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Getting there

 

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

 
ooof just listening to a tape of a group doing the role play, they are really trying to maintain the English, very good. ( I think they've forgotten about the tape??)But not exactly discussing or interrupting or arguing in English, just haltingly reading through their notes, and abandoning the roleplay element completely,...aha, the president has not bothered to ask everyone to vote...distinct silence from this group now everyone's had a turn to speak, as the background noise records...some groups are discussing furiously in Japanese, and others are handing round their notes so everyone can copy the info from the grids they made up, rather than pass it on by word of mouth, to say nothing of English...
now i can be heard redirecting groups who are finished to split up and do it again in another group, also asking what country they voted for: two for Canada, two for Malaysia and 1 for Senegal.... finally "Canada is best, we vote Canada, ok , finish" and the students cut the recorder. So 3 in all for investment in Canada...

back to the beginning: the class convened and one of the students queried why i didn't accept a vocabulary word not written in Japanese characters, but only in hiragana: "It's not a Japanese test", she said..."Do you want to go to your job and use hiragana?" I asked...one other student butt in to say, she's right you know, it's Japanese, ....sigh, there are three different meanings for kasen, if it's not written in pictographs...then the student got shirty about an abbreviation which may be used, in a particular essay or wherever, but which is not a commonly recognized abbreviation in the dictionnary, like GDP or whatever...again, unwilling to accept my opinion, and I didn't have the dictionary on me, so they said they would bring the books to support their argument....
sigh...sure, i said, i'm afraid it will be very heavy...

Then I explained the way the role play we had prepared would finally meet in groups, and to all meet up with their own role group firstto divide into companies. The students had to choose colored slips of paper to divide up into random groups, five of one color: all in all six colored groups with a, b, c , d, and e roles. As they reallllly slowly got into their groups, and i designated the company spot with the colors for the groups to meet up, then went round prompting the presidents, who, in spite of having had two homework slots and a double groupwork slot to prepare, was aabout as at sea as everyon else, seeing that most didn't even have the role play script out....
Webheads talk of navigating a sea of confusion, I think that's what my class was today...

At 10:25 they had a five minute break, and I asked them to sit further apart when they came back in to do the final review test...they lost time getting seated, today's test was matching economic terms with the English definitions from the Oxford Dictionary of Economics, open book test, dictionnaries allowed, seems to have been really hard, judging by the results, although i used terms like "infrastructure", "boom" and "GDP" which we have been using throughout the course, and which was on a list of words they should know that i had handed out...Last week was group effort and cooperative scores, filling in a grid togethere, this week it's head down and simple matching numbers to definition letters (definitions also being on the vocab sheet, so it gives them ideas for that), the week before that was writing longer commentary and opinions, so I think I have a good mix of testing schemes...

Still a little sad the opportunity to try out the role play in English was lost..groups who had finished preferred to doss rather than notify me as requested..perhaps i will make a tapescript later and listen to what is going on in the groups in Japanese..

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