January 25, 2012

Caroline called in sick and I had to carry out the teacher training session by myself. I tried once again to get the teachers to do a little bit of reflecting by asking them to think about a lesson that had gone really bad and what they would have done differently. I gave them cards with half sections of popular similes so they could find a partner and discuss the question. Most of them had no idea what I was talking about when referring to literary devices used to make comparisons, figurative language such as similes and metaphors. At least one teacher indicated that metaphor was the same word in Russian, but the puzzled look on her colleagues’ faces told me they weren’t used to talking about it or using it in the classroom. I had to help many of them find their partners by matching such similes as “black as the night”, “tight as a drum”, and “sly as a fox”.

After much dead time where teachers just looked at each other, one of them told they didn’t have unsuccessful lessons because their lessons were conducted in Tajik and everything was explained in the L1 language. Only one teacher said she had assigned the comparative/superlative lesson for homework and her students hadn’t been able to use the language successfully in the practice. I told her I’d demonstrate an active way of doing so later on in the day. We had a matching activity using more similes and then the dictionaries came out en masse as teachers didn’t even know such words at “stubborn”. Zhulejo admitted that vocabulary was a prime area of concern with these teachers as they themselves had a pretty low level of word knowledge and it was one area of study not included in their curriculum at the Pedagogical Institute. I related to her that a teachers’ college purpose was not to teach English but the appropriate methodology to do so and that such college should only admit students who were already proficient in the language in question.

I did an activity to review prepositions of place along with the use of there is/ there are by drawing a diagram of my own living room and asking the teachers to describe the relationship of all the objects placed therein. As a way of having students show their proficiency in the use of these grammatical items, I had the teachers turned their chairs so they were sitting back-to-back, and asked them to draw a diagram of their own bedroom without showing their picture to their partner and to describe the finished picture so their partner could recreate the drawing. They couldn’t understand why they had to sit back-to-back, why they couldn’t show their drawing, why they shouldn’t just do it for them and so on.  It was palpable how uncomfortable they felt performing the activity themselves and I just can’t see them trying to carry it out in their own classrooms.

Sanifah, the one teacher with the highest level of fluency and whom I threatened to expel from the classroom for her insistence on providing answers out of turn, brought in sambusas and other goodies for Caroline and I. So very nice of her.

I demonstrated how to get students to play with adjectives in the comparative and superlative by writing a list of adjectives on the blackboard, or by providing pieces of paper with adjectives written on them, and have the teacher start out by making the following request:

“Sanifah, would you please come and stand next to me because you are younger than me.” The teacher goes back to her seat and the student then calls on somebody else using a different adjective and so on. Later on, the same is repeated, but using the adjectives in the superlative. How did this go? Well, many of the younger teachers do not know the rules for forming either comparatives or superlatives and just stammered repeatedly while trying to form a sentence. Pitiful to say the least.

I returned to the lamination place for more cards and then got a call from Takhmina asking me to postpone the class until 2:30pm. I declined as I’d have nothing to do in town for two hours and suggested making it the next day. She agreed and I let Rebecca know I’d pick my package tomorrow when Caroline would be at the American Councils and we could have lunch together. I need to find out how the negotiations are going with the landlady and whether she’ll be able to stay there for the remaining of January.

Elbek came for his lessons and seems to have quite a good grasp of basic vocabulary, but his spelling is strictly phonetic.