Tea With BVP

27 Jan 201627 Jan 2016Leave a comment

Each Friday morning at 6am (Australian time) Bill Van Pattern hosts a discussion about second language acquisition with Angelika and Walter.

Every session has a topic and today’s topic is:

“Are vocabulary and grammar learned differently?”

Here are my notes that I took while listening:

Vocabulary and grammar are learned in essentially the same way.
Acquisition is fundamental as opposed to learning (remember that the only thing that matters is the acquisition of language).
Colourless green dreams sleep furiously. (Chomsky) Gibberish but the words fit grammatically!!
Let’s hope teachers aren’t still asking students to memorise lists of vocabulary.
Thematic conversations are not the same as thematic topics (e.g. restaurant, sport, body parts etc) Carol Gaab
Frequency lists – If we use every day language, then we generate frequency vocabulary naturally.
Verbs account to 20% of language. Nation (1990) 4000 – 5000 most frequent words account for up to 95% of written text & 85% of speech. Carol Gaab
Be aware that context in classroom will be different to context out of classroom. If we prepare for outside experiences out of the classroom, then it is out of context. Stick to what students need in class. Stick to what is important to your cohort of students.
Body parts (as a theme) will come naturally into speech when students need to know that specific vocabulary.
Acquisition is effortless and involuntary – Karen Rowan
You don’t have to talk about grammar unless your students ask for a clarification
Is grammar acquired involuntarily? Word meaning is thought about consciously but grammar is not, by language learners.

As Bill is a professor of second language acquisition at Maine University, his knowledge of relevant theory and practice is prodigious. He would be a compelling lecturer because he sprinkles irreverent comments throughout which at first seem bizarre but once attuned to his sense of humour, listening to him becomes very entertaining.

The conversation between the 3 presenters is largely theory based but it is balanced practically by Walter & Angelika as well as the many language teachers who contribute to the discussion either on Twitter, Mixlr, by email, or by calling in and talking directly to the panel.

The conversations can either by listened to live however if that isn’t possible, then go to the TeawithBVP website and listen via links to past episodes on sound cloud.

Every week there is a SLA Challenge Quiz – a multiple choice quiz with prizes (coasters today) depending on the number of questions you get correct. Those listening on MIxlr generally help who ever is taking the quiz by posting answers. A true example of the collegiality that exists amongst TCI practitioners!

Here is a taste of the SLA Quiz!

Q1 just like grammar that has syntax and morphology, vocab is largely is largely acquired by

?
Interaction with input
knowledge of the first language
Examining Trumps speeches

Q2 Researchers refer to vocabulary as?

A morphological units
The mental lexicon
The syntactic and network
One fish red fish blue fish

Q3 words can be changed not only from one meaning to another but also from a found to an adverb. How do we refer to how a word changes from one category to another?

Inflection
Extension
Derivation
Freudian catharsis

If you are keen to learn more, then sign up for the newsletter on the “Tea with BVP” website.

Another option is to listen to BVP talking about aspects of second language acquisition. Here is the first in a series and this one is titled “What Everyone Should Know About Second Language Acquisition.”

https://youtu.be/X1LRoKQzb9U?list=PL7AsHYMEToB7gSRuN1WBRF4hL6QOSLagr

IFLT/NTPRS/CI Teaching- How To Involve The Whole Class When Storytelling

21 Jan 201621 Jan 2016Leave a comment

A great thread appeared overnight on the iFLT/NTPRS/CI Teaching Facebook page Have you joined yet? If not, I highly recommend it. It is a global community totally dedicated to all levels and aspects of TCI. Your own personal PLC where you can comment on other posts or ask questions about teaching with Comprehensible Input and TPRS. For those of us here in Australia, where TCI is only just taking off, this group is awesome. Whether you prefer to be a lurker or a contributor makes no difference because the other teachers here bring a wide variety of experiences and the knowledge they share is impressive. They too cover the spectrum of experience and once you take the first step and. join, you will discover what a warm and generous community it is. My only word of caution though is: go with your gut feeling. Remember that we Australians aren’t the only ones frustrated by the lack of training available here and thus interpretations of TCI vary. If a suggestion sounds a little off centre, don’t worry or stress; it is most likely because of a different understanding of what TCI actually is. If you need clarification, ask openly on the page and no doubt an experienced practioner will chime in and clarify. There are certain names to look out for and you’ll recognise them from all your readings.

The thread I enjoyed reading this morning asked how to involve more students when reviewing a story. It was posted by a parent/teacher who has a child in one of her classes. I remember the pros and cons of teaching my own children and this was definitely one of the pros. I totally appreciated the insights into both my teaching and the students in the classes.

Here is her question:

The answers to the question were awesome and most of them are worth sharing becausse they would work very well in our primary classrooms. Interestingly though, is that secondary teachers have also shared here!

The answer below by Karen Rowan actually fits in after Grants initial comment above.

So many great ideas here to not only gets heaps of repetitions but also to keep our students engaged in the story.

Martina Bex is Luar Biasa!

4 Jan 2016Leave a comment

Are you thinking that maybe you might like to dip your toes in the TCI/TPRS ocean this year? If so, then Martina Bex has a brilliant series about how to do this. Her latest post is called ‘TPRS 101 : Give it a Try’ and you can read it here. I highly recommend this post because she has clearly outlined the steps to follow for your first ever lesson. The only thing to keep in mind is that this is for secondary language teachers, so the questions I would ask my primary students would be based entirely on language they are already familiar with mixed together with lots of cognates. Eg where did you go yesterday, who did you see yesterday, what did you eat, what did you drink? My students understand the Indonesian concept of ‘yesterday’ meaning sometime in the past, it might have actually been yesterday or it might have been last month. Very useful when simplifying language and keeping it comprehensible.

For my students I could introduce the target structure ‘dapat’ (am thinking dikasih may be too confusing. ) ‘Dapat apa?’ And then ask that student ‘Dapat Xbox tetapi mau apa?’ Which uses all familiar language except ‘dapat’ which is the vocabulary being targeted and has to be used repetively to ensure acquisition.

What other questions could we ask Indonesian students whose vocabulary is very limited? Feel free to add in the comment section below.

Kursi Luar Biasa

16 Dec 201516 Dec 2015Leave a comment

I read of an idea in which individual students enjoy being interviewed just before Sharon pointed out that we haven’t fully covered aspects of the 3-4 & 5-6 curriculum regarding student personal information. To me the idea of a special star student seemed a terrific way to not only cover this aspect of our curriculum but would also give middle and upper primary students the chance to shine and enjoy the limelight answering questions about themselves to a captive audience.

I have also been toying with the idea of how to widen student knowledge of Indonesian exclamations, so I decided to combine both together with ‘murid luar biasa’ and translated it to students as ‘the awesome student’ however this didn’t feel right, so in the second week I changed it to kursi luar biasa and for some reason, it felt better. Luar biasa is now the new Indonesian catch phrase and has been used constantly – to my delight!

I took the secretary chair and covered it with the beautiful Batak shawl Pak Pahot gave me in February and transformed it into the kursi luar biasa.

I explained to students that anyone can sit in the chair with ‘first in, best dressed’ (rewards students who get to class on time) however once they’ve had a turn, they can not sit in it again util everyone who wants a go has done so.
While I only trialled the kursi luar biasa for 2 weeks, it was hugely successful. I began with our stock kenalkan questions and was pleasantly relieved just how much students have remembered even though we haven’t had a ‘kenalkan’ focus since term 1 2014!! This reaffirms my belief in the power of TCI/TPRS. Next I started thinking of other questions I could ask students and that proved challenging. Questions that incorporated language structures they were familiar with and ones that students could answer using just the language they have acquired so far.

While I had thought my questions were largely lame, all students who have chosen to sit in the kursi luar biasa chair must disagree with this because there has been no shortage of volunteers. What I have enjoyed in particular is the opportunity to talk to just one student and learn something surprising about them. I learned that one of my families has a pet snake, which was compelling for the class as well as for me!! It was pure gold because I could circle this information to include other students by asking if they too owned a snake, who was scared of snakes, have you seen a snake, are there snakes at school etc. E.g. Jodie sudah lihat ular di sekolah or Jamie mau lihat ular di sekolah? Another student told us using ‘gado gado’ that her budgie had died that morning because her grandmothers dog had killed it. I’d never have known if not for her choosing to sit in the chair that day. But the most heart warming part of this was when the entire class said with compassion, “kasihan” that I knew the kursi luar biasa is well worth continuing with.

The session goes for as long as I feel that I have whole class engagement and once I run out of questions or the class starts getting restless, we stop and move on. It is the perfect way to ask students personal questions in context and get repetitions of this language. I am looking forward to honing my questioning techniques next year as well as developing a bank of questions which not only rely on known language structures but also lend themselves to open-ended answers.

Questions I have used so far include:

Tinggal dimana?

Umur berapa?

Siapa nama?

Kelas berapa?

Punya adik?

Punya kakak?

Siapa nama adik/ kakak/ ibu/bapak?

Punya anjing/kucing/tikus/burung?

Suka warna apa?

Suka makan apa?

Kemarin kemana?

Mau punya apa?
Feel free to add suggestions!!

Dadar Gulung

8 Dec 201530 Dec 20161 Comment

Traditionally in term 4, my year 7 classes study a cooking recipe before cooking it in groups because, lets face it, anything to do with cooking is popular and it’s a positive note for them to finish on after 8 years of learning Indonesian at primary school. This year, the challenge for me was adapting such a unit of work to be compatible with TCI methodology.
As usual, I began the term by asking the students in each class to vote for the food their class woud like to cook. Each class narrowed their wishlist down to 2; a savoury and a sweet recipe. Previously I split the 9 week term in half, with classes studying recipe #1 for the first 4 weeks, before focusing on recipe #2 over the final 4 weeks. The final week is always a right-off with graduation, class parties etc and it’s nice to have a week up my sleeve just in case! I quickly discovered though that attempting two recipes was one recipe too many. Thus for the majority of the term we focused on the one recipe that both classes had chosen: Dadar Gulung.

In adapting this unit of work, my first task was to simplify the ‘authentic’ recipe drastically to reduce the large amount of unfamiliar and unnecessary vocabulary. This turned out to be even easier than I imagined. Yet, what I couldn’t avoid was the long list of ingredients, mostly low frequency vocabulary except for maybe water. Here is my recipe in English and following it is the CI version.

Here is my simplified recipe:

Here’s my adapted version of the method:

Campurkan gula dan kelapa. Goreng dan aduk. Angkat.
Campurkan tepung, gula, garam, telur, pandan dan susu di mangkok besar. Aduk.
Panaskan minyak.
Kasih satu sendok besar campuran dadar dan goreng dua menit.
Balik dadar dan goreng satu menit lagi.
Angkat.
Ulangi.
Taruh campuran kelapa/gula di dadar. Lipat dan gulung.
Selamat makan!

I decided to tackle the ingredients first with the thought that as soon as they were acquired, the method would be largely (although still not i+1) comprehensible. I began with a google search for images and found a large image of each ingredient. I then printed an A4 copy of each and laminated them. I didn’t label (ie write the Indonesian on) the pictures which at times was useful and other times frustrating. Probably should have though to assist with acquisition. I began by introducing this new vocabulary and encouraging students to come up with ways they could remember each. Both classes suggested remembering ‘minyak’ (oil) is easy because it is yuck (yak)!! Next students got into 6 groups (the number of trestle tables in my room). Each group was given 11 sheets of A5 paper & 11 laminated cards, each with one of the ingredient words on it. As a team, each ingredient had to illustrated, one per piece of paper. Here are just a few of them:

We then played a game to get as many repetitions of this new vocabulary as possible: all picture sheets and cards were turned upside down and mixed together in the centre of the table. On go, teams had to turn everything over and then match up the illustration with the word card. When groups had played this several times with their own pictures, they were asked to stand and rotate to another table and we replayed with the pictures from another team. This was hilarious because some of the pictures were left field. You can imagine what some teams thought of some of the gula merah pics!! When the teams were at the final table, I then added a further variation to the game by asking the teams to nominate their best 2 players to play off against the other teams and after that round asked the groups to nominate the 2 players who had participated the least for a final competition. In each team there were passive team members, some were lacking in confidence while others were over ruled by more dominant team members, so this gave them a chance to participate and shine. My instruction to the non-players insisted that their hands remain under the table and to only speak in Indonesian! This worked beautifully! More repetitions!! From me and their fellow students!

From that lesson onwards, I began lessons with a vocabulary review by asking students to tell me what the ingredients are for dadar gulung. (Dadar gulung pakain apa?)The only word which stumped them right to the end was kelapa parut!! Considering most of the language used in this unit is low frequency, it will be interesting to see how much is retained long term.

The next lesson I planned to teach included a cooking demo so that the students could both watch the method and listen to the recipe in context while completing a listen and draw however it was precisely that week I fell sick. Such a bummer. Unfortunately by the time I was well again, end of year interruptions and severe depletion of energies resulted in this not happening. Instead students did the listen and draw without the demo, cloze and a ‘unjumble the sentences’ type of activity. It was very rushed towards the end due to the loss of time which was such a shame.

I also had to squeeze in a very quick introduction to the 2nd recipe the classes were each cooking. One class chose Mie Goreng Telur Ala Ibu MIa (which was perfect because I coud recycle most of the dadar gulung method vocabulary) and the other class had chosen mie goreng. In those lessons, we also had to finalise groups (students choose their own) and determine the equipment needed to cook the recipes. It was very rushed but thankfully it all finished well.

When classes cook, I provide the ingredients and students have to bring in the equipment as they will be cooking the recipes by themselves in their group. I do it this way for several reasons – the main reason being that I firmly believe students should take equal responsibility in preparing for this. It also weeds out the apathetic students who have in the past sabotaged the experience for the others in their group. These non contributing students are divided out amongst the junior primary classes to ‘help’. This year though, for the first time ever, every student cooked!! The one student who didn’t bring anything in had spoken to me privately explaining how difficult this would be for him, and he was fortunately in a group being supervised by one of their Mums who knew him and his circumstances well. Phew, because this was the only thing we did all year that he showed any interest in and it was great for him to finish up on a positive note. A final bonus for doing it this way is that students take home all the dirty dishes and I don’t get left with the washing up!

I encourage groups to invite a ‘supervisor’ for several reasons. The supervisor can be a parent, an older brother or sister (lovely opportunity to catch up with ex students who themselves get a kick out of revisiting an Indonesian cooking lesson) or a responsible family member/friend. Having community members is great for PR but more importantly, the electricity board in my room cannot support more than 4 electric frypans at any one time. Thus a supervisor enables groups to cook elsewhere in the school, either in our canteen, the staffroom or even in their own classroom. The added bonus of this is that I usually end up with only 1 or 2 groups cooking in the Indonesian classroom!! Bliss.

I begin the cooking lesson by handing out copies of the recipes and then standing back as the groups organise their ingredients.
Here are a few photos taken from one of the classes:

Firstly, the ingredients as I set them out. Some are portioned already and some aren’t.

Students helping themselves to the ingredients

Students cooking:

The unit of work was finished with a Kahoot! challenge. What an amazing and engaging way to complete the unit. As I said in my previous post, I had issues with lagging which we still haven’t been able to trouble shoot even with Kahoot! support. Quite a shame really because it has so much potential. I intend to investigate it further next year in the computer room and see if by eliminating the ipads, the lagging stops. It was such a fun way to wrap up the unit with a concentration on structures. Even kelapa parut was learned by the end!

Overall, in reflection, I feel that this topic was more of a ‘bail out’ and whether this was due to insufficient time or that it still needs a lot of tweaking, I’m not quite sure. Also at this time of the year, it is more important to do what is manageable because of the sheer number of balls teachers juggle with end of year requirements. Another issue is that the year 7’s in term 4 are challenging and the sooner the SA government moves them to high school in line with other states and our national curriculum the better, but that’s a whole different topic!

End of Term 4 Reflections

6 Dec 20156 Dec 20152 Comments

Fourth term is just about to finish; just one more week to go. It has flown by so quickly! As I’ve written several times, this term I focused on the traditional tale, Kancil & Buaya. During the last holidays our hub group met to adapt the story so that the vocabulary in the story was largely comprehensible for our students as well as introducing a few new structures. I think we did a great job with it and although much longer than any of our previous stories, was enjoyed by my year R – 6 students.

My tweaked adapted version:

Kancil berjalan kaki ke sungai.

Kancil lihat mangga di sebelah sungai.

Kancil lapar dan mau makan mangga.

Kancil tidak bisa berenang.

Kancil lihat banyak buaya di sungai.

Kancil lihat banyak buaya lapar di sungai.

Bagaimana kancil bisa makan mangga?

Kancil berkata, “Halo Buaya! Ada berapa buaya di sungai?”

Buaya berkata, “Tidak tahu!”

Kancil berkata, “Saya manu menghitung. Ayo buaya, antri.”

Buaya antri.

Kancil melompat dari buaya ke buaya dan menghitung.

Satu, dua, tiga, empat, lima, enam, tujuh, delapan, sembilan, sepuluh.

Kancil berlari dan tertawa.

Kancil makan mangga.

Buaya marah.

Kancil terlalu pandai.

Isn’t that an awesome adaptation? The vocabulary for the original story was so complicated! It is so rewarding to turn an incomprehensible story into a comprehensible story!

I then parred the story down even further for junior primary students. Their simplified version looked like this:

Kancil berjalan kaki.

Kancil lihat mangga.

Kancil mau makan mangga.

Kancil lihat buaya.

Kancil berkata, “Saya mau menghitung buaya. Ayo buaya, antri.”

Buaya antri.

Kancil melompat dari buaya ke buaya dan mengitung.

Satu, dua, tiga, empat, lima, enam, tujuh, delapan, sembilan, sepuluh.

Kancil makan mangga.

Kancil senang sekali.

Each week, I focused on a new structure from the above story and incorporated it into the JP story. It became an embedded reading! The most useful structure was undoubtedly ‘tidak tahu’. What a great phrase! I love how students have acquired ‘tidak tahu’ so thoroughly and use it appropirately in conversations!

My major reflection regarding this story is that it would be a great story for first term when we have 11 weeks rather than fourth term which is more like an 8 week term! There is so much potential for this story. I feel like we barely skimmed the surface of its potential.

To finish up the terms work, students did a free write and played the word chunk game last week and then this week I am going to experiment with Kahoot! using my 6 ipads. I have created a 20 question game to review the story. Feel free to open Kahoot! and search for Kancil dan Buaya. While there, have a look at the Dadar Gulung review game I made for my 6/7’s. It was such a success! It turned a group of year 7’s who are too cool for school, around last week. They begged to play it 3 times!! The amount of repetition was awesome. I did have a few connectivity issues which I emailed Kahoot! about. They have replied already, so I will discuss their comments with our IT guru tomorrow to see what needs to be done before Tuesdays lessons.

Sharing Great Ideas – Membagi Ide Bagus

3 Nov 20153 Nov 20154 Comments

Due to a nasty virus, I’ve lately had plenty of ‘rest’ time enjoying interesting online articles. I’ve also discovered the ‘add to reading list’ button at the top right corner of my ipad which has been very handy for bookmarking and saves me having to go backwards and forwards between apps and safari.

Here are a couple (tongue in cheek) that I would like to share with you all:

Have you heard of contextualised chanting? Read this blog post by Michel and learn about it. What a great way of having a brain break and getting some bonus repetitions in!
I got a lovely surprise yesterday when following a link to this google doc listing CI reading activities on the Tristate TCI – Teaching World Languages with Comprehensible Input facebook page, included a link to this blog!!
Also on that facebook page was this video demonstrating the airplane activity, another ‘post story’ activity.
Have you discovered Senor Fernie’s blog? I love it because it has an elementary/primary school aged focus. He has just finished a series of posts dedicated to junior primary story telling.Here is the the first one: Enjoy.
Have you watched any of the Musicuentos Black Box podcasts yet? I’ve seen a few and each one has been fascinating. They only go for about 5 or so minutes and give a good general overview of the topic being discussed. Here is videocast number 7 (Overcoming Resistance to 90% Target Language Use) and number 6 (The Inescapable Case For Extensive Reading).
Somewhere to share posted recently a fun story review game. I think the game has great potential but I wonder how to avoid students recognising each others handwriting? Could the story sentences be typed up by the teacher beforehand and distributed randomly or selectively?
Here are a few videos I bookmarked. 1. Willy Winako & Dara singing Suara Perjuangan. 2. A fun video illustrating how some well known western words would sound if pronounced ‘properly’ (can only find the link on facebook, but hopefully soon it will be on youtube!) and is an edited version of the original. 3. Another video from facebook which thankfully has a youtube link – about a current topic – the Indonesian forest fires, and finally 4. Goodnews Indonesia.
I am following Martina Bex on facebook which randomly promotes links to previous blogposts. This one came up last week and could be useful for term 4 if you are looking for ways in which to add some TPRS fun to the end of the year. It is all about the many ways we can use songs in the Languages classroom.
Have a look at this amazing collection of brainbreaks. While not all are appropriate, there are enough great ones here to make it worthwhile. Some of the video links are hilarious and I am sure could easily be adapted to Indonesian. How about this one for example? Imagine the language repetition for a short target structure?
Creative Language Class posted recently about how she teaches her school curriculum using TPRS pedagogy. I love the way she identifies the key skills and then lists ideas of how this could be achieved.
Saving the best till last – the link to the most recent edition of the IJFLT (The International Journal of Foreign Language Teachers). This contains many interesting articles by a selection of well known TCI/TPRS teachers. Past issues are also available.

Happy reading and hopefully I haven’t included too many links? Maybe add some of them to your ‘reading list’ for the upcoming holidays which will be here faster than we can imagine!

Week 3 Reflections

29 Oct 201529 Oct 2015Leave a comment

Week 2 is always a disappointing week for me. Students are usually amazing in week 1 when they are so thrilled and excited to be back at school which is always delightful. However I then plan lesson plans for those enthusiastic students only to discover that by week 2 they did a ‘Jekyl and Hyde’ over the weekend and my lessons do not turn out quite the way I had envisaged.

Week 3, thus is a great week by comparison! I am prepared, in fact usually over prepared, but at least this time it is strategic over planning unlike week 2 where it was head in the clouds over planning. I can’t believe I tried to do a movie talk last week with the combined year 6/7 left overs that focused on entirely unfamiliar structures! What was I thinking?? Not surprisingly it was a huge flop. Still, I learned a huge lesson from it – doesn’t matter how engaging the video is, if it’s not comprehensible, it will not be engaging.

This week with another group of year 6/7 left overs, I showed Laskar Pelangi which was far more successful for several reasons.

Firstly, it was purely an English culture break and considering the film went for 3 lessons and students were engrossed right up to the end, I was happy with that. I also have to confess that it was my first time watching the movie so maybe in future years I may consider using it as a MT now that I can see the potential. The lessons progressed well in that we began with a single lesson and then 2 days later had a double. I said very little before the movie started yet before continuing with the movie in the double lesson, I talked about several aspects including a little Belitong history and providing a bit more information about the main characters. Yet it was the discussion about the symbolism that students enjoyed the most and then commented on during the movie. I spoke about the symbolism of fences (dividing communities), crocodiles (obstructions) and rainbows (happiness, togetherness and positive hopes for the future).

This term with the other classes (ie all but the year 6/7’s), we are looking at the kancil & Buaya story. At the end of term 3, our hub group met and we simplified the story to ensure the story only incorporated a few unfamiliar structures as well as revised many of our known structures. Last week I introduced the word ‘kancil’ and largely in English we talked about their body shape, their diet and where they are found globally. Naturally it was only their diet that lent itself to circling! Kancil makan apa? This week I introduced the word ‘buaya’ using both a picture of a buaya, a soft teddy buaya and a hilarious crocodile hat I found at Savers last Sunday. As usual, using Annie’s voices, I introduced the word encouraging the students to repeat buaya over and over in a variety of ways including singing, syllablising, weird voices and generally having fun. I then held up the buaya soft teddy and circled buaya.

Buaya!

Buaya? Ya buaya.

Kancil?

Bukan. Buaya.

Kancil atau buaya? Buaya.

I then opened a bag of soft teddy animals including the crocodile hat. I held the buaya soft teddy in one hand and with the other dug into the bag. I pulled out random animals and asked, ‘Buaya?’ The students loved the suspense of not knowing what was coming out of the bag and all screamed with delight when I finally pulled out the crocodile hat!

The hat is great because of its large mouth and which allowed me to revise makan. Buaya makan sepatu? I walked around amongst the students stating sentences like that and then having the crocodile mouth the shoe. Or I would point at my nose and say a couple of times ‘hidung’ before saying buaya mau makan hidung Joey. They just loved it and were all begging to be eaten!! It was chaotic and loud with lots of laughing. I actually had a parent looking for their child, knock and put their head in the door while I was bent over a student ‘makan sepatu’ and I’d love to know what she made of what she saw! Hopefully she asks her son! It was strange though because I felt guilty that I was having too much fun! That I should have been more serious! Oh well….

I did a ‘kindergarten reading’ with the story with the year 4’s where I had them sitting on the floor in front of me and I read a big book version with large colourful pictures. They were totally engrossed yet when I asked afterwards whether they preferred acting out the story or listening to it, the majority said they much preferred acting it out!! Didn’t see that coming.

This story incorporates the numbers 1 – 10 which has been a great. Early in the week I suddenly remembered a counting song from Languages Online. Unfortunately it goes way too quickly for my younger classes, but then I had a brain wave! Instead of singing satu, dua, tiga bunga (not a familiar word), I changed it to satu, dua, tiga buaya!! Then I got even more creative and sang about kancils, penguins, orangutans and finished with murid murid! The more repetitions I can get with this song the better to cement number acquisition.

And speaking of songs, I also ‘wrote’ this song on the weekend for later in the term:

Kancil, kancil di hutan

Tidak bisa berenang

Datang banyak buaya

Hap! Tidak ditangkap!

Can you pick the tune? Lifted from cicak cicak di dinding!

Hope you had a great week too.

Kunjungan Sekolah Petra Berkat – Petra Berkat School’s Visit

29 Oct 201529 Oct 20157 Comments

After months and months of planning, the group of 5 students and 4 teachers from Petra Berkat School in Denpasar finally arrived!! The final weeks leading up to their arrival was quite frantic at times with last minute tweaking of host families and their timetable. We were so delighted when APBIPA suggested we consider inviting this group of primary students and while their visit is not over yet, it has been very successful so far.

Our school hosted Grace, a 14 year old in year 9. She stayed with one of our families as they have a daughter the same age as well as a son in year 5. We also briefly hosted Ibu Yustine, the school director. Her family run the school and thus she was the person with whom we communicated with to organise the various details leading up to the visit. The other 4 students were shared across Victor Primary & Goolwa Primary with the remaining staff. Ibu Oka was based at Goolwa and taught the kecak dance to students there while Ibu Leni was based at Victor and did mask making with the classes she met there. Ibu Yustine and Ariel (the designated photographer) were the only 2 staff members to visit all sites.

Ibu Yustine mentioned in her emails that she enjoys cooking with students and was very keen to cook mie goreng while visiting our sites. She chose mie goreng because not only is it a well known traditional Indonesian dish but also because it needed to be a recipe that could be cooked and eaten in a 50 minute lesson! Her day at PEPS was full on without any non face to face time. Her only breaks were at recess and lunch!

6 lucky classes were delighted to arrive at the Indonesian classroom to discover the chairs arranged around a table covered in ingredients and cooking equipment and standing behind the table were Ibu Yustine and Grace finalising last minute preparations. After the ketua kelas had led the students in a greeting (murid murid, berdiri dan kasih hormat kepada Bu Yustine dan Kak Grace), Ibu Yustine began cooking.

Here is her recipe:

Cook the dry noodles till soft. Drain and pour sufficient kecap manis, kecap asin & tomato sauce over to coat the noodles.

Beat 5 eggs and fry like scrambled eggs. Remove from pan.

fry onion, garlic till cooked. Add grated carrot, finely shredded cabbage and cook.

Add egg and stir through.

Add noodles and mix thoroughly.

Taste and top up with sauces if necessary.

Such a simple yet delicious recipe. The students all loved it, even the ones who claimed beforehand that they don’t like egg!

I loved that when Ibu Yustine commented in Indonesian about the recipe, my students could largely follow along and when she said something they didn’t understand, the stop sign was raised immediately! It was great. We began by showing students the ingredients and explaining what they were in Indonesian. While kecap manis was a familiar term, kecap asin was not. With the later classes, I broke down asin to ‘us’ & ‘in’ which helped enormously with retention later in the lesson when Ibu Yustine reviewed the ingredients! It made such a difference with recall. When Ibu Yustine added ingredients, she would say, “Kasih kecap manis, kasih kecap asin, kasih saus tomat” etc which was awesome. So lovely that our visitors are largely understood now in the Indonesian classroom unlike before when all cultural lessons were 100% undertaken in English or with English translations.

After the school day finished, we headed off to staff meeting where the year 3 class outlined to staff their inquiry into establishing a 4th sports team. It was a perfect demonstration for Ibu Yustine to witness how our students develop inquiry questions, collaborate as a class to research it and then share with staff and students their findings and their recommendations. The 4 students who stayed back after school to present to staff did a great job and represented our school beautifully. Ibu Yustine was very impressed. She was also impressed with the presentation by our principal about listening. She was delighted when he offered to email it out to staff and has since informed me that she would like a copy so that she can share it with her staff at the begining of the new school year!!

Straight after staff meeting, staff headed over to the staff room to enjoy a staff family cooking workshop with Ibu Yustine. This time she made nasi goreng. Staff helped with the chopping and slicing before sitting down to watch her cook. This too was delicious and all who participated were pleased they had stayed back to do so. I bet Ibu Yustine slept well that night!! 7 cooking workshops in one day!! All in all she cooked for 5 classes at Victor Primary, 2 at Goolwa and 7 at PEPS. No wonder by Wednesday she had almost lost her voice!!

On Wednesday evening we held a ‘Cultural Evening’ for the host families and principals. The program included Ibu Yustine cooking mie goreng for the final time, a dance performance by the Petra Berkat School students and Ibu Leni

as well as presentations. Ibu Yustine presented all schools with art work completed by her students and our principals/ deputy principals reciprocated and presented her with artwork from our sister schools on the APY lands. Sharon, Annie & I were also presented with a beautiful batik jacket each.

The cultural evening finsished with an Aussie BBQ as our contribution to the cultural evening!
For me, that was the end of my involvement in the visit as I am now flying off to Medan to visit another partner school through the Bridge Project. I hope the rest of the visit is successful and that we see Petra Berkat School back on the Fluerieu one day soon!

A Day With Stephen Krashen

24 Oct 201524 Oct 20154 Comments

What an amazing day we had yesterday in Adelaide – I’m still absolutely blown away by the entire experience! Imagine having the opportunity to listen to Stephen Krashen speak in Australia? I hardly know where to start to give you even a taste of what the day was like. That we attended at all came about purely by chance after learning just last week tthrough the MLTAWA newsletter that he is on an Australian “Power of Reading” Tour organised by the Australian Library Association. We each bought a ticket even though his presentation would be largely aimed at librarians because the opportunity to listen to him speak was just too precious to pass up. We had our fingers crossed that aspects would be useful but not in our wildest dreams imagined just how brilliant it would be.

Why were we so excited about hearing Stephen Krashen speak? Quite simple really. He is the mastermind behind TPRS. The TPRS/TCI methodology we use in our Indonesian program is based on his theory of second language acquisition and supported by his many years of research. Here is a brief bio from amazon.com:

To those familiar with the field of linguistics and second-language acquisition, Stephen Krashen needs no introduction. He has published well over 300 (BC- closer to 500 actually) books and articles and has been invited to deliver more than 300 lectures at universities throughout the United States and abroad. His widely known theory of second-language acquisition has had a huge impact on all areas of second-language research and teaching since the 1970s.

So you can imagine our absolute delight upon learning that Adelaide was one of the stops on his Australian tour and in no way did he disappoint us. Our day began at 7am as we headed off to Adelaide and finished 12 hours later, yet every minute was absolutely and undeniably brilliant. He is a relaxed and entertaining speaker.

While his presentation was pitched at librarians, sprinkled throughout were many TPRS references and he also spoke at length about Free Voluntary Reading (FVR) – equally important in a second language classroom. Absolutely everyone we spoke to throughout the day took so much from his presentation. I sat between a young librarian from a local council library and a Year 12 English teacher and they were both totally rapt throughout.

During the first break, I went up and introduced myself explaining that I was one of 3 TPRS teachers in his audience. He was so excited to meet Australian TPRS teachers. He had no idea that there is a small group of us here in Australia. He encouraged us all to follow aand post questions on the iFLT/ NTPRS/CI Teaching Facebook page where he himself soon posted:

The fascinating aspect of his presentation was his use of stories. They were compelling and entertaining just as they need to be in TPRS. Even after lunch, in that well known time where most participants start to nod off, he tackled the huge topic of poverty yet with relevant Australian statistics meshed with real life stories – Geoffrey Canada & Liz Murray – we were wide awake and entranced till the very end.

Afterwards, we invited him out for a coffee. We took him to a nearby restaurant and for an hour chin wagged. Can you imagine? Can you possibly imagine how cool it was to actually talk directly to the TPRS guru? We were able to ask him questions about all sorts of details and also listen to his ideas and use them to further gel our understanding of TPRS. Our conversation re-energised us and if anything, made us even more determined to attend some official training somehow, somewhere!! If you would like to join us, write in the comments below and I’ll keep you posted with any plans. A huge conference in Agen, France is already being planned for July 2016. HOw amazing would that be?

He was so busy, so tired, so jet lagged, yet happily gave up his free time to spend it with us newbie TPRS teachers and for that we will be forever grateful.
If you’re keen to listen to him actually speak, I highly recommend this podcast: http://www.sourcesandmethods.com/podcast/2015/9/14/sources-and-methods-20-stephen-krashen He covered so many topics and there is no way I can do them justice. So do yourself a favour, find an hour and sit down and enjoy this podcast. Lots of truly great points raise & relevant to everyone, not just teachers.

Just to finish, here are a few quotes taken from his presentation:

There are 3 ways to slow down the onset of dementia:

bilingualism
reading for pleasure
lots of cofee

Through FVR (Free Voluntary Reading) students improve their

reading comprehension skills
writing
vocabulary
grammar knowledge &
spelling. (Therefore FVR is the source of most of our literacy development.)

If teachers read with their students during SSR for as little as 10 minutes a day over their career, it will amount to 3 months of paid leave!
Research demonstrates time and time again, the impact of reading for pleasure on people is far greater than the level of education their parents achieved.
Reading aloud to students is very important for language acquisition in areas of vocabulary, grammar & also develops a love of reading
A love of reading develops empathy. When reading the reader is in the protagonist’s shoes, thus helping readers to have more tolerance for vagueness which is important for problem solving. Readers learn not to reach premature conclusions.
Schools are not broken. Just because test scores are low, does not mean that our schools are broken. It is wrong to measure school results by test scores. Instead governments should be addressing the high levels of poverty. Poverty causes poor school results not teachers or schools.
Find your strengths, then get better at it and use it to help others. When you know your strengths, work on it. Don’t focus on your weaknesses, focus on your strengths because its fun. If its not fun, then it is wrong for you.

He also included some great quotes from other notable people:

Picasso ; The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.

Mark Twain: The 2 most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.

Zhao: It is difficult to predict what new businesses will emerge and what will become obsolete. Thus, what becomes highly valuable are unique talents, knowledge, skills , the ability to adapt to changes and creativity, all of which calls for a school culture that respects and cultivates expertise in a diversity of talents and skills and a curriculum that enables individuals to pursue their strengths.
Isn’t he a legend?

Indonesian Teacher Reflections

Belajar Mengajar

Category: TPRS/CI