Module 3 in full flow

So, to return to this much-neglected blog...

I'm now one month away from finishing Module 3, and therefore also the Delta itself, as long as everything is in order. Module 3 is generally more straight-forward than the other modules, but this is partly due to now, having done the first two, I have a clearer idea of what I'm to do, and what the "Delta style" entails.

The motto of the whole things so far though seems to be "get it fixed in November", as with the draft of each section, I see more things that need to be changed and sorted out. These will be cleaned up and smoothed out for my final draft version, and then further cleaned / smoothed for the final version, which will then be evaluated.

Still a lot to do, but it's going in the right direction, at least.

The calm before Module 3

I got my result from Module 2 a couple of days ago; it was a pass, which I feel relieved about, although not to the extent that I feel like celebrating it.

Module 3 is starting on the 1st of September, so I hope that that runs smoothly and won't be too painful. I'm planning on focusing on blended learning for my specialism, although detailed information right now about what I'm to do with this area of research is lacking. It does however appear that I'm to draw up a study plan in the first week of Module 3, so things will perhaps be brought into sharp focus before too long.

A moment of calm

I've just uploaded RA Stage 4, and hopefully I've now got a few days to get things in order before the onslaught continues. And I certainly need it, as I'm currently tired and worn out in that way that only comes when you've been doing all the work you possibly can for various months, and still have so much more to do which you should have done some time ago, except you're just too tired and things keep mounting up and you don't seem to really be getting anywhere.

This last point is primarily because, after weeks of working on my assignments and trying to do the best I could, I found out that I'd failed the essay for LSA3. Which means that my module 2 experience has all been a downhill slope; I got a merit for LSA1, a pass for LSA2, and now a fail. Right before the big one, LSA4. It's all rather depressing and demotivating, and not least because I thought that my work for LSA3 was actually quite good in the end. It does kick the wind out of you to discover that not only can you not write a decent assignment, but for that matter, you can't even identify good from bad.

I did however have a good teaching experience before we had our pre-Easter exam week. I'd arranged for a colleague to come and observe me, in part to have that info for my RA Stage 4. I was working on phonology with joke telling as the focus of the class, and it all worked quite well; I was able to see some progress and have some clarity in this area which so often has been difficult for me to demonstrate clearly. By the end of the session, students were able to tell each other the joke with improved fluency. 

The other good, albeit slightly odd, thing in that class was that I did quite a good revision activity for modifying comparatives. This is something that students have struggled with throughout the semester, and I came up with the idea of taking in some of my pokémon cards for students to practice comparing the creatures in pairs and groups; ie. "cottonee is a little bit cuter than squirtle". It all worked very well, making me think that so often this type of learning works best when it can be transferred to something tangible, like the cards, or the cuissenaire rods that I used last semester. It seems to give the students a concrete grasp on the situation that otherwise escapes them. The odd thing though was that one student was taking photos of the cards at some point, and so I asked her what she was doing, and she told me that she was taking a photo as she was enjoying the class so much, as it was so dynamic". Students have demanded dynamic classes from me on many occasions, and I hadn't realised before that pokémon cards were the missing ingredient for this.

Post-LSA3

Well, that’d LSA 3 pretty much done now, other than my meeting with my local tutor and my writing up of my feedback, which never really seems like enough space for me to get my teeth into thinking about what went well / could have gone better. 

One thing that I’ve come to accept whilst doing the Distance Delta is that I’ve become quite unable to really know how well I’ve done on a particular task, whether that’s an essay or teaching an actual class. That said, I felt a lot happier about my BE once I got that finished and sent off than I did about my draft. Taking a much more genre-based view and analysing my specific type of current affairs new programme (using the NPR model of radio programme), then looking at the sub-skills and strategies needed to understand this type of listening (which to a large extent came down to top-down processing, checking hypotheses with bottom-up processing, and understanding the prosodic aspects of spoken English), before looking at how exactly students struggle with these and can be helped with them, was a much clearer way of setting out my stall. The question that lingers though is whether I’ve got into sufficient detail, or focused on the right things. As does tend to be the case, I just didn’t have more time or space to really go into more detail or explore more areas in the essay.

Anyway, the class today went smoothly enough in terms of its mechanics. Timings were respected throughout, although this did mean, as I’d anticipated, that I had to be curt to almost an exaggerated extreme when transitioning. Again, I have to look at a lot of things in the class and say that if the lesson was the usual 90 – 105 minute lesson that we teach, I’d have been a lot more comfortable in going more in depth with aspects of the lesson that I think would benefit from having more time. 

That was the case at various stages, such as the pre-listening lexical exposure exercise. In any normal class, I would have given this a much more lexical focus, and used the target language for gap fills, discussion and the like. As it was, it was more like “okay, so these are the expressions. Any questions? No? Good.” The final stage as well, where I asked students to read the transcript while listening and make a note of which parts of the recording, could easily have been extended. There were clear areas where students were starting to identify problem areas with their listening skills (such as phonology and the differences for them between reading and listening), and it would have been interesting to probe this – unless of course I had hit up against a brick wall in doing this, and found my students asking questions of me that I just couldn’t answer.

In the end, I was as happy about the class as I could be, and there weren’t any major hiccups in execution or planning. The students did show some improvement by the end of class, in managing to understand a good amount of the listening text and showing more sensitivity towards the problems involved. At the end of the class, when we revisited problems that the students had had previously with listening skills, there was no eureka moment where excited learners suddenly declared that it all made sense, but there was a small clearing visible through the fog, which is perhaps what I should set my sights on.

There were a few things that could have been a little better. My boardwork once again was a bit messy and would have benefitted from at least some colour to differentiate, given that the room I was using has the smallest whiteboard ever made. It’s rather hard to organise and write up decent notes on lexis when you’ve got a surface the size of a flipchart. Also, there were as always some notes that I’d made to myself and things to check in my instructions that I skipped over in the heat of the moment. They didn’t make a big difference, but it’s always frustrating to look back at the notes after transitioning to a new stage, and realising that I’d missed out some ideas which I’d thought were quite useful when planning. 

The topic of cell phone jammers worked very well with the learners; perhaps naturally as they are university academic staff, any chance of rendering students’ phone signals useless was very appealing!

LSA3 approaching!

Have my LSA3 - skills assignment on listening - tomorrow. Still trying to fit the jigsaw together, but generally feel that I was far too ambitious in my first draft of things. I wanted to create a paradigm shift and do something radical for my learners and my own teaching experience. Instead, I've fallen back on basically doing what I would normally do in a listening-based class. My focus now is on making it all concrete and explaining why I do these things. Fingers crossed, it'll all come together.

Nearly at the start of things

Just a couple of days to go now before the start of the semester, and I once again have that slightly queasy feeling of wanting to get started and at the same time wondering whether I still remember how to teach, and whether I might have some rather difficult students. I'm sure that it will all work out though.

I'm sure that the DELTA will also be fine as well, although I'm currently scratching at finishing off my RA and will need to get LSA3 on the road very soon after classes start - need to do extensive diagnostics with my students in the first few classes to make sure that I've got a good needs analysis basis on which I can build my language analysis and teaching plans, however those turn out...

Limbering up once more

After a decent break over Christmas, it's time for me to get moving once more, with both RA stage 3 and LSA3 already on the horizon. Don't entirely have my head together yet, but I'll hopefully get there. I'm making a start on the RA today, at least, and once again have to reflect that the timing of things doesn't help us a huge amount - we only had a month of teaching after RA stage 2, so little chance to read up and put that into practice and for that practice to be observed... Will have to see what work-arounds are available.

Was however heartned to see that I'd got a pass for LSA2, both for the BE and lesson itself. Wasn't too confident about it, so a pass was a nice result. Will have to see about improving on it though for the last two LSAs.