Julia Maffei

Communication in class is important. Yet, I find that most students are generally reluctant to speak up. If I ask my students, “Do you understand?” they answer, “Yes.” But I know that is not always true. Likewise, if I ask, “Any questions?” most often folks remain silent and avoid eye contact or give a blank stare. So, this semester, encouraged by the ACC FCTL Faculty Fellows, I tried to be consistent in the use of strategies to improve communication in my ESOL Writing and Grammar class.

Open-ended questions

  • I tried to remember to frame questions for longer responses and not ask simple yes/no questions. So instead of “Any Questions?” I would try to remember to say “What questions do you have?” Often I said both after saying the “wrong” one first.

7 seconds

  • I let my questions hang for a few seconds to give students time to formulate questions.

Questionnaires and focus groups

  • Pre-semester to find out student attitudes to learning and how and what they wanted to learn.
  • Post-semester to find out what worked well and what didn’t.
  • Next semester I want to add a mid-semester questionnaire.

Comprehension Check
With Flash Cards

  • I distributed sets of cards with the letters A, B, C, and D printed on them, and students used the cards to answer multiple-choice-questions.

With Ten Fingers

  • Students rated understanding on a scale of 1 to 10 using their fingers.

With Neon Colored Index Card

  • In groups, students discussed what they weren’t quite grasping about what we had been learning and each wrote down their concerns and shared with the class.

Conferences

  • For individualized feedback on essays, 10-15 minute face-to-face meetings with individual students before or after class let me clarify my comments and ask one more time “What questions do you have for me?”

Journaling with a Blog and Forming a Facebook Page

  • Journaling is a good way to increase language fluency, but in order to widen the audience of readers (not just the teacher), I had students write a blog on WordPress and then comment on each other’s writing. In addition, to have easier access to each other’s blogs, we started a Facebook page for our class where students could post their favorite Blogs.

Peer-to-Peer Teaching

  • When students work together, there is a different dynamic in which students feel more comfortable communicating their thoughts and clarifying questions. For writing tasks, students worked in teams to brainstorm, organize their ideas, write and give each other feedback.
  • For grammar, students took two-part low stakes quizzes. The first time the quiz was taken individually, and then the same quiz was taken in teams.

Using these strategies let me listen more, clarify information for students and make changes to my teaching as the semester went along. Plus, we had fun. It was a great semester!