 Wed Dec 19, 2007 0:17 am Conversation Classes |
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| Ralf wrote: | | Jamie (K) wrote: | | A lot of my ESL teaching method was learned from the Japanese who taught me martial arts. |
Sounds like a book-filling story by itself. Care to elaborate? |
As with any sport, martial arts involve practicing and practicing a form until you make fewer mistakes, but they also involve routinely setting yourself up in situations where you're in over your head and are liable to fail. If your ego can't handle this failure, and you never set yourself up to fail, you never really succeed.
Another thing they did was give us test techniques that formed our habits in a certain way, and once those habits were deeply ingrained, they'd give us revised techniques that ran completely counter to our habitual movements. This would render us very clumsy, and we'd have to endure a lot of aggravation, and swallow our egos a lot, in order to bring ourselves up to the next level, which was very satisfying, once we'd achieved it.
Compare this to the typical way most language teachers operate. They try to grade everything in such a way that the student makes only minimal mistakes and that the whole learning process seems relatively easy. That is NOT realistic preparation for an immersion environment, where people are bound to make lots of mistakes -- sometimes embarrassing ones -- daily. (One of my Mexican students got sloppy with his pronunciation the other day and insulted some Japanese colleagues at work by telling them they were [dʒoŋɡ]. They thought he'd called them "junk", but he'd meant to say "young".)
I found overseas that my language progressed best at moments when I was made aware of my mistakes, not when I was protected from making them. For that reason, my lessons are often "safe" places to make mistakes, and I accelerate the process by setting students up with communication tasks that are a bit above their heads. The communication breaks down, they fall into a pit, and I show them how to climb out of it. Language learning is largely a matter of how to make productive use of one's failures.
Another thing is that one of our instructors initially gave us philosophy lectures with his limited vocabulary, which couldn't have consisted of more than 3,000 words, if that many. However, we understood what he was trying to get across, and having seen this was important for my own language learning and teaching. |
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Jamie (K)
I'm a Communicator ;-)
Joined: 24 Feb 2006
Posts: 4225
Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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