Note: This week I was only able to observe one day because the students are taking an exam today and it was optional to come in and observe. Also, BJHS is on spring break this week, so I am only commenting on what I observed at Heartland on Tuesday, March 27.
This week, I was looking for some "student talk"; in other words, how the students talk to each other, to their teacher, and what strategies they use when they are speaking. I think that students in both of the classes have intermediate to advanced speaking skills, and it definitely depends on how long they have been here in the United States and how exposure they have had to English. I think for the adults it might be a little easier to become immersed in the language because they immediately have to get jobs to support their families or children that they bring with them. A lot of them work in restaurants and in the hospitality business, so obviously they have to interact frequently with English-speaking customers in the community and therefore have to learn strategic competence very quickly. A few of the students are not as confident in their speaking abilities; I can tell because they do not speak up a lot in class and tend to just sit back and watch the situation. I can tell that they work it through in their heads before they answer any questions, because they probably have that fear of being wrong and that is totally understandable. When they answer questions, their answers are a bit halted at times and they hesitate a lot before saying words that they do not totally understand or cannot pronounce properly. When Sue is doing their syllable stress activities at the beginning of class, the students tend to repeat the words after her to make sure that they pronounce them like a native speaker would. One good thing about Sue is that she uses realistic language and lets them know that some pronunciations are easily accepted in certain areas and that they are not wrong if they pronounce it that way. I think it is great that she lets them know that there are variations in English, because I feel like some English teachers think it is their way or the highway, so to speak, and so there is only one correct pronunciation.
When they are doing their error correction activities, too, I see the students mouthing the words to themselves in order to understand what is wrong in the sentences. The students are really good at the grammar like tenses and punctuation, but they seem to have a lot of issues with slang or uncommonly used words in English, as well as if the error correction activity has spelling mistakes. If you are exposed to the word enough, like we are, we would know if it is spelled wrong, but if they are not reading or writing that word a lot, they would probably not notice a spelling mistake. I know I would not notice words that are spelled wrong in Spanish entirely because I have not read the word in context and I tend to just believe what my teachers tell me is right in Spanish. I feel like that is a similar effect. I know both the classes I observed had trouble with the word "guzzled" because they have never heard it in context. I understand why they did not comprehend the word because I do not feel like a lot of people use it. I know I do not use it, so maybe this book of activities might need to be updated to use more real language. So I definitely think that their grammatical competence is great, but their strategic and discourse competence are still in progress. None of them can communicate in paragraph discourse; they can only saw 1 or 2 sentences before they trail off or get frustrated.
Conversation between students is very different depending on the class; of course, we expect that every class is going to have a different dynamic so Sue has told me how she feels about the different classes. The morning class is very animated and it is a little smaller and tighter-knit group; a lot of them work together outside of class and have personal friendships so they talk to each other a lot about their families or their kids or something that happened at work the night before, etc. One thing I noticed that was different between the two classes was that the morning class very, very rarely speak in another language to each other, but the night class has a tendency to lapse back into their first language. I cannot seem to figure out what the difference is between the classes. I think the night class is a slightly older group, like 30's and 40's while the morning class is in their 20's mostly. I think the younger group might have an easier time learning English and they feel less tempted to use their first language while the older group is struggling more and gets frustrated so they lapse back into using their first language instead. I think it is just a comfort-ability factor because they also work with the people in their class, and they have a lot to talk about with them, but it is in their first language rather than English.
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