#KELTChat Slowburn: “Just who are my students anyway?” 24th March 2015, 11am-7pm (KST)

Tuesday sees the return of longer form #keltchats for this season, with a slightly different timespan: 11 am to 7 pm. Slowburn™ chats are designed for people to drop in and out of the chat, and to allow topics to be developed in a little more depth than our one hour chats. You are not obliged or even expected to participate for the full eight hours.

The title of this chat is, “Just who are my students anyway?” We hope that the topic will encourage teachers to think more deeply about the people who step into their classrooms, and take away positive insights to help them with their teaching. We think it might also be fun to compare the impressions that teachers in similar contexts hold.

Some questions that we would like you to answer during the chat are:

• Where are my students from?
• What is their English learning history? How might this affect their views of English?
• What expectations do they have of teachers?
• What do they know about English? What might they want to find out?
• What is their relationship to English and English in the world?
• What do they know about themselves? What might they want to find out?
• What do they know about the world? What might they want to find out?
• Where are they going?
• What are my students afraid of?
• What common ground might I have with my students?
• Why are my students studying English? Intrinsic/extrinsic motives?
• What do my students do now?
• What activities do they like in the classroom?
• What do they like to do outside of the classroom/in their free time?
• How can I get my students to open up about themselves?

If you have never participated in a chat before but would like to start, there are some useful hints on the how-to tab above. Questions and contributions of any kind are also welcome at our Facebook page.

#KELTChat: But my students don’t speak at all in class (Sunday 8th March, 8pm)

It’s a new month and a new semester (at least here in Korea), which means that #KELTChat is back this Sunday at 8pm (KST) for an hour-long chat, and we want to make some noise!

The topic for the first chat of 2015 is “But my students don’t speak at all in class!” It’s a situation that many teachers have probably faced in their career. You go into the class with the best intentions but no matter what you do, your students just don’t want to speak. This might just be a one-off occurrence with a single class, but other times it is a more persistent problem with a particular group of students.

The focus of this week’s chat will be on what you can do in those situations. Some questions you may like to think about before, during and after are:

• What is causing the students to remain silent?
• Does this happen across all age groups/levels or is it just a particular group?
• Are there particular times of the day, month, semester when this happens more often?
• What other factors (outside of the classroom/studying a language) might be causing students to be quiet?
• What have you done in the past to encourage your students to speak more?
• What success stories have you had encouraging students to speak in class?
• How important is it for students to actually speak in class?
• Should we be forcing students to speak if they really don’t want to?
• What activities/type of activities have you found prompt the students to speak the most?
• What type of interaction patterns are most effective for encouraging more student talk? Dyads? Groups? Class Discussions?

Perhaps another tangent that the chat might like to take is how to encourage more speaking in traditionally quieter, heads-down activities.

#KELTChat welcomes anyone and everyone to take part, whether you’re in Korea or not.

Topic: #KELTChat: But my students don’t speak at all in class!
When: Sunday 8th March at 8pm (KST) Check your local time here
Where: Twitter

See you all there.