English House Dec 29

I've been meaning to write, but keep getting pushed away by other things!

I have three groups, Lower-Intermediate 2 (from beginning through today, my first class, from 9:30am), Upper-Intermediate, and Lower-Intermediate 1. (There is 1 group of Beginners, 1 group of Advanced, and three groups each of Upper and Lower Intermediates.) Not surprisingly the Upper-Intermediate group is more talkative, but also, partly through personalities, more fun.

We are working through a discussion book, but for one class hour we did "winter vacation" - but not as they expected, and not as another teacher is doing. Instead, it was more "controlled practice" with also memory exercise - repeat what people before you said. The point of it, as I explained after the first round, was to help them work on the higher-level memory tasks while using English, not just practicing "taxi-driver" English. I introduced the content-language diagram and the idea of BICS/CALP (as with TOEIC/TOEFL) and that the other conversation teacher was working on general fluency and comfort, whereas I was working on "building brain power" (cognitive processing load) and they seemed to get it, be more comfortable with what we've been doing. (See "Combining Language and Ideas" blog post from last summer, here.)

I feel much better about what I'm doing. Let's see if they continue to accept it.