Reacting to Student Concerns

It’s the first day of a new schedule today, and I wonder what the students think about it. I know that the administration here in the EAP program thought a lot about how to address the concerns of the students and create the optimal conditions for learning, and this is what they came up with. Basically, I am now teaching each writing class for about five hours per week, and the other teacher is going to teach the grammar class for about five hours per week. We are going to alternate the days that we teach so that the students can have a full two hours with one instructor on any given day.

It will be interesting to see how this works. On the one hand, I like the idea that I now have a full two hours to focus purely on writing. There is a lot of work that we can get done in an hour. I’ll also have more opportunities for writing in class. On the other hand though, I used to like the flow I sometimes was able to create from the one hour grammar portion of the lesson to the one hour writing portion of the lesson. While I totally believe in teaching grammar, I like to mix it up and take an untraditional approach to teaching the grammar in that I do a lot of activities that force the students to use the grammar structures I am targeting that day rather than traditional “grammar exercises”. It is almost like we are doing a lot of different activities, and the students are unconsciously focusing on the grammar targets for that day because of the activities themselves. After that, I like to then see if the students can apply the grammar I have been targeting in their writing. If I notice that the correct grammar structures are being produced, then I can move on. If I notice that the correct grammar structures are not being produced, then it is time for either more activities, or even some old fashioned grammar lecturing where I explain the grammar rules to the students on the board. More than any of that though I also like forcing the students to come up with their own questions about the grammar. The sneaky thing is that half the time I don’t answer their questions. However, I like to set up the conditions where the students are able to articulate the questions and truly understand what it is that they don’t understand. Once they really know the questions, they should be able to find the answers on their own. I need to do this, because once the students are working by themselves in their regular university courses, they aren’t going to have the benefit of a grammar teacher to answer their questions, so they need to teach themselves how to learn on their own. Additionally, it is impossible to truly understand the “answer” if you don’t really know the “question”. Remember . . . . the answer is 42! What is the question?

Anyway, despite what I have written above, we’ll try this new schedule and see how it works. Naturally, there are arguments for the other side that say that some pure focused and concentrated grammar instruction is just what students need if they wish to speak English accurately and fluently. Anyway, I’d love some feedback!