Relevency in the Korean English classroom

"They're developing habits of engaging-- ways of becoming involved and invested in literate tasks that are significant to them, not because they were born to love reading and writing but because of the ways the literate activity connects to other things in life that matter to them." (Bomer, 3)

The portraits illustrated in Randy Bomer's Building Adolescent Literacy in Today's English Classroom show students using skills from the English classroom while doing tasks they care about. Through my Adolescent Literacy class, I've continued developing my philosophy of teaching, and this is one of the points of my philosophy: what we teach in the English classroom should be always be relevant in student lives.

I've started working on an ongoing project for my future students in my Conversational English (language) classroom related to this philosophy. I want my students to be able to analyze their own spoken conversational English over a period of time and have more opportunities to speak English than the average English classroom in South Korea allows for. The project will be open for students to make a vlog or podcast and possibly with a written blog component. Students will be able to choose their own themes for the blog and their own topics to write about, but should use the grammar and some relevant vocabulary in class. Because I'll know my students' blog themes, I can also gear my content towards those topics as much as the school's curriculum will allow.

Much of the English learned in Korean classrooms are not useful to students, or are outdated and irrelevant. I want to work hard to make the curriculum as significant to them as possible, because without relevancy, we'll all be wasting time and energy and my students won't be retaining what they're learning.

How they were written

A technique I really appreciate and would like to use someday is one brought up in Katie Wood Ray's inquiry study, Exploring Inquiry as a Teaching Stance in the Writing Workshop. A teacher in her study, Emily, presents op-ed articles to her fifth graders, who figure out how they were written, and then emulate the writing in their own op-ed piece. This process seemed familiar, and I recognized it as how we determined in our Adolescent Literacy class how to write a report on our case studies.

When I was in high school, I remember my sophomore English teacher posing the question for our journal warm-ups: "Why do we read literature?" Even though English classes had always been my favorite, I wasn't really sure. I ended up answering that the purpose was to see how great authors wrote and try to improve on our own writing through their techniques. My opinions have of course changed on why we read literature, but I'm a little disappointed in past-me for reducing literature to simply learning writing techniques.

That being said, I definitely think there is strong value in looking to literature and especially non-fiction works for answers to the question, "How do I structure what I want to say in the most effective way possible?" Ideally, as teachers we could send our students through and beyond high school with a toolbox of methods for writing what they want to say most effectively, but even better if we could send them out with the methods for deciphering what formats and techniques they can glean from any piece of writing.