Conversation with Trivia

Conversation has four rules; Attention Getting, Topic Nomination, Topic Development and Topic Termination. These rules are commonly seen and practiced in a classroom. Many properly conducted classroom activities also provide assistance such as; lectures, demonstrations, cooperative learning, exercises/activities, textbook reading and conversation with trivia can all assist learning. Even recitation and assessment which sometimes used judiciously by some teachers are necessary elements of conversation.

Using trivia and/or sharing of ideas and knowledge can greatly help a child or student develop his oral communication skills. As a high school teacher, I had several hard experiences of motivating students to listen on my everyday lessons since students now are exposed on a much bigger world on information: E- Media.

It is very tasking on the part of the teacher on how he will get the attention of the students. As I have observed, there are several factors why these are happening: First, students nowadays are glued more on television and computers. They are easily getting all the information they want upon watching and downloading information from the internet. This situation may affect the attention getting technique on the part of the teacher if he/she will be talking about the information which was viewed or read by the students themselves. Second, the attention span of the students are very short, they are much interested in visuals rather than listening to the traditional type of teacher – who keeps on talking and talking without even asking the reactions of the students or I should say dominating the entire class period by giving one way information.

Conversation with trivia may assists the performance of the students. These can be shown in several ways. In students’ homes, It is very evident like a storybook reading or story telling; like helping or questioning the father about cars or any topic that would interest the child. Through this, children can learn how and when to use the language or to react and answer on certain ways.

At school, teachers may use different games shows such as “Game Ka Na Ba”? Or “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” as strategies in order to present the lessons in a manner that would encourage the students or even motivate them to participate actively in class discussions. It will be a lively discussion because the topics are presented through a timely way.

The concept itself may be a paradox: Instruction and conversation may appear contrary, the former implying authority and planning, the latter equality and responsiveness. The task of teaching is to resolve this paradox. To truly teach, one must converse; to truly converse is to teach.

In the instructional conversation, there is a fundamentally different assumption from that of traditional recitation lessons. Parents and teachers who engage in instructional conversation are assuming that the child may have something to say beyond the known answers in the head of the adult. They occasionally extract from the child a “correct” answer, but to grasp the communicative intent of the child, adults need to listen carefully, to make guesses about the meaning of the intended communication based on the context and on knowledge of the child’s interests and experiences, and to adjust their responses to assist the child’s efforts in other words, to engage in conversation.

Of course, teachers should not act like parents in all ways. The large number of students, the restricted and technical curriculum, and the complexity of the institutional restraints of schooling require that teaching be highly deliberate, carefully structured, and well planned. Assisting performance through conversation with trivia requires a quite deliberate and self-controlled agenda in the mind of the teacher, who has specific curricular, cognitive, and conceptual goals. This requires highly developed professional competencies: positive and efficient classroom and behaviour management, provision of effective and varied activities, orderly monitoring and assessment of progress.

All intellectual growth relies heavily on conversation as a form of assisted performance in the zone of proximal development.
“When teaching through conversation occurs, classrooms and schools are transformed into “the community of learners” that they can become “when teachers reduce the distance between themselves and their students by constructing lessons from common understandings of each others’ experience and ideas” and make teaching a “warm, interpersonal and collaborative activity” (Dalton, 1989).

When teachers are engaged with their students in this way, they are aware of the students’ ever-changing relationships to the subject matter. They can assist because, while the learning process is alive and unfolding, they see and feel the child’s progression through the zone, as well as the stumbles and errors that call for support. Schools must be reorganized to allow more activity settings with fewer children, more interaction, more conversation, and more joint activity.

While good instructional conversations with trivia often appear to be spontaneous, sometimes they are not, because young students without television or internet may never realize it or will not have an idea about what the teacher is saying.
The instructional conversation is pointed toward a learning objective by the teacher’s intention; but even the most sophisticated learners may lose consciousness of the guiding goal as they become absorbed in joint activity with the mentor or if the teacher will not change his/her strategies in teaching the lessons. According to Michael Crawford (currently teaching in Japan and also involved in teaching training and materials development),

Trivia’s wide ranging appeal and the ease with which it can be adapted to learner’s interest make it a very useful source of content for teaching conversation.

Teachers who are very traditional may find it easy to encourage and motivate their students if they will used the – “trivia based activities”, since the practice of questioning and answering is an integral part of conversation. As a result, it will be more helpful on the part of the students and the teachers to honed their oral communication skills and to be communicatively competent.

~ by Daga on March 27, 2008.