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!