Snippet on Strange Relationships

One of the strangest thing about working at a call center like mine… where we do both inbound and outbound calls, is the sort of relationships you have with your callers. There are frequent customers, who in return are old, some are drunks and sounded like hill billy , I have dealt with them for a long time and I can finish their sentences for them and know what they need and what they want to convey. That’s actually pretty cool. Those people make my job easier, and sometimes I consider some of them my friends.

Though majority of my customers are not my friends. They are in that grey area of almost acquaintances. It’s like flying on a long flight where you actually talk to the person sitting next to you. You may be friendly, but you accept that you will never see this person, so you actually make no real attachment. It’s weird to get to the end of your day and you can’t remember half of your conversations.

I know that its fairly unrealistic to think I would have the sort of conversations where we share deep feelings, talk about things that matter, and develop meaningful conversations. Yeah, that’s some serious B!@#$%^* I guess the thing that bothers me is that spending all day talking to people, having such curt, cold conversations makes me feel kind of cold and lonely. Sometimes, I think the nature of call center work varies on how you deal with it…some makes you feel a little cheap, boring, challenging, out of this world issues like you are paid to be pleasant to people that are only calling because they want things from you, and the rest are all techie issues….and what nots!@#$%, some are personal things.

I’ve always been very good at keeping friends, or developing best friends. The nature of my job just seems to amplify that. I guess I want to actually talk to people, to talk about things bigger than mutual funds and bonds, and to feel that they hear me and have experienced same things like i did.

Marxist were right when they said that work causes alienation. It alienates you from what you produce, and the people around you.

At least I can still press the mute button and abuse my customers that way. That always helps.

Teacher? Taught? or Just a Thought!

It has been nine years (staggered) that I endured all the pains of sacrificing all i have and what i know for my students..Teaching is one big charity effort. Even while everyone’s struggling for comfort, I have yet afforded to wiggle while in struggle. Teaching has both surprised and fascinated my nerve for delivering content to whoever is able and interested. Now, my career is on a crossroad. I have come to terms that an additional fold of one’s age especially when it’s crippling towards the tail-end of the calendar, MUST ALWAYS be a bell ringing to your time line, for personal maturity and professional growth. SO where am I now? Rightfully on the space provided for me by Providence. Very still and calm patiently waiting for some fortuitous fruits of labor. Hence, will continue to sow harder for life… not for sole happiness but for infinite contentment and constant reflection.

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.

Oral Language Development

At the most basic level, oral language means communicating with other people. But when we talk about oral language development across the curriculum, we do not mean teaching children to speak as much as we mean improving their ability to talk or communicate more effectively. Speech is not usually simply basic communication–it involves thinking, knowledge, and skills. It also requires practice and training. How can we help our children to develop oral proficiency? What do we need to do as teachers to facilitate that development? These are the questions we will discuss in this Digest.

Oral language acquisition is a natural process for children. It occurs almost without effort. The ability to speak grows with age, but it does not mean that such growth will automatically lead to perfection. To speak in more effective ways requires particular attention and constant practice. Holbrook (1983) sets out three criteria for oral language competence: fluency, clarity, and sensitivity. To help children achieve these levels of development is our responsibility as educators. Another factor that should be considered are the tools being used by educators. Nowadays visuals are most important to learners.

They feel relax watching visuals because it gives them vivid pictures of the possible changes in their own world.

That’s why educators should predominantly avoid excessive talking inside the class because the learning process will not be achieved.

TEACHERS ROLE

Many studies have indicated that oral language development has largely been neglected in the classroom (Holbrook, 1983). Most of the time oral language in the classroom is used more by teachers than by students. However, oral language, even as used by the teacher, seldom functions as a means for students to gain knowledge and to explore ideas.

Underlying this fact are two assumptions. One of these assumptions–that the teacher’s role is to teach–is usually interpreted to mean that to teach means to talk. Accordingly, teachers spend hours and hours teaching by talking while the children sit listening passively. Such conventional teaching-learning is one of the obstacles preventing the real development of oral language. Children leaving these classrooms tend to carry this passivity over to their learning attitudes, and tend to be “disabled” in their learning abilities, as well.

The second assumption is based on the fact that children start learning and using oral language long before they go to school. Therefore, it is assumed that the primary learning tasks for children in school are reading and writing, which are usually seen as the two major aspects of literacy.

In one investigation Stabb (1986) reported a steady decline of the use of oral language in classrooms as a major reason for the inhibition of students’ abilities to reason and to forecast as they progressed from lower to higher grades. Such a phenomenon is found not only in the language arts classroom, but also in other classrooms. According to Stabb’s and many other researchers’ observations, classrooms are dominated by teachers talking and by workbook exercises. Researchers call this phenomenon “teachers-talk-students-listen” or “teacher-dominated.” In related research, Willmington (1993) surveyed school administrators who attested to the importance of oral communication skills for teachers–and they considered listening to be the most important skill of all.

Another result of teacher-dominated classrooms is the negative effect upon children’s attitudes toward learning. Operating under the two above-mentioned assumptions, teachers often fail to see that literacy learning is a continuum–an ongoing process of learning–for children. Learning before going to school and learning in school are often viewed as separate processes. Oral language, which is the major learning instrument for children before going to school, is no longer available with the onset of formal schooling. Confronted with new tasks of learning to read and write while being deprived of their major learning tool, children tend to feel depressed and frustrated. Learning begins to loom large, and schooling gradually becomes routine–exactly the situation described in Stabb’s research.

After a few years students will have become programmed to a kind of passive learning atmosphere–the teacher talks, the students listen and do their homework. Here, learning simply means taking down whatever is given. In this type of classroom environment, students learn the basic skills of reading and writing. However, they will not learn how to think critically and how to make sound judgments on their own.

Stabb (1986) speculates that we teachers often become “so involved with establishing routine, finishing the textbook, covering curriculum, and preparing students for standardized tests that we have forgotten one of our original goals, that of stimulating thought.” Though Stabb’s speculation sounds critical, she does provide us with a thought-provoking expansion of the relationship between oral language development and thinking abilities development. In delineating a debate program for elementary school students, Aiex (1990) notes that, although the focus of the program is on the development of oral communication skills, critical thinking and reasoning abilities are also developed along the way.

ORAL LANGUAGE AS FOUNDATION

From the preceding, we can see that oral language is indeed an important link in the process of children’s learning and thinking development. It is not merely a language issue; it is also an intellectual issue which deserves serious attention from both teachers and researchers. From the perspective of language development, oral language provides a foundation for the development of other language skills. For most children, the literacy learning process actually begins with speaking–talking about their experiences, talking about themselves. It is through speech that children learn to organize their thinking and focus their ideas (Lyle, 1993). The neglect of oral language in the classroom will destroy that foundation and severely hinder the development of other aspects of language skills.

RESEARCH ON COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT

Current research literature on critical thinking and cognitive development indicates that the development of language has a close relationship to the development of thinking abilities (Berry, 1985; Gambell, 1988). This is especially true for elementary-level students. Before achieving proficiency in reading and writing–and even after proficiency in reading and writing have been achieved–oral language is one of the important means of learning and of acquiring knowledge (Lemke, 1989). Throughout life, oral language skills remain essential for engagement in intellectual dialogue, and for the communication of ideas.

TEACHER AS FACILITATOR

Given this understanding of the importance of oral language skills, we should reflect on our attitudes toward the teaching-learning relationship. First of all, we need to overcome the faulty assumptions mentioned before. As teachers, we should not assume the role of authoritarian knowledge giver. Instead, we should see ourselves as friendly and interested facilitators of student learning. In emphasizing the role of oral language in the classroom, we are by no means implying that the teacher’s role is not important; on the contrary, we present a more demanding task for teachers. To facilitate a learning process in which children are given both opportunity and encouragement to speak and to explore their own thinking, the teacher has to do more than tell children what he or she means, or what the text means. Instead, the teacher has several different roles to play.

The teacher can encourage students to bring their ideas and background knowledge into class learning activities. To achieve this goal, the teacher must be a good and responsive listener to children’s talk. Facilitation of a child’s talking in class is not enough for language teaching, however, but only provides an environment conducive to both teaching and learning. At this point, the teacher can raise questions concerning the content of the class or the text. While maintaining the role of a knowing arbiter, the teacher still needs to persuade the students. Here one point should be emphasized–implementation of oral language development across the curriculum requires teamwork. All content-area teachers have to be actively involved in this task. The goal is not only to get children to speak, but also to have them learn and develop through speech.

As the children’s other language skills develop in the course of time, classroom talk can be directed more towards the goals of exploring ideas found in texts and sharpening thoughts. “Speaking to learn” is the vehicle for increasing and deepening knowledge.

REFERENCES

Berry, Kathleen S. (1985). “Talking to Learn Subject Matter/Learning Subject Matter Talk.” Language Arts, 62(1), 34-42. [EJ 309 762]
Gambell, Trevor J. (1988). “Linguistics and Literacy Teaching.” Paper presented at the World Conference of Applied Linguistics (Sydney, Australia). [ED 299 816]
Guidelines for Developing Oral Communication Curricula in Kindergarten through Twelfth Grade (1991). Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association. [ED 337 828]
Holbrook, Hilary Taylor (1983). “ERIC/RCS Report: Oral Language: A Neglected Language Art?” Language Arts, 60(2), 255-58. [EJ 276 124]
Lemke, J. L. (1989). “Making Text Talk.” Theory-into-Practice, 28(2), 136-41. [EJ 415 815]
Listening and Speaking in the English Language Arts Curriculum K-12. 1989 Field Test Edition. Albany, NY: New York State Education Department. [ED 335 726]
Lyle, Susan (1993). “An Investigation into Ways in Which Children Talk Themselves into Meaning.” Language and Education, 7(3), 181-87. [EJ 485 116]
Stabb, Claire (1986). “What Happened to the Sixth Graders: Are Elementary Students Losing Their Need to Forecast and to Reason?” Reading Psychology, 7(4), 289-96. [EJ 348 985]
Willmington, S. Clay (1993). “Oral Communication Skills Necessary for Successful Teaching.” Educational Research Quarterly, 16(2), 5-10. [EJ 480 434]