Today I felt really left behind much of the time, while many others seemed to memorize vocab spontaneously.
Observations about today vs. the other days:
He spoke a little more English than in the previous two days. Not much, but just enough to clarify certain points, which was helpful. But of course in Real Life that’s often not possible.
I spoke with Kim about her observations about his teaching style. He has not established set rules about who can talk and when. He will pose question to the group sometimes, and look for someone to answer. Other times he walks around the circle, bends toward a student and asks him/her a specific question in Turkish. When we pair up, he makes the rounds, listening in and making himself available should someone have a question, and making corrections to any glaring errors.
Today he didn’t focus on accent as much as he did the first day, but more on vocabulary. He introduced more numbers, a few more “chunks,” and a new class of vocabulary: vegetables. He brought some veggies in with him, gathered us all around the table, had us take turns naming the object, and then — still standing — informally pair up and ask each other “what is that?” about the veggies. Before or after (I can’t remember) he selected certain students to come up in front of the classroom and have a dialog with him about buying vegetables, as though he were a vendor. It was way beyond my capability so I was glad he didn’t call on me. I later asked him about his criteria for choosing students for that exercise, and to what extent he is aware of our varying levels of comprehension. He said he’s beginning to see who knows what, and that he did pick student he thought could handle this relatively complicated exercise. So it was no accident he didn’t call on me.
One memorable moment was when one of the students asked him if he had a carrot. He did, but we wanted to model how to tell us he didn’t have a carrot. So he picked it up and threw it behind him, and then replied in the negative: yok. He also incorporated a cultural lesson at that point, when he was pretending to be a vendor. With his role-playing he communicated a sense of a Turkish market: the spirit and tone we might expect to find there.
Other classroom activities involved (again) stamps. We each got an envelope of Turkish stamps of different denominations. In pairs, we asked each other “Do you have a __-lira stamp?” and replied, “Here is a ___-lira stamp” or “I don’t have a ___-lira stamp; what a pity!” It was a good exercise, I thought, because it involved several levels of brain: tactile, visual, cultural (the Turkish stamps), interactive, cognitive (figuring out, from what was written on the blackboard and/or our notes, how to say “61”).
In answer to questions on our learning log sheet again:
Subject matter: Fundamentals of greetings and counting, and then a real-life, practical introduction to food and shopping.
Nature of input: He seems to be trying to keep things simplified, but at times he seems to race ahead and I have no idea what he’s trying to communicate. He has begun to cover some rules — partly during the review in English at the end of the class — about gender (not used in nouns), the copula “to be” (nonexistent), and a little about grammar and word order. Partly he communicates that by writing a word on the board and chopping it into morphemes. Partly he does it by comparison, pointing for example at himself and at a woman to distinguish between gender. When he does this, he floods, doing it several times so we start to see the relationship. Sometimes, however, I mistake the distinction he’s trying to make. With “here” and “there,” for example, I thought he meant “this” and “that” (or was it vice versa?).
Affect: I’m feeling shyer as I fall behind. Still his kind presence keeps anxiety from turning to terror. That, and my relationship with members of the group. And when I screw up, their laughter WITH me is reassuring.
Production: Repetition of different combinations or classifications of language: numbers, vegetables. I’m not sure what kind of errors I’m making because I don’t get feedback from him unless I ask or do something outrageous. I notice my classmates will sometimes correct my pronunciation, but I know they’re wrong.
Strategies: Writing everything down, and saying it over and over.
Style: See above.
Fellow learners: They can help or hinder. They can provide positive reinforcement and encouragement. They can be humorous (like when Sabah, exhausted and still fasting for Ramadan, spontaneously made up quite a ridiculous word); on the negative side it was distracting because we were laughing so much that I missed the beginning of the next exercise, but on the positive side it was a release of stress. They can help by providing corrections, but can hinder by providing the wrong corrections. Perhaps most importantly to someone like me, they set the atmosphere that allows me to be comfortable or not.
Corrective feedback: I get it from the teacher with pronunciation when I ask for it, and it is helpful. I think when I learn I pay more attention to phonology than vocabulary and syntax.
One final note, which Kim and I also discussed. The teacher will sometimes move forward to a new exercise too quickly, either before we are ready (not allowing enough time for the slower ones to finish) or before he has everyone’s attention (like when Sabah and I were laughing). In those moments I and maybe some others get left behind. As Kim pointed out, he has no signal for when he wants silence and attention on him.