Self-reflection I

Teacher: Wenwei Li
Class: Advanced conversation, 5 students (4 Japanese, 1 Chinese, 1 Turkish)
Date/Time: Tuesday, Feb 24
Theme: Going viral

This conversation class uses two materials for two activities.

The first activity uses portraits of famous people around the world (some from student home

countries, for example, Akio Morita, Jackie Chan, etc.) and anecdotes about their lives.

Students were asked to match the portraits with names, then anecdotes, and finally discussing

what do they know about them in pairs. During the post-activity, students resumed to speak to

the class on few questions: do you look up to anyone here; if not, whos your role model;

what do they have in common; what have made them famous.

Although during selecting material I tried to incorporate famous people from different student

cultural background to make the topic relevant, it did not incur as heated a discussion as I

expected. The material was actually too focused that if a student is uninterested in, or has

little knowledge on the people listed there, student may experience obstacles, like a lack of

topical knowledge, in this activity. Also, target language is also limited to scripted anecdotes

that students were not given enough opportunity to spontaneous speech. One way to improve

is to downsize the material to only one person, say, Steve Jobs, whom all students are familiar

with. Then several key words would help students to brainstorm things about Steve Jobs, like

achievement, personality, gossip, etc. After constructing one figure with the entire class

(model), students can more easily come up with few key words to describe a person they look

up to, probably someone from their own country. Key words and descriptions can be

effectively recycled then.

The second activity is around a TED talk video: why videos go viral? The content of the

video was a little beyond students proficiency level, which is a common problem in using
TED talks. However, I presume it would not be a problem, as in L2 listening, learners should

be conscious to the fact that authentic L2 listening context requires more focus on getting the

gist, rather than details. TED talk video is a good choice in this regard, as the video would

from time to time display examples in visual and/or audio forms, to assist understanding of

unfamiliar concepts.

The main problem occurred in the second activity was that the content of video was culturally

biased, that some of my students could not understand the culture behind the language,

although they could capture sufficient language to facilitate comprehension. An example in

the TED talk was that the speaker was explaining that a You-tube video published by

Yosemite mountain bear has gone viral, because famous people forwarded the video at a

certain time, while pointing out the pun between publishers name and content of video. In

fact, lack of topical knowledge on digital culture can easily hinder comprehension on such

content. I overlooked the fact that 2 senior students from my class lack such knowledge.

Another Turkish student, though being a regular Internet user, actually belongs to a different

online community that she spent a long time figuring things out. This problem reminds me of

how teaching material can bring cognitive challenge students, and thereby threats the

processing of target language. I should always be aware of the fact that what appear

cognitively natural to me might be incomprehensible to students. In using any material in the

future, I should explicitly assess whether the content is universal to cultures. Also, if I intend

to teach not only language, but also rationale behind content, I should consult to someone

else about the rationale.

Two tools can be incorporated in teaching TED talk. First is to let students watch videos

before class. They could watch it for several times until they reach full understanding.

Teachers can review, and/or test the language on class then, to consolidate learning. The other

tool is to focus scripts of TED talks. It might be a better fit for advanced learners, as TED
talks involve a number of terminologies. However, teacher can clip parts that are meaningful

to different proficiency groups out from the video and make them a focus.