first week of teaching 418

Today is the second day that I started teaching 418. The class is held in the faculty development lab. The immediate trouble that I can see from using this lab is that students in the back of the room can hardly see what's on the presentation screen. I think I should offer them the opportunity to view whatever is on the screen also on their computer.

Well, how did the class go? It's not as full as I planned. We spent the first hour of the class trying to signing for the blog. Many students sloved the problem by themelves, but in the end there were still three students who had trouble. I speculate the problems that they were having is probably because they used the school email account, which has all sorts of restrictions. Now, all but one student can comment in the class blog.

We spent the last fifteen minute talking about the chunking tool in Meskill (2002). The rationale for its use is that language is not just bits and pieces of syntax and vocabulary, rather it's specific language used in the specific situations or context. As language teachers, we may need to be very observant as how language is used in real life communication and record the language chunks (e.g., How are you? It's good to see you here. etc.) or even though the full sequence of a social communication phenonena. The example that I showed my student is an 30-second exerpt from Start Trek: Next Generation. It's when caption Picard welcoming the new intern on the Enterprise. In this exerpt, the overarching sociafunction of the interaction is welcoming a new-coming, but there are a lot of speech acts to different micro functions, such as compliment, self-effacing, leave taking, etc. All need to be taken as a whole as a baseline to understand each utterance and the syntax and vocabulary components. In other words, language need to be taught in an "organic way" not contrived.

The following is a template for the chunking tool. One could imagine that a database can be built over a long time of observation.

The Chunking Tool
Learners:
Topic:
Situation:
Function(s):
Structure(s):
Lexis:
Skills foci:
Cultural notables:
Special expressions/idioms:
Medium/materials:
The chunk:

The homework for my students is for them to find a piece of media and complete one set of chunking tool. I plan to ask them to share in pairs of their media and chunking tool.

About time management: I think in each class session, I should spend at least 20 minutes on lectures and the rest on hands-on.