The Teach-Off – Dogme Day 7

Before I summarise today’s lesson, here are the ‘answers’ to the loan words featured in yesterday’s post.

  • Rajicase (Japanese) is a shortened form of Rajio Casetto Pureya…or Radio Cassette Player.
  • Pasocon (Japanese) is also another shortened form. This time, it’s of Pasonaru Computa…or Personal Computer.
  • Salaryman (Japanese) refers to an office worker who draws a monthly salary.
  • Office Lady (Japanese), also known as O.L., refers to women who work in offices whose duties include making tea, photocopying and dealing with meaningless admin. Rather politically incorrect, I know… Oh, and did I mention that they have to wear a uniform too? Does ‘Girl Friday’ ring any bells?
  • Face Pass (Japanese), or KaoPasu, uses ‘pass’ like in ‘student pass’, refers to good-looking people who can get into clubs or bars for free.
  • Skinship (Korean/Japanese) is a physical intimacy shared through a display of affection, e.g. hugging, kissing, holding hands, etc.
  • Fighting! (Korean) is what you say to someone going for an exam or about to face a difficult challenge. The closest equivalent in English would be ‘Go for it!’ or ‘Come on! You can do it!
  • Show off (Persian/Farsi) has the exact same meaning in Farsi as it does in English. Interesting though that an English loan word is needed to describe such behaviour.
  • Site (Brazilian Portuguese) is short for website.

And here’s the boardwork for today. You know the drill.

Boardwork 1
Boardwork 2

Today’s lesson consisted mainly of a recall and revision of yesterday’s language, which in turn led to further questions and lexis, and the rest of the mini-presentations by the students, followed by some delayed correction of all the student presentations.

After giving students about 15 minutes to do a recall in pairs and to fill in the new student on what she missed yesterday, I gave each pair a mini-white board and described the lexis, while they discussed the answers in their pairs and kept score. The discussion of the word ‘tailor make’ used as a verb led to questions like ‘What’s the opposite of “tailor make”?’ (‘to buy something off the rack’) and this was further extended to me eliciting from the students if we could say, ‘I went to a tailor and I tailor made a shirt’.

The students and I agreed that it wasn’t I, but the tailor, who tailor made the shirt, and so I fed in the causative structure, ‘I had the shirt tailor made.’

After asking the concept questions, ‘Did I do it myself?’ (No)

‘Did I ask someone to do it?’ (Yes)

Did I pay someone to do it?’ (Yes)

I then elicited the form ‘to have + something + past participle’

The Japanese students got rather confused at this point, probably because in Japanese, the causative has its own tense (and by tense, I mean conjugated verb form). In addition, seeing the past participle threw quite a lot of the students off.

A few more concept questions later, I wrote:

I need to paint my walls.

I need to book a holiday.

I need to print these photos. 

I need to clean my house.

I then established that I was very rich and didn’t want to do these things myself.

I was going to pay someone to do it.

The students worked in pairs, changing the sentences into causative structures, and later in open class, I asked,

‘I need to paint my walls next week,’

eliciting the answer, ‘I’m going to have my walls painted’.

As I varied the time adverbials in each sentence, the students were made aware that the time element was signaled by the first verb ‘have’ and the past participle remained the same.

After some more controlled practice, we went back to our mini-whiteboards and revision. But when the phrase ‘loan words’ came up, a student asked about the noun ‘loan’. This led to me eliciting several words connected to banking and loans as the students bounced off the new language, sharing the words that they would use in their language, e.g. while we say ‘to be in the black’ and ‘to be in the red’, some languages used ‘blue’ and others ‘green’, instead of ‘black’!

Perhaps another noticeable point of today’s revision session was the fact that all the students were better prepared and had clearly been going through their notebooks and revising at home. The setback of yesterday’s Back-To-Board for a particular team had clearly jolted the students into putting in some work at home! Success!

After the break, our only Iranian student in the class gave a excellently-prepared presentation on her country and aroused quite a bit of interest during the post-presentation Q&A from the Japanese and Korean students. Following that, our two Japanese girls told us about Japanese Kabuki and Ukiyoe, and although I am quite confident about my knowledge of Japanese culture, they filled me with all kinds of interesting trivia that I had never known.

The delayed correction slot basically consisted of me writing sentences that I had heard over the last 2 days during the student presentations and having students discuss in pairs as to how they might reformulate the sentences.
I then went through them, sentence by sentence, having students write their reformulations on the mini-whiteboards, and then sharing it with the rest of the class. What I like about this is the fact that very often, there really isn’t one correct answer to these corrections. By getting all the students to write their versions on the mini-whiteboards, we can not only acknowledge the different ways of reformulating the sentences, but it also provides the students with a chance to have in-depth discussions with their partners as to how to change the given sentences, raising their awareness while consolidating their knowledge of how language works, on top of providing the teacher with an insight into how much the students are able to handle. (Have a look at the sentences in Boardwork 2. How would you reformulate them?)

Tomorrow is the last Dogme day of the Teach-Off.

Tomorrow is the day of the student questionnaire and focus group.

And then it’s on to my DOS and the coursebook, Global…


Author: Chia Suan Chong


4 thoughts on “The Teach-Off – Dogme Day 7”

  1. I really like the delayed correction slot with the mini-whiteboards. I’ll really have to get some of those. Like you say, it’s a great way to see that there’s not just one way to say/write something.

    Thanks, Chia! I’m going to miss these posts.

  2. Yes yes yes. No right answers! Great stuff. Should we ever have 1 right answer? Isn’t it better to have discussions and say what is,could, might be or isn’t write and why? That’s real conversation about language. I’d go so far as to say that 5 minutes of that is more useful than teaching several grammar points. It covers the whole are of activating knowledge/schemata/connections etc’. Then questions start coming in about why and how and then students see how everything is linked together and you’re not just doing whatever but are teaching in a looser form that is more communicative.

    Today (sorry to bore you) I had a TOEIC student who wanted to do speaking practice about his job so that’s what we did but we ended up covering maybe 20 words for the test and several useful structures which we discussed. There was no ‘teaching’ in the natural sense but there was better recall and use than in a normal ‘teacher teaches’ situation.

    Well done on this whole project Chia. You are a PLN star!

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