OSU-PNU 2006

Only 7 more days of class. Wow! I can't believe that our time here is almost over. Overall, I would say that it's been a good experience. I've enjoyed being in Korea for a second time. As I mentioned in a previous blog, this trip has seemed like a homecoming in a sense. (I lived and taught in Seoul for a year 10 years ago.) I've enjoyed the teaching, even though I'm not teaching what I was hired or prepared to teach. And I've developed some friendships along the way. So overall, I think it was a good decision to spend part of my summer teaching at PNU.

In class today, we continued the theme of famous people. I designed a cloze dictation on Margaret Mead (one of my favorite famous persons). I also used the text to talk about grammar and vocabulary issues, particularly usage issues. The second activity we did in class was another follow-up to the interviews students did in class on Tuesday this week. One focus of the activity was on vowels and language rhythm; the other focus was on how the part of speech of a word changes the pronuciation of it. Most of the pronunciaiton practice I do with the students in the class is a listen and repeat exercise, with me being the source of input. It's unfortunate, but because we were not informed ahead of time that these would be the types of classes we would be teaching, we did not bring the appropriate materials with us. Consequently, we don't have tapes or CDs as another form of input for the students to listen to. Most of the listening exercises we pull from the Internet, which has been both good and not so good. The other activity we did in some of the classes today was to have students pair up and share the information about the famous people they researched. While they were sharing this, I went around and made note of the language difficulties they had when speaking and checked the accuracy and content of the 10 questions I asked them to write and that they would ask if they were to meet this person in person. I wasn't able to do this in all the classes because we had to let the second period students go early on account of an evaluation that was being administered at the end of the period (see below for a more detailed explanation and response to this). And then, because of a lack of communication on Dr. Kim's part regarding our lunch meeting today (She organized a lunch between us, her, the dean and another professor. It was very nice; however, she failed to tell us that the venue had been changed. We waited for 20 minutes and then left to go find our own lunches before we had to be back in the classroom to teach. By chance, we went to a place where the office staff was having their lunch, and they told us where the new meeting place was.), we were 20 minutes late getting back from lunch (It was good that Dr. Kim called the students to let them know we would be late because of her lack of communication with us), so I was unable to do everything in the other two classes that I accomplished in my first class of the morning and to keep the classes more or less at the same place, I decided to save the famous persons discussions in two of the classes for tomorrow. After class on Tuesday, I uploaded the interviews that the students recorded to our class podcast page so that they would have access to these. For homework, I asked them to review their interviews and write down three aspects of their spoken English that they want to work on improving and bring this to class with them tomorrow. In class, I gave the students some examples of what I meant by aspects of their spoken English, e.g., pronunciation of consonants and vowels. I also reminded them that other teachers, like Lisya, were working on spoken English issues with them, so I asked them to think of these and consider them as possible aspects they want to improve. Our next theme is entertainment and the subtheme I chose is sitcoms, primarily because of my experience teaching sitcoms in the ESL classroom. I asked the students to bring in a synopsis of a Korean sitcom, including the main characters and be prepared to discuss their favorite episode. I'm going to have students share these and then we'll watch another episode of the Simpsons, which I'll decide tonight, although I'm not sure if we'll have time to start it tomorrow or have to save this for Monday's class. I'm finding, and the others are too, that it's difficult to cover a theme a day, so I'm taking two days per theme, barring no secret course evaluations or other disturbances (e.g., no air conditioning in the classrooms. Come on! It's like 100 degrees. And we have to compete with all the construction noise.)