Sometimes living in Los Angeles feels fantastic. Beauty – in many forms – pervades. You look around, and you smile. The sun shines, the scene looks great, and many languages fill the day.
I visited the Huntington Gardens, a beautiful oasis near California Institute of Technology, yesterday to catch a large photography exhibit documenting 150 years of Los Angeles history. Inevitably, I fell in love with the city again – and gained a new appreciation for how cars, film, oil, and immigration have created this global city of dreams and demons. The show, “This Side of Paradise: Body and Landscape in LA Photographs”, starred evocative photographs by numerous great photographers and attracted a fine crowd.
While moving through the city or going to tourist sites, I often ask myself a simple question. “How many languages did you hear today?” It’s a way to nudge me to pay more attention to sounds, along with the sights, around me. It also reminds me that I’ve traveled quite some distant from Crawfordsville, Indiana where I went to college or even Indianapolis, Indiana where I mostly grew up. This simpe question is also a lively conversation starter in cosmopolitian areas.
Los Angeles is both a great American city and an international magnet for artists, seekers, immigrants, and students. Yesterday I heard Russian, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Italian, German, Hebrew – and lots of English. Many other languages were also spoken, but I didn’t have the pleasure of hearing them. Art, photography, gardens, and culture brought all these people to share a common experience in multiple tongues.
“As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to see the future,” wrote Alison Lurie, an American novelist. Her words still ring true. And living here provides still more possibilities!
Have you ever seen two emotional people talk past each other? Both talk and neither listen. Both want to tell the other, and don’t want to hear – or understand – what the other person is saying. This happens too often in stressful workplaces.
Stephen Covey, author of the international bestseller called “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, advises people “to seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Following this traditional wisdom can improve workplace relationships and communication.
What are some techniques that can help understand other people? Here are some tips:
Listen first and avoid interrupting.
Pause before speaking.
Look people in the eye.
Be curious.
Ask “what” and “how” questions to get more information.
Keep the voice down. Stay calm. Talk slow.
Repeat or rephrase what people say to avoid misunderstandings.
What are some other tips to avoid misunderstandings or conflicts at work?
In conversation, it is often helpful to show other people that we understand what they are trying to say. A smile, a nod of the head, and eye contact are encouraging to others at work and at home. Frowning, shaking one’s head no, or looking away while others are speaking will discourage others from trying. In our ESL classes, we want to encourage each other as we learn and make “good mistakes.”
Gestures matter – in conversation and in ESL class. I often ask ESL students to practice smiling at others, nodding encouragingly, and giving eye contact. Here are some simple questions that I suggest teachers, administrators, and students ask during the first week of class:
1. Why do you want to learn English?
2. Where do you use English now?
3. How will better English conversation skills help you at school?
4. How will improved English conversation skills help you at work?
5. How can you use English speaking skills in your daily life?
6. How do you feel when you speak English now? Why?
7. Where do you plan to speak English in two years? Why?
Getting English Language Learners to answer these simple questions will give instructors a chance to evaluate skills, learn about the background and ambitions of ESL students, and focus student attention on the task at hand. English students need more opportunities to practice and improve their speaking skills in our classrooms.
Student conferences, especially with shy students worried about their grade or academic performance, can often be a bit awkward for both the professor and student. ESL (English as a Second Language) students, sometimes insecure about their pronunciation or vocabulary, can feel particularly anxious. ESL and other English teachers have to find ways to reduce student anxiety, provide a safe place for English students to speak, provide feedback on student work, and uphold academic standards.
In general, I find student conferences very productive and satisfying because you get a chance to really work with a college student on their writings and assignments. I often feel that I learn as much as I teach in these 20-30 minute student conferences.
Sometimes, however, I have awkward conferences. If the student has plagiarized, then this can’t be avoided. Those moments, which I dread, can not be avoided. So it goes.
Yet sometimes, as occurred last semester, an ESL (English as a Second Language) student is so shy, so timid, and so unsure that they speak so softly that I can’t even hear. Sometimes I lean forward and ask them to please speak a bit louder. If a student continues in the same low volume, I might apologize for my poor hearing and again request they speak up. What does one do on the third request?
“Please speak a bit louder so I can hear you.”
Was this too direct? I wanted to say, “If I can’t hear you, you will be misunderstood. I want to understand you. Speak up!!”
Patience, this time, paid off. The student raised her voice to an audible level, and replied, “okay.”
“Good to hear you,” I replied. We proceeded to have a productive end of semester conference.
English and ESL teachers at all levels, from elementary school and high school to adult school and university, need to emphasize the importance of student speech being comprehensible. That includes speaking loud enough that conversation partners, classmates, and instructors can hear.
Bottomline: students must speak up in conversations, conferences, and class discussions. Volume matters.
Ask more. Know more. Share more.
Create Compelling Conversations.
Visit www.CompellingConversations.com
Sometimes time just seems to escape, and we fall behind. Despite the alarm clocks, cell phones, and wrist watches, and many labor-saving appliances, the hours just seem to rush by, the work piles remain, and time vanishes. Modern life can feel more hectic than relaxing – even in summer.
This uncomfortable experience that life is too hectic is quite familiar to adult education students who often work two jobs, take care of their family, and go to school at night.
ESL Teacher: What do you like to do you in free time?
Adult ESL Student:What is free time?
Many college and university English language students feel pressured and short of time. I’ve had ESL students tell me that “sleep is for the weak” and they can’t afford to get even six hours, let alone eight hours of sleep. This lack of sleep, of course, reduces their ability to think clearly, write strong papers, and increases their stress levels.
ESL teachers, who sometimes work at two or more locations, can also feel overwhelmed and stressed by deadlines, traffic jams, and work loads. Getting to class ten minutes early is a wonderful practice, but many evening ESL instructors find it difficult to squeeze just 10 extra minutes into their crammed schedule.
Therefore, it’s useful for ESL teachers and English instructors to teach a few helpful phrases to English language learners to use when they need more time at work or school for projects and class assignments.
Can I have an extra hour?
Can you give me an extension?
Is there any way we can postpone this?
When is the absolute final deadline?
Do I have to work overtime?
Can I have the weekend off?
Is there somebody else who can do this?
Would it be okay to turn this in a day late?
Can I turn that paper in next week?
While nobody would ever fall behind on their work schedules in the perfect world, ESL teachers and students live and work under imperfect and sometimes challenging circumstances.We should, therefore, help our students develop the vocabulary and verbal skills to request extensions, reduce their stress levels, and shift deadlines. Students should also be prepared to explain why they need an extra time.
These requests may be denied, ignored, or accepted, but our students should at least have the vocabulary to ask for more time.
How can English language teachers create a rigorous, tolerant, and focused classroom atmosphere?
One effective technique is encouraging English students, especially ESL students, to “learn by doing” and “make good mistakes” as they expand their vocabulary, experiment with new sentence structures, and use English more in their daily lives. A good mistake, as I explain on the first day of class, is a logical error that makes sense, but just happens to be wrong. For example, a young boy might think 2+2= 22. You can see the logic, but the answer is wrong. The student needs to know that 2+2=4. But you can also acknowledge that “22″ is a good mistake. Some teachers might consider this mistake a systems error or category confusion.
Far too many ESL students, especially in countries that worship standardized exams, have created psychological barriers to experimenting in English. These students often want to avoid making any mistakes, and prefer to remain silent in conversation class to expanding their verbal skills. The ESL teacher, therefore, has to directly confront this trend or learned behavior. You can’t learn to speak a new language without making mistakes.
So I encourage English students, in both conversation and writing classes, to make good mistakes. Take chances. Try something new. Stretch your learning muscles. And make good mistakes. A good mistake is also a mistake that we acknowledge and learn from and avoid repeating. A good mistake is not a good mistake if you’ve made it ten times before in a class or on previous papers. Students usually understand, relax a bit, and proceed to experiment a bit more in our crazy, confusing, and misspelled English language.
Our goal, I sometimes joke on that first day, is to make many good mistakes, learn from these good mistakes, and move forward to make new, different, and even better good mistakes.” We usually realize this goal in our English classes!
