Stephen van Vlack

Sookmyung Women`s University

Graduate School of TESOL

English for Specific Purposes (ESP)

Spring 2006

Week 13 - Murphey. (1997), pp. 117-131 & Blakeley. (1997), pp. 274-289 - Answers

1. What are some of the strong points of the Nanzan program? (Mur)

There are two main strong points about the Nanzan program. The firsty of these revolves around the courses themselves and the second of these revolves around the feedback mechanisms. While it is clear that many of the topics listed here as CBI course topics are not really content-based, we might also say that it is the variety of topics which is one of the stronger points of the program. This is true both from the side of the students as well as the instructors. The students are able to pick topics that they might find interesting and teachers get to teach things they are also interested in even if they are not normally content teachers. As we have mentioned throughout this course, one of the major challenges of CBI is getting language teachers used to or comfortable with the idea of teaching content. The Nanzan program takes care of this problem at least for the regular English teaching staff there. The idea of having four six week classes instead if 2 twelve week classes per year is also good in that it provides diversity which will heighten the students` interest. The other positive element of the Nanzan program relates to the feedback. The action reports to be filled out after each class and kept in a notebook is a really good idea. It gives the students some degree of ownership of the course while at the same time providing invaluable feedback for the instructors about the efficacy of the course or specific lesson.

2. What are some of the weak points of the Nanzan program? (Mur)

Despite some of the positive aspects of the Nanzan program there are some negative aspects of the program. The first of these is the content itself. Some of it, as mentioned above, might not be seen an being terribly academic and it is uncertain what they are doing with some of the more language focused topics. While the students might enjoy some of the topics it is uncertain how well they will prepare the students for the rigors of academic courses in English. Tghis is made evident by the extremely short and dubious authenticity of the reading materials for a university level credit course. Additionally, the class design while beneficial to the students for reasons discussed above is quite demanding for the teacher. Having forty different students that change on a six week basis does not sound like a lot of fun. The teachers are going to have a fair amount of difficulty getting to know so many students over such a short period of time and it is not at all clear whether they might be expected to ever see the same student again after the class. This is worrying as regards what might actually be happening in the class because the use of classroom interaction is to a large extent reliant on the teacher knowing the students. Interaction will not work very well when the students do not know each other and the teacher does not know them either.

A further problem with the program at Nanzan is that it is still very much an offshoot of an adjunct program at the university. This is reflected in the report that the main content teachers/university professors are reluctant to partake n the program. In light of the fact that in his university, as in our own, it is still the regular practice for higher level content course, even in English language and literature to be taught in the local language (Not English), we can see how trying to get support from the university in general might be hard, but CBI needs to be streamlined. Overall, making the program simpler (shorter classes and pathetically short amounts of reading) and with less academic topics might work well to ingratiate the program in the hearts and minds of the students but it will keep CBI from having a lasting effect on the university.

3. What are the main reasons for doing the program and what are the main concerns? How do they relate to our own situation here in Korea? (Mur)

Again, one of the main reasons for the program was to try to offset some of the past learning that the students have had in relation to the English language. Such learning there as here often results in students who have lots of passive knowledge. CBI is, in theory, an effective way of using the students strong passive knowledge which enables them to recognize elements of English while prohibiting them from being able to DO very much with their knowledge. CBI, with its focus on meaningful input, is a great tool for building on the knowledge such students have, but only if it is used well.

So, in a way, this program shows us some useful ways of making a CBI program accessible to students and manageable to the administrators and teachers working on it, but it also shows us certain problems with watering down academic program content.

4. What is the crux of the fellows program? Describe it. (BL)

The basic idea underlying the fellowship program revolves around something we already know: more studying of the same old stuff in the same way does not lead to learning. Language, as a social phenomenon, needs to occur in social environments. This, however, does not mean that university students are going to learn the academic English they need to survive in bars or fraternity parties (provided they are even allowed in). What they need is academic socialization and this is what the fellowship program is a ll about. It supports what can be termed collaborative learning. Students of different proficiency levels are interacting for specific academic goals and on a specific topic. It`s all good.

5. What are the advantages of such a program for both parties involved? (BL)

The advantages for the lower proficiency participants are obvious. They get help with certain problems they are facing and in many cases have become fossilized. For the higher level participants they also are able to better not only the content they are guiding their partners through, but they are able to learn about the process of learning and even classroom management from a very different point of view. They acquire the ability/ the skills to empathize with individuals who were very simply invisible o them before. This a problem of both students and professors/teachers on university campuses/in schools certainly not only in the US, but all over the world. As teachers we stand distant from our students. We have power over them and we have a tendency to focus on the ones that do well. The ones that are doing badly and not complaining about it are often left to simply drift through the cracks.

The true assertion there are many functionally illiterate university graduates in the US might be shocking to many of us but the same can be said for our students here at least in relation to English (hopefully not Korean). Students have received extensive training in certain elements of English in their 14 years (minimum) of English study in Korea, but many of them face the same problem in that they have not been challenged to actually do very much with English except take tests.

6. What makes the idea of fellowship particularly rewarding or effective? (BL)

It is the reflective nature of this fellowship-type of experience which makes it particularly rewarding. The ability to makes a difference not from a distance but up close and personal. As a result this is a real eye-opener for many novice and experienced teachers both. Such an eye-opening experience inevitably leads back to reflection and change. We saw elements of change in the paper which reports on the changes in the behavior of course instructors who were not even directly involved in the fellowship program. Imagine the changes that would or could take place were the collaborators working teachers!

For us in this class as teachers we are concerned with how this type of idea can be used in our classroom and the answer simply relates to how we use and set up group work. The information from this paper lends support to the idea of getting students to collaborate and this collaboration should be done by students of disparate levels of proficiency. It is not only the lower level students who benefit but the higher proficiency students as well and in fact the higher levels students might actually benefit more.