In class on Friday Elizabeth did two exercises.

The first was a simulated cocktail party (she was the waitress). She reviewed the cultural aspects of a cocktail party: how one behaves, the tone and style of the conversation, and other norms (superficial speech, milling around, informality…). Then the “party” began. She put on fairly loud background music and walked around with beverages and “hors d’oevres” as we paired up and talked about a preassigned topic: our strengths as an L1 speaker (of the 4 skills), those of our L2, and I think it was which we’ll focus on in the classroom. We noticed the conventional speech of cocktails parties accepted some amount of talking over one another, and we were also regularly interrupted as Elizabeth came by to offer us food and drink. The ambiance was such that we had to raise our voices to be heard by our partner.

I guess the point of the exercise was to reveal the inseparability of listening and talking and the importance (socially and topically) of context. We found that are strengths are not necessarily the same in our L1 and Ln.

In the next exercise she divided us into three groups: people who know no Spanish, people who know none or a little, and people who know a lot. She put a video on the TV but covered the screen so we could only hear. She played one three-minute scene.

Each group tried to understand what was happening, with no context given and no visual cues. Next, she told us the movie was El Norte and confirmed that the scene was in a restaurant, with two woman talking. (I’d thought one of them was a kid, but it was a young woman.) She played the scene, with the screen still covered. After discussion, she played it a third time, after telling us a little more about the movie and uncovering the screen.

As she processed our observations during each round, she unwittingly hurt my feelings. My two partners knew a lot less Spanish than I, so of course I understood more than they. When Elizabeth asked for our reactions and I spoke, she said to me, “I should have put you in the advanced group,” with the subtext that I was busting her experiment and that I should be quiet, since what the others had to say was more representative. So from that moment on I didn’t say a word. She didn’t notice. I admit my enthusiasm for the rest of the lesson, and my feelings about her, diminished. A classroom is such an emotional environment. Some of us are very vulnerable there.

Anyhow, the findings were:

• First listening: The beginner group heard music, voices, emotion, background sounds. Intermediate group heard word clusters, high frequency words and setting. Advanced group understood the cultural as well as physical context, the topics under discussion, in full sentences.

• Second listening: Group 1 had a  clearer sense of the context and picked up some cognates. Group 2 heard more words and phrases than before, and began to understand the relationship between the two speakers. Group 3 got pretty much the whole story.

• Third listening/first watching: Group 1 got personalities and relationships. Group 2 got more on personalities, more on sentences and ideas and topics, but still not the whole gist of the scene. For Group 3, everything was clear. (I didn’t belong in Group 3; she was wrong.)

Among the lessons we should take away is that, at any level, teachers need to make sure that context is clear and that keywords are identified, particularly when they’re new.

Some additional class notes

(From Del Hymes)

Each speech event involves:

• Setting
• Participants
• Purpose
• Order of Events (e.g. starting from greeting)
• Tone (e.g. mood)
• Form & style of speech (register/dialects; e.g. who you’re speaking to and the actual words used… casual, or …)
• Social rules
• Genre (kind of speech act, e.g. social, business…)

In teaching, we always need to address all of these. We looked at them in the context of the cocktail party.

Sarah pointed out that not only are listening/speaking and reading/writing inseparable, but that reading can support speaking, etc.

She’s got a circle with “Concrete Experience (who am I as a user of the skill)” at the top. At 3:00, with a directional arrow pointing there, is “Observation & Reflection.” Turning more around the circle we find 6:00 is “Form Abstract Concepts.” Then pointing up to 9:00 is “Test in New Situations.” And the arrow points back up to 12:00, indicating an endless cycle.

Oh, wait. Here it is. She finally posted it:

David Kolb on experiential learning

David A. Kolb (with Roger Fry) created his famous model out of four elements: concrete experience, observation and reflection, the formation of abstract concepts and testing in new situations. He represented these in the famous experiential learning circle (after Kurt Lewin):