Page 312 - Beyond Methods

300 Monitoring teaching acts
themselves and be on the lookout for possible conceptual misunder- standing they may create in the learner.
Go back to the same segment, turns 1 – 18. In turn 10, S4 suggests “mobile home.” The teacher merely acknowledges it and moves on. Prompted by the observer, the teacher later felt that most students, being recent immigrants to the United States, might not have known what a mobile home is. The teacher could have used this op- portunity to explain or at least encourage the student who gave that answer to describe his mobile home or the neighborhood. Again, in turn 12, S5 says, “Under the bridge.” The teacher accepted that as a matter of fact—as if to say, “you know, you live in an apartment, you live in a house, you live in a condo, and you live under the bridge!” As she discovered later, the student was clearly making a reference to the problem of homelessness among the poor in the San Francisco Bay area. The teacher was aware of that, as she told the observer later, but she didn’t pursue the student’s reference to the social problem of homelessness because she thought that it was not relevant to the topic at hand.
After further discussion, the teacher and the observer said that the two examples had something in common: in both cases, they hypothesized, the teacher could have utilized the learning opportu- nity created by learners. And, in the case of the bridge example, they both agreed that language teachers should not hesitate to talk about socially relevant issues, particularly as glaring an issue as home- lessness, especially when a student himself brought it up. There are other examples where the teacher overlooked the learning opportu- nities created by learners. For instance, in turn 24, S6 wanted to know the meaning of the abbreviation DW. The teacher ignored the request although she went on to say, “It’s important that you famil- iarize yourself with abbreviations.”
Now, consider turns 28 and 29. Only the day before this partic- ular class, the teacher had explained the concept of a paragraph and used the word paragraph several times during that class. Yet, when S8 asked, “What is paragraph?” she took the question in stride, and correctly used the opportunity to explain how to recognize a para- graph. The observer asked her why she picked up on this learning opportunity and ignored several others created by the learners. The teacher replied that this student-initiated learning opportunity was in line with her own agenda. The student offered her an opportunity to clarify and reinforce her earlier lesson, so she recognized it and responded to it.