I felt like I had my own little cheering section coming along with me to class this morning… all of YOU!
The task was to prepare a 90-minute lesson plan, but in simulating it for my classmates (who would pretend to be new Canadians with ‘high basic’ language level), I was allotted 20 minutes: 10 for the elicitation and explanation stage and 10 to start the class on any one of the three prepared practise exercises. My topic was verbal introductions.
In doing a last run-through this morning, I found that at the 10-minute mark, I still had lots I wanted to share from my elicitation and explanation part. I was worried that if I included everything I wanted my classmates to see, I would run over and inconvenience the teacher and the class by using up more than my time. But if I continued to shave off parts, my classmates would not get to see the whole wonderful picture of the lesson I had prepared. They would get a lop-sided view, you know?
Small grace number one was finding P there sitting alone at a table when I came thirty minutes early. She looked at me with a somber face and said, as much for her own benefit as for mine, “It’s not life or death.”
I looked into her eyes, recognizing in her a sister in perfectionism. “I was so relieved when M (teacher) said yesterday that she doesn’t expect perfection,” I told her.
“ME TOO,” she confided. Then she added, “She may not, but I do. I expect perfection from myself.”
It felt good to have someone in the same boat with me, someone else who gets really worked up over these things, whether we know in our logical minds that it’s silly or not.
“It’s not life or death,” I murmured as I went off to the kitchen to make a cup of cocoa.
Two of us were scheduled for today, first E at 10:30 and then me at 11:00. It wasn’t until I was watching E do her simulation that I realized I could relax. She was forgetting all sorts of things, like telling the class what language level to pretend to be before slipping into character. But all in all she did a great job and we applauded and gave her praise where praise was due, encouragement around the strong areas that she can build on and suggestions around her weak areas that she can work on over the next weeks.
I took my props and rolled up chart paper up to the front. I had lined up the magnets on the board before class to save a few seconds. I asked my classmates to do me a favour. I asked, “when I slip out into the hall to change into my teacher hat, I’d like each of you to spend about 30 seconds changing into a new immigrant from which ever culture outside Canada you are most familiar with.”
I needed P to pretend to be newly immigrated from Israel. B would be Chinese, A would be Korean, R would be from Syria.
I dashed out and came back in with my big teacher smile and a big “GOOD MORNING, EVERYONE!”
There was no room for worrying if I was making a fool of myself. I forgot I was facing a room full of native-born Canadians. These were my level 4 new Canadians in front of me, and I had promised to teach them how to extend and accept social invitations with their Canadian neighbours, classmates and coworkers in this strange and overwhelming new culture.
I used the method our teacher and text call “elicitation,” meaning don’t give the students the information, make them give it to you. Engage them and give them a reason to care about the topic. I remembered how animated the teacher I observed last Wednesday was. She overcame the students’ limited vocabulary by being constantly in motion, miming, gesturing, using her face, her eyes, her hands to supplement words that students might not know. So I gave myself permission to do all of those things, as well. As I had watched Kimberley do last Wednesday, I graded my language down to the students’ level without sounding patronizing.
I remembered to keep teacher talk time to a minimum, giving students lots of opportunity to practise speaking.
Then suddenly I realized… I had forgotten to look at the clock as I began. I had no idea if I was going too fast or too slow.
Ok, well, can’t step out of character now… have to keep going.
I elicited the three necessary elements for an invitation: the event, the time/place, and requesting the other’s presence. I got ideas for things you can invite others to do with you and listed them on the board as the students called them out: go to a movie, come shopping, come to my wedding, go out for dinner, have coffee…
I put the new language up using the big sheet of chart paper I had already prepared the night before. We learned the difference between semi-formal language (I would like to invite you to…) and informal or casual language used between friends (let’s go…?, do you want to…?, how about…?) and how to respond to each, matching your register to the inviter’s.
We practised saying the phrases together. “Would you like to _____?” “Thank you, I’d love to!” “Sorry, I’d love to but…”
We integrated culture:
“In your country, when someone invites you out to a restaurant, do you know who will pay?”
“In my first country,” one delightfully cooperative role-player said, “the older person pays.”
“Wonderful example! I wish it were that easy here in Canada…” and we talked about how if someone issues a casual, “let’s go for coffee,” you might want to bring your wallet along, because this is not necessarily an offer to pay.
So if you want to pay, you should make your language explicit so you don’t leave the other person guessing. “Can I take you out for…?”
We learned the terms “to treat,” “my treat,” “go dutch,” and “rain check.”
After the elicitation and explanation, I started them on the first handout, a set of four dialogues to rehearse in pairs. I stopped them after just a minute, since it was just a simulation. Per the assignment instructions, I showed the class the other two activities I had prepared to take the learners from controlled practice to semi-controlled and finally to fully communicative practice of the new language.
Then I stepped out of character and waited for the critique.
I got some good suggestions. For one, something I realized I’d done wrong the minute I did it and winced to indicate I had remembered two seconds too late, I forgot to finish giving all the instructions for the activity BEFORE passing out the handouts. Once you pass out the handout, everyone is looking at it and no longer listening to instructions. Always instruct, then distribute.
Secondly, some of my language was generation-specific. K says none of her friends use the term “go dutch.” They say, “can we have separate checks?” Good point. I conceded that my biggest challenge in devising this lesson plan had been coming up with natural sounding language. In fact, when trying to write a dialogue between two men, I realized I have no idea how men talk to one another when women are not around. (Will I have to get a TV and watch Seinfeld reruns?) So I had written a dialogue the way I would talk to one of my friends, but when I tacked on the speaker names Chad and Mark, I realized it came out sounding like Chad was trying to pick Mark up. So point taken, will work on building my mental colloquial Canadian English database.
The next comment made me smile: above all what shines through is my sincerity. It is clear you really want to do this, someone said.
The teacher called a 5-minute break. I took my posters down and went to the kitchen to get some water. Boy, nervousness makes your mouth dry!
There in the kitchen one after another of my classmates approached me to say, “Great job!” and “that was really good.”
My mind was such a muddle, I don’t even remember now who said what. I just know one person’s comment stayed with me the rest of the day; I held it close to my heart.
She said she could see my passion.
