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Erika Sertic
Peter
TESOL Practicum
16 July 2018
Narrative

Kyunghwa:

During the TESOL Practicum that I participated in, I was assigned to teach in the high

school on the Kyunghwa Girls’ School campus. These girls were split into three grades, slightly

differing from the usual four-year American school set-up. While working at the high school, I

worked with 1st and 2nd years as the 3rd year students were busy with preparation for college

exams. Between the 1st and 2nd years was an even larger divide as half of the classes were on

track to study liberal arts whereas the other half were on track to study science and math.

As for the students’ English levels, it varied greatly from student to student. Most were

proficient enough to hold a conversation with the University of Kansas teachers, but some were

almost fluent. This was usually due to studying a year abroad in a English speaking majority

country for a year. This concept of sending students abroad to improve their English fluency is

not a new concept, as Park mentions in his article on “English fever”. He mentions that parents’

emphasis for students to study English in a “pure” English environment is driven by the idea that

English is a competitive edge for their student’s success in higher education and onto the

workforce. In fact, just in 2006 there were around 8,000 students who went alone to an English-

speaking majority country to study. Including that with the students who were accompanied by a

parent or guardian with students who emigrated, it made up 17,921 cases of young students

going abroad to further their English education. While I was talking to students at Kyunghwa, I
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saw this either through students that had mentioned they studied abroad in somewhere like

Australia. Otherwise, if they hadn’t studied abroad, they were more often than not recommended

to study abroad in the past by one of their teachers.

Another teaching concept that I saw present at Kyunghwa was the idea that I saw was the

idea of “native speakerism” (Holliday). The idea at Kyunghwa was that the best source for

teaching English to the students was to learn it from “native” English teachers. The three native

English teachers on the Kyunghwa campus were all from the “English speaking west” (Holliday)

in that their first language was English. However, by law, the native English teachers had Korean

co-teachers, but the co-teachers were more so to help students if the native English teacher just

couldn’t get their point across. In the high school, the Korean co-teachers were often the

student’s home room teacher.

With all these dynamics at play, this was the environment of teaching English at

Kyunghwa.

Lesson Planning:

While at Kyunghwa, being in a practicum, the important concept was to learn how to

make lesson plans and implement them. Based on what I had observed in my mentor teacher’s

classroom I thought the best way to engage students was through games. In my first lesson plan,

my focus was on teaching the students about words that they could use for when they consume

English media, like tv shows, books, or in the case of onomatopoeias, comic books. The focus in

my second lesson plan was to emphasize listening comprehension.

The first lesson had a focus on onomatopoeias that occur in English media. I first started

with asking the students which onomatopoeias they already knew, then would show them a
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selection of onomatopoeia words that I had chosen in advance. Following this, to let the students

practice the new words, I set up a bingo game. With a blank card, the students were encouraged

to fill in the words that they wanted to and asked questions if they were unsure about the

meaning of the words. After the bingo game, the next task for the students was to create a comic

using 4 of the new words that they had learned. I thought that this was the best way to structure a

lesson because it had the four areas of focus in the 4-Mat lesson planning. By asking them what

words students already knew and what onomatopoeias they had in Korean, we were able to get

the students motivated about the lesson. Then for the teach part, I went through with pictures and

examples of the word, like “achoo!” with a picture of sneezing. Then the practice came through

while doing the bingo game. The final part of 4-Mat, which is apply, was used for their creation

of their own comic strips. Areas to improve for this lesson plan would include eliciting more

English out of the students during tasks, drawing more parallels between Korean and English so

students better comprehend, and finding a more concrete way to measure comprehension. The

area that needs most emphasis on improvement would be comprehension measures as I saw

while previewing students’ comic creations they would sometimes use an onomatopoeia that

wouldn’t normally fit in the context. So, I need to add a way to really make sure the students

understood their words.

For the second lesson, the emphasis was a little bit different. At first, since I decided to

talk about movies, the class was structured in a similar way as my mentor teacher’s lesson on

music. The idea was to talk about movie genres, show trailers as an example, play a game on

which trailer belongs to which category, film making vocabulary and matching words to

definitions, and then movie recommendations for me. This however failed when I found out that

the students had a great grasp on movie topics, and there were too many words for a matching
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game. After that I completely uphauled the lesson and created a lesson to focus on listening to

English in a practical context and then using that English for a skit. This lesson also followed the

4-mat idea similar to the previous lesson. This as well needed a better form of comprehension

check on my end, as during their skits I did not correct for pronunciation. This would have been

a good idea to implement and should implement if ever I were to do this lesson again.

From these two lesson plans, I was able to learn a few things about lesson planning. One

area that I thought that I did well in was making my speech understandable to the students. By

using more simple words and thinking out my words rather than allowing my speech to be rapid-

fire, I thought that I made my input more comprehensible. On the other hand, I need to improve

on is to integrate more tests of comprehension into my lessons and find a way to give feedback

during tasks so as to help improve my student’s English acquisition. One other area to improve

on is to make more tasks that are cognitively demanding and decontextualized (Cummins 2000).

Most of the tasks that I made for my class were on the other end of the learning spectrum

belonging squarely in cognitively easy and contextualized quadrant. If I want my students to

really learn, I have to move them from easy and contextualized tasks, through demanding and

contextualized and then over to demanding and de-contextualized. With these ideas in mind, I

can become a better TESOL teacher.

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Works Cited

Cummings, Jim. “Range of Contextual Support and Degree of Cognitive Involvement.”

Holliday, Adrian. “The Struggle for New Relationships.” The Struggle to Teach English as an

International Language, Oxford University Press, 2005, pp. 1–16.

Park, Jin-Kyu. “'English Fever' in South Korea: Its History and Symptoms.” English Today, vol.

25, no. 01, 10 Mar. 2009, pp. 50–57., doi:10.1017/ S026607840900008X.

Peter, Lizette. “General Theories and Research in Second Language Acquisition and Their

Relationship to Practice.”

Peter, Lizette. “Lesson Planning for an EFL Classroom.”