Subject Matter
He began (as he has done before but I forgot to notice/mention it) by stating & writing on the board the date. It was a nice way to start the class and get students’ attention. It was sort of a dictation; he told us to write things down, anyway.
Ordering breakfast in a restaurant: foods, some cultural aspects of restaurant communication. Introduction to time-telling, which includes a review of numbers and the introduction of some new words (quarter [hour]) and some word order. In one pairing, certain words mean “one hour” but if you reverse them it means “one o’clock.” Hard to explain and I think, in the end, he had to resort to English to confirm his meaning.
In his restaurant activity he began by calling three volunteers to the table in front of the room (I was one). “I tried to make it real” he said of the way he interacted with us. But he had to flip roles from waiter to teacher when our [my] comprehension was slow. He says this technique allows him to give leading roles to more proficient students.
Then we worked in groups of three, role-playing as customer and waiter (see below). He calls this an “information gap activity.” It works with two, three or four people. You give them a task-oriented situation where they have to find information (in this case, menu items from our list and numbers from another list to insert into sentences in a third handout (Mad Libs-style, except it was supposed to make sense). You have to find info from (in this case) your partner (what they want to order). It can be like a treasure hunt, too, where someone has to find everything on a list.
Nature of Input
In the review session he talked about his having used “present, practice, produce” method, “practice” referring to repetition exercises. He did a lot of that today, in several ways. He had us as a whole group repeat after him (“like a Greek chorus”). Then he had the whole group reply to him with the pre-established dialog that we had in front of us on a handout. Then he “conducted” one half of the room to play the role of the waiter, and the other half to play the customer in reply. That felt like a very safe way to practice, since one’s individual voices couldn’t really be heard — and thus one’s mistakes or silences were also aurally unnoticed — though I think he was visually cataloging who was keeping up and who wasn’t.
We also were required to produce pretty quickly on our own. This time we had the chance to work in threes, which I liked better than pairs because there’s more chance for inter-brain play and peer scaffolding. “You may make more mistakes if you’re thrown into ‘produce’ too soon,” he commented, “but maybe that’s not bad.”
He broke up some phrases to look at word order and morphology. He used even more English today than before, but still, most of the lesson was in Turkish. He briefly used the overhead projector at the end of class to introduce what we’ll work on tomorrow: time. It was the first time he’s told us part of what’s ahead for the next day and I appreciated the foreknowledge. It helped ground me a little, in my state of confusion over what he was saying and my trying to keep up.
He tried saying set phrases quickly, the way a native would, and having us repeat, and then more slowly, and then fast again, which I thought was a great idea, because we could both hear natural speech and be able to parse the words, in turn. Another exercise he did, which he discussed later, was breaking up sentences into chunks. I was interested that he began at the end of the sentence and worked backward. Actually, I didn’t even notice that’s what he was doing until he told us later. So if, in Turkish, we were saying, “I would like to order 10 eggs and some orange juice, please,” he would say “some orange juice, please” [and we’d repeat], and then “10 eggs and some orange juice, please” [repeat], and then the full sentence. He demonstrated how working backwards that way preserves the natural cadence and music of the sentence/language.
He gave us a dyad activity with a handout: clock faces with different times. Some clocks had question marks on their faces and I didn’t know what that represented. With my partner I wasn’t able even to get through one time-telling exercise before he moved on. That’s because we all were unclear on syntax and meaning of the new words and phrases he gave us, and I was struggling to find definitions before I could do the exercise.
He brought out a map of the world and named the oceans near Turkey (in Turkish) but I couldn’t quite decipher his meaning.
He spoke even more English this time than in previous days, though still primarily in Turkish. Some students appreciated this, grateful for the opportunity to understand what was going on. Others said it was making them lazy. “By not translating, it gets you into guessing mode,” which is good, “but it can be hard to wonder…”
Affect/Emotion
Because I’m falling behind, lacking the ability to remember upon hearing and the time to practice, I dreaded the class. However, I soon got engaged despite that, by trying to understand and then by some practice exercises that provided some laughs. As mentioned, the pair activity — today, telling time — just made me feel stupid because I didn’t get it and my partner either didn’t or was distracted, but the triad activity had a lot more life and spirit — and mutual support.
Production
I partially answered that above. My mistakes are in every realm. Primarily I can’t remember words long enough to recall them when needed for the next exchange, and can’t remember stuff from several days earlier. We’re covering a lot of ground, it seems to me, and my production is lagging more each day. Where I had been thinking my pronunciation was my strong point, now that too is falling apart. I wish that, for those of us with that skill, he would spend a little more one-on-one time listening for that, rather than for content. He actively makes the rounds during these partner sessions, no doubt getting a sense of our abilities, but doesn’t interfere when we’re making mistakes; generally he speaks only when we ask him something. I know that the repetition/choral exercises are designed to improve all aspects of production, from pronunciation to syntax, but pronunciation gets lost in the crowd.
Strategies
I’m still trying to write words phonetically when I hear them, but because we were producing so much I left behind phonology and started to write definitions for the words instead. (I learned that there was an assignment — making a list of vegetables for a “shopping list” — for today that I didn’t even hear him give; that was weird, because I’m attentive if overwhelmed.)
Style
Seat of my baggy pants. Running to catch the train. Staying invisible when possible. Joining in when it’s safe (e.g. chorals). The sentence structure is starting to make a tiny bit of sense.
Fellow Learners
As mentioned, the groups of three were great for helping me keep up. I don’t know if I was able to help them as well, but I tried. Certainly I helped produced laughter, if not proper Turkish. I worried, though, that I was doing all the taking in the interchange, since the other two were way faster learners than I.
I noticed that, initially, he calls on people who, he must’ve figured out, are quicker learners.
Corrective Feedback
I really like getting corrective feedback on pronunciation, as mentioned. But today he gave little if any corrective feedback, but only as a group, when he heard a note in the chorus go sour. Nice guy, though. Not touchy-feely-supportive in the least, not encouraging, but not critical either: just relaxed and easy-going, though I thought on one occasion I saw him get a little flustered at our inability to comprehend something he was trying to tell us, charades-like, in Turkish.