How to do a successful bilingual demonstration class

When DNA MEETS English   When Lantern Meets English   Open Fire Cooking

Lesson Planning: When X Meets English

Through cross-curricular team teaching, a dual focus on both content and language helps students learn better with learning tasks.

 

Thanks to the sponsored bilingual teaching program by the NCUE EMI Research Center, a driven Scouting teacher, Yang Mei-siang, and I developed a four-class bilingual course for open-fire cooking together. The project consists of a simple introduction to survival skills in the wild, cooking with a firewood stove, and an EMI class aimed at some terminology.

 

The heated debate over content and language

 

According to a famous teaching approach for bilingual education here in Taiwan, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL), students learn a subject and a second language at the same time. However, a rising concern among subject teachers is that they lack language-teaching skills and confidence to speak English in class. To solve this, a so-called "domestic bilingual education model" is pushing the idea of not including learning objectives for language.

 

Then, a PE or scouting class will still be a regular class, with the primary focus on content, right? How do we count it as a bilingual class? The solution is encouraging subject teachers to use more "classroom language." For example, all a math teacher has to do is say, "How are you?", "Let's turn to page 38.", "Please hand in your workbooks now.", etc. Can we turn a regular math class into a bilingual one just like that? I DON'T think so.

 

When and how much English should we use?

 

Content always comes first when I do collaborative lesson planning with subject teachers. A bilingual class is NOT an English class, so you don't want to teach too many technical terms or grammar, like passive voice or relative clauses. However, for learning objectives to include language, an English teacher must help with the following:

 

1. Subject-specific Terminology

I'd ask myself this: if I want to talk about open-fire cooking with a friend in English, such as supplies,  ingredients, and steps, what vocab words would we frequently use? Go for easier and more conversational ones instead of complex jargon.

2. Grammar/discourse Structure

Again, only those sentence patterns that help students explain what they've learned should be incorporated. Therefore, you should teach students sequence words and imperative sentences for them to explain how they made milkshakes or sesame oil chicken step by step. 

3. Language for Learning

Random and irrelevant classroom language is for beginners. To move on to the next level, if we divide a class into two parts: mini lecture and interactive activity, I'd like to advocate conducting your lectures in L1 and tasks in L2. It would help if you strived to move on to the next level. As for my personal goal, it's always more of an EMI (English as a medium of instruction) approach.

 

How to help students better understand your English?

 

As I took the OPENEMI online course, I remember we had to list all the possible means to make our English lectures and activity instructions easier for students to understand. Later at some workshops, I found there was a specific term for it, multimodality:

 

1. Visual aids. A picture is worth a thousand words. I prefer using PowerPoint slides with animated images to go with the target words. 

2. Live demonstrations. Don't just tell. Show how the task is done. Students don't have to understand every word of English to engage in activities. 

3. Body language. Over 70% of communication is through non-verbal communication. Use gestures to make you sound more natural.

4. Pace, stress, and inflection. You don't want to sound monotone. Vary the three would help your English become more comprehensible.    

5. Road Map. Tell students what they're going to achieve for the class. They'll be more prepared and guess the words they don't know from the context.    

6. Students' first language. We don't have to stick with the English-only policy when teaching complex or abstract concepts. Without a doubt, L1 is a lot more effective.   

7. Practice, practice, practice. It's pretty self-explanatory. However, you also want to dream big but start small.

 

What makes a good bilingual demonstration class?

 

I came up with an easy CAT principle for the judging rubrics:

1. Is it comprehensible? You don't want to show off what a fluent English speaker you are. It means nothing if students don't understand your lectures or activity instructions.

2. Is it attractive? There are only two class periods a week for PE. Students will hate it if you spend over half of the class teaching English when they know they can play basketball.

3. Is it task-based? So, how do we make a bilingual class fun? Right off the bat, you'll have to create a laid-back vibe. Make them curious about what kind of class it'll be. Then, keep them busy with hands-on tasks, which is especially good for subjects like scouting, living technology, visual arts, performing arts, and so on. A worksheet of jargon translation does the opposite.

The Education Bureau of Taichung City established a new advisory group for bilingual teaching. As a teacher who has been into creating more authentic opportunities for students to USE English, I signed up for the selection process and got accepted into the program. We'll be doing workshops, demonstration classes, lesson plans, and videos to promote bilingual education. Also, with school visits and class observations, we'll help those hard-working teachers and the administrative staff polish their bilingual teaching skills and programs.