Savannah Glaves

C&T 491

Dr. Cho & Johnson

28 June 2019

Instructional Unit Narrative

English—it is the language of many varieties. How can a person really consider

themselves competent in English if there are so many varieties? Variety or not, English is

considered the main language of today’s globalized world. It is linguistic capital. It is the

language of the world and people communicate with it in business, economics, politics, etc. It is

used to make a profit, to say the least. (Cho & Peter, 2017) But what does English being

linguistic capital mean for the world?

If English is used to make a profit, then it means that English must be used often. For

people that do not speak the same languages, English becomes the mode of communication

between the two people. It may be broken English, but it is enough for the people to understand

each other. English becomes a lingua franca when it becomes a globalized commodity. (Celce-

Murcia, 2014) In a neoliberalized society, if you cannot speak English, you are less likely to get

a job.

In South Korea, it is easy to see that English is a major part of schooling. From

elementary school, students start to learn English. They continue to learn English until the end of

high school, where they prepare for college entrance exams, such as the TOEIC, TOEFL TEPS,

etc. (Choi, 2008). These exams consist of many academic texts, with many technical words and

jargon. Rather than actually learning conversational skills, these students are taught English from

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a textbook. They only apply their English skills to reading and writing, and while it is good for

them to learn, they completely ignore other aspects of the English language.

If English is considered linguistic capital, then how exactly does this test-based learning

help Korean students? They are only taught English to test. When they get out into the real

world, they will be unable to communicate with other people that do not speak Korean. A French

person would most likely be unable to communicate with a Korean person in a business

transaction unless they knew the lingua franca.

I have seen this personally in my own teaching experience at Kyunghwa so far. Many of

the students have amazing English test scores, but they barely know how to speak English. Even

the ones who do know how to speak it enough to comprehend showed me the words they had to

memorize in their normal English class. There were words like “interpret” and “manufacture”

which we only really use in academic texts. While they most likely would be able to understand

a textbook or academic article, they would be unable to understand normal phrases that English

speakers don’t tend to use in writing. While I do try to use less odd phrases while speaking with

the students, many do still tend to have trouble understanding what I am saying. If you cannot

understand ninety-eight percent of a conversation, then you won’t understand what is going on

(Zimmerman, 2014). If a student does not even understand one word that I am saying, they might

not be unable to communicate. In a globalized world, they need to be able to communicate more

than anything.

In Deja’s and my lesson plan, we decided to have the students learn about American

restaurants. One of the major things that everyone on this trip has been struggling with is

ordering food in Korean restaurants. For the first few weeks, I was just saying the food with no

other words with it. Even though I took Korean for a year and learned how to order at a

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restaurant, I could not remember until somebody else told me what to do. Because of that, we

wanted to create a lesson where the students would learn how to order food. We did not want

them to struggle like we did. By creating a two-part lesson plan where we taught the students

both how American menus work and how to order, we hoped that it would show them how

American restaurants differ from their Korean counterparts.

Many of the students have never left Korea, and if they have, it’s most likely been China,

Japan, or some other East Asian country. It normally is not a native English-speaking country.

Since English is a foreign language in Korea, they rarely are exposed to it. There is no chance to

hone in on their conversational skills until they leave the country. However, by that point they

are unable to speak with the people around them unless they have assistance. I hope by

presenting these lessons on ordering food that they will be able to at least get food while they are

in another country. Starving in another country just because you do not know how to order or

understand which food is which is not very fun—at least in my opinion. While some students

may not be interested in learning English for traveling, I feel like our lesson will help them learn

some descriptive words that may show up during their college entrance exams.

To start off the first lesson, we talked about many descriptive words for foods. In our

lessons, we mostly focused on group work. After teaching them, each group would work with

each other to make a menu with one food per person, including a name, picture, and descriptive

sentence for each. This is very similar to how American menus work. Then in the second lesson

they worked in partners for our first activity. They would talk to each other like a cashier and

customer would, ordering food that they wanted. Then they would switch so both students would

have time to act like both. Afterward there would be an activity that involved students going to

other groups to order from their menus, and the group would act like the front counter while the

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other student would be the customer. Since this lesson was meant to teach students something

that they were not normally exposed to in academic texts, we decided that the lesson would be

the same for both of the grade levels.

By putting the students into groups and partners and having many activities, they were

able to speak to each other in English often. They would have to discuss what they wanted to do

and produce it into an English sentence. If one student could not figure it out, they were able to

get help from another student. By doing this, they were able to improve their English skills. They

were able to learn about descriptive adjectives, passive voice (such as “served with” in menus),

conditional tense, and interrogation in simple future. Along with that, we were able to gauge how

well they were learning by the worksheets that they had to fill out. In the first lesson, they

completed a matching worksheet where they matched the food to the descriptive adjective, and

in the second lesson, they completed a worksheet where they filled out the customers’ responses

to the cashier.

By doing all of these things, I hoped that we would be able to get the students to learn

more about speaking in English. If they are able to order from menus, they are able to

communicate better than any of us did in the first few weeks in Korea. Along with that, they will

know more common adjectives and phrases that will often be used in conversation with another

English speaker.

Native or not, English is the lingua franca of the world. It has become such an ingrained

part of both native and non-native English speakers’ lives, to the point where students are taught

to test rather than learn how to converse. While reading and writing is a large part of

communication between two people, speaking and listening is as well. By teaching these

students more conversational words, I hope to be able to improve their English comprehension

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even a little. They need to know the types of form we teach them, regardless of their

communication skills. By completing these activities in my class, I hope to be able to help the

Korean students at least in some way. In such a globalized world, that is all I can hope for.

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 Works Cited

Celce-Muria, M. (2014). Teaching English in the Context of World Englishes. Teaching English

as a Second or Foreign Language (4th ed.). (pp. 63-70) Boston, MA: National

Geographic Learning.

Cho, H. & Peter, L. (2017). Chapter 9: Taking TESOL Practicum Abroad: Opportunities for

Critical Awareness and Community-Building among Preservice Teachers. Handbook of

Research on Efficacy and Implementation of Study Abroad Programs for P-12 Teachers

(pp. 149-171) Wayne, NJ: William Paterson University of New Jersey, USA.

Choi, I. (2008). The Impact of EFL testing on EFL education in Korea. Language Testing.

10.1177/0265532207083744.

Zimmerman, C. B. (2014) Teaching and Learning Vocabulary for Second Language Learners.

Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Languge (4th ed.). (pp. 288-302) Boston, MA:

National Geographic Learning

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Savannah Glaves

C&T 491

Dr. Cho & Johnson

20 June 2019

Lesson Plan 1 Reflection

Teaching the first lesson ever can be stressful. No one knows how a student will react to

the lesson. However, it was less stressful for me than teaching a lesson that someone else had

made because I knew what happened when. I felt like I had been pretty prepared before the start

of the lesson at the beginning of the week. Even though there were some problems, Deja and I

learned from them, and then we made changes for the next time we taught.

I feel like our lesson went fairly well, especially considering it was my first lesson ever.

We taught the students some adjectives to describe foods, and then they were able to create their

own menu with their own unique foods. I feel like the students were able to understand what we

taught them very well, especially since we had them repeat us so many and then practice.

However, I also think we should have thought about how long it would take to make a menu,

because now we have to incorporate them finishing their menu into next week’s lesson. While

we were thorough in our teaching, we did not give them enough time to finish our second

activity in the lesson. We may have to change the activity we were thinking of for our second

lesson because of this.

Even though they were unable to finish making their menus, I do think that the lesson

objectives were met by the majority of the students by the end of the lesson. They were all quick

to finish the matching worksheet in the lesson. Even if they were not very willing to speak in

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class—even if we tried to get them to—they still showed understanding when they did the

matching worksheet and then started creating their menu. They used many adjectives that we had

taught them during the lesson along with other ones as well. Many of the menus even used the

passive verb phrases “served with,” “fried in,” etc., which we had also taught them during the

lesson. Some students were able to think of their menu items faster, so they were able to

complete their menu in the time allotted. Other students were struggling a little more with

coming up with their own menu items. However, I do not think that some students achieved the

objective more fully than others because they all understood how to describe the foods that they

created. Some were just slower than others.

I think our biggest flaw in our lesson was during the first time we taught. We did not

fully explain that they were allowed to make their own food items, and they all thought that they

had to use the foods that we showed them in their menus. Only one group had understood that

they were allowed to make their own foods as long as they used some of the words that we had

presented to them. We treated those errors by the next time we taught the lesson. We made sure

to show an example of our own menu with a “fruit burger,” so they would understand that they

could even create fake foods. While some students still created real foods, they used foods other

than the ones that we had given them in the first place. I feel like our explanation change allowed

the students to use more creativity. They were also able to associate the adjectives with other

foods that they knew of, so we were able to tell that they understood the meaning of them.

The main thing we hoped for when planning this activity was that the students would

understand how an average American menu works—with descriptions normally rather than

pictures. We decided on this activity because we had realized how hard it had been for us to

order food when we arrived in Korea. There were only pictures, and I was normally used to

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descriptions because it told us what exactly was in the food I was ordering. It made it harder for

me to understand what I was ordering. Because of this, we thought that understanding other

types of menus was essential for these students. They were able to create both descriptions and

pictures, which would prepare them for both if they ever went to other countries and were

exposed to different types of menus. I believe that they were able to use authentic language

because the only guidelines were that they needed to create one sentence with a description of

the food and that their needed to be a picture. They were able to make their food into whatever

they wanted it to be, while also demonstrating their English skills. I believe that the students

really enjoyed making the menus because it allowed them to make things in English creatively,

rather than learn words and grammar points just for a test. It makes me happy as a teacher.

Overall, I believe that this lesson was fairly easy for the students. They knew a fair

amount of the words we taught, but we also made sure to include new words such as “gooey” or

“crunchy.” They already knew words like “salty” and “chewy.” I feel like this made it a little

easier for them, but not too easy to the point where the students were bored. We were able to

make sure every student was able to participate by having each student make one food item for

their menu. They all were able to create the food, write one descriptive sentence, and draw a

picture of the food. I believe that the students were all able to practice their skills by doing this,

regardless of their level of English.

I think our greatest success in teaching these students was that we were able to allow

them to express their creativity while also teaching them about adjectives and some passive verb

phrases. However, I think we also need to work on planning out how long an activity will take.

Since some students are slower than others, some students will finish later than others. Having

only fifteen to twenty minutes to create a menu with one food item per person is a lot to do in

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only twenty minutes. Personally, I also think that I need to work on speaking more slowly,

because sometimes the students had trouble understanding me. I believe I do well on enunciating

the words that need to be, but I do speak too fast sometimes. While I did some things well, there

are still many things that I need to improve on.

Altogether, I believe that our lesson went pretty well this week. Improvement is key to

when a person is learning. Both the students and I need to improve, albeit different things. They

need to improve on their English, while I need to improve on my teaching. I hope to be able to

help them improve their English by improving myself. Being a teacher has turned out to be such

an amazing thing that I had never realized before. I hope to be able to improve even more in the

future so that both my students and I can enjoy learning even more.

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Savannah Glaves

C&T 491

Dr. Cho & Johnson

28 June 2019

Lesson Plan 2 Reflection

Time is such an important part of teaching. If you do not have the time, can you really

teach? That goes for any job, really. Will it be your best work if you do not have the time for it?

That was probably one of our biggest problems during this week of teaching. Lack of time—plus

a few other problems here and there—led to a fairly average lesson plan compared to last week.

Last week, we did have some trouble with our lesson plan, but I felt like we had more this

week. Coming back from a packed weekend in Seoul, we did not have much time to complete

our lesson plan or hammer out the details. Come Monday afternoon, I feel like we were

prepared, but at the same time we were not. We knew exactly what we were teaching about and

how we were going to execute it—we had known since the week before—, but we had not gone

over all the little details such as who would speak when. It was about ten minutes before our first

lesson of the week that we decided who was doing which part.

Our lesson plan was about ordering from the menus that they had made the week before.

I do think that our concept was really nice, since they were able to apply the concepts that they

had learned the week before to the next lesson. They were also able to apply new things such as

ordering from a menu during our lesson. However, I also do think that we had a severe problem

with time management during our lessons. I think we only got through all of the activities twice

out of the four times we taught the lesson (since we taught lesson plan one for the other two

classes that we did not have last week). The first lesson, we made it to the activity, but barely had

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any time to do it. The second lesson, we got to the activity and had a little too much time. The

third lesson, we added a smaller partner activity into it along with the bigger group activity. That

class was busy the entire time and we had time to do all of the lessons. On the last lesson we had

been moved to the library—which did not have a clock—and our time management was

horrendous. We managed to get through the partner activity but had no time for the group

activity. While our idea for teaching was pretty good, we did struggle a lot with time

management during this lesson.

I do believe that the lesson objectives were met by the students by the end of the lesson.

They had more time to finish their menus, and if they finished early they could decorate it or add

more foods. We also had a worksheet for them to fill out with the customer responses to the front

counter, so they were able to show if they understood what to say to the front counter. We gave

the worksheet to them after we explained the phrases to them, so they would not be able to fill

them out before the partner activity. In the partner activity one student acted like the front

counter and one acted like the customer, and then they switched. If they had gotten the worksheet

beforehand, they could have just filled out the worksheet while we were explaining. Instead, they

had to remember what we had taught them to fill out the worksheet and converse with each

other. I believe that all of the students achieved the objectives rather evenly because they were

all able to fill out the worksheet pretty easily, and if they made it to the next activity where they

ordered from the menu of another group, they all understood what they were doing almost

immediately.

The only error that I really saw from the students was that some did not understand how

to answer the second question on the worksheet. While the majority just answered with what

they would want as a food, some did not realize that they could choose any food that they

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wanted. When they asked, we told them that they could choose any food they want, like a

hamburger or chicken, and then they understood. I feel like this correction did have some help in

correcting the language form because they were able to actually answer the question when they

realized what to do. Overall, though, there were not that many errors being made.

During the partner and group activities, I hoped that the students would be able to talk

with one another in a way that a cashier or server would converse with a customer. Since we had

taught them how to make menus the week before, we determined that they would use those

menus to order the next week. I do think that it was interesting for them to talk with one another

because they were all willing to talk with each other. When they were the customer, they tended

to use more authentic language than as the front counter. When they were the front counter, they

had to follow the script that was on the worksheet. However, when they were the customer, they

could freely reply, or follow whatever they had written down. While in the first lesson they did

have more authentic language experience, they were still able to experience some in the second

lesson.

I think the difficulty for this lesson was fairly average for the students. It was not too hard

or too easy. They did have a little hard time trying to think of what to reply to the front counter

when we first showed them the concept, but they showed understanding when they were required

to do the worksheet and activities. Every student was able to participate in our lesson by having

them do the partner activity where they would roleplay as the customer and cashier. Thus, I do

think that every student was able to improve their English at least a little in our lesson.

I believe that our biggest success in teaching this lesson was how well they understood

the concept. Because we had explained an American menu in the first lesson, I think they

struggled less in the second lesson. However, we did have some problems. Our time

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management was awful during most of our lessons. It definitely did not help that there was not a

clock in the room in the last lesson but knowing what time we get out of class would also be

really helpful. The morning classes’ times are different from the afternoon classes’ times, which

can make it very confusing. It would probably be helpful to make sure we know what time class

ends before the class starts. While we excelled in explaining the lesson, our time management

really needs to be worked on. We had the same problem in the first lesson, but we made it too

short instead of too long.

Overall, I do think that our lesson has a lot to improve on. The students did understand

what we were trying to teach them, but we had many problems. Although I cannot show more

improvement during this program since this is our last lesson, I do hope that I can improve more

outside of the program as well. As I said in my personal statement to get into this program,

teaching is used in more than just a classroom setting. I can improve myself to teach other people

around me, regardless of the career I choose. If I can improve myself, I can improve other

peoples’ lives as well.

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