the Simpsons episode we watched last Friday in class. Students brought in their dialogs to class today. I gave them time in class to go over these with a partner or two, depending on how many persons they had in their dialogs, and then they performed them for the entire class. It was interesting to see how creative the students were with this and how talented they are in performing (see pictures). All of the classes did very well with this assignment. I was particularly impressed with how students in the P group had fun playing around with the language. Samples from all three classes can be viewed on the Creative Conversations Showcase blog.