Lower levels are hard… though I should add that when EFL classes are actually leveled, everything’s doable. If I’d known how easy I had it with my first job, where great efforts went into ensuring students were properly leveled — at least at the start — I might have hesitated to move to the Uni I went to, where students were grouped by major and you had high level and low level kids all jumbled. (It’s less of an issue where I am now, but at my last job, it was a constant nightmare. Again, out of some bizarre understanding of what “fair” means, we were forbidden to level students even when multiple sections of the same course for the same major were offered, in case someone might feel bad being in the lower-level group.)

As for age and gender, it’s funny… I’m reminded of a businessman who was in a conversation class of mine, and complained it was unfair if I graded him on the same criteria as his classmates. He said, “But they’re good at English!” I didn’t know what to say; after all, they were, and he wasn’t, and he wasn’t really trying all that hard, and didn’t seem very interested in actually becoming good at English. I finally asked him why he’d decided to take university courses with very advanced English Language majors rather than get a solid foundation for a few years in a hakwon (private language school) before attempting it. He couldn’t understand or answer the question, and when I translated it into Korean, he smiled and still couldn’t answer in English. I can only guess he figured white-man-osmosis would make him fluent faster, or that it was the piece of paper he was after. (Since even some English majors have recently claimed to me that they can get through most of their classes without using any English at all.)

And lest I seem like a gerontophobe, I had another student around his age who started out not knowing how to write an essay and several semesters later scoring what I think was an A+ for a sustainedly clear, powerful, and decisive discussion of necessary educational reforms in Korea. She improved from sheer effort, and she never pulled rank on other students for being older (as this guy sometimes tried to do) so those who knew her were quite proud of her, really.

I was teaching lower levels, and I should add, as might have been evident from my example, that the “handicap” was put in place to help level the playing field for a number of differences (gender, work and educational background) amongst students.

Cool.

Mark,

I understand. I think that’s a good solution since, anyway, especially in low-level students, preparation has been shown to be a great aid to organized and clear speaking.

But that’s as far as I would go. I have to admit that cultural differences or not, I’ve known Asians — Japanese, Korean, and Chinese alike — who’ve overcome the cultural barriers to language acquisition. The fact that they have more of them is real — I think so anyway, especially when you count educational and social experience and not just “core culture” — but at the same time, I think individuals can and should overcome those barriers if they want to learn something. The Chinese guy in my French class was shy, and quiet, but he didn’t use Chinese culture as an excuse to hide behind. He opened his mouth and pushed words out every damned class. So did two of the Japanese girls in my YMCA French class in Montreal. Sometimes they were even better than me!

Still, balancing cultural differences is hard. Hell, even my mother’s experience of Anglo culture as a Quebecois Francophone was alienating, so I can imagine the clash between a young, outgoing Mexican and an older, less-outgoing nurse from “rural” Japan.

(Or is Sapporo not considered “rural” the way everything outside Seoul is considered “rural” in Korea?)

I don’t understand the all-out department-wide things, or the uni-wide festivals so much. I find them a waste of time, energy, and resources.

I also think participation would be a harder thing to figure out in a course where students of widely different cultures are interacting. Still, there are enough outgoing students my classrooms these days that, culture or no, these tendencies can be overcome, so I’m less willing to write it off as cultural difference.

How did you deal with it? My first instinct would be pairing them in some kind of buddy system, or something, but I can imagine that totally bombing.

Participation and attendance were always sticky issues for me when I was an ESL instructor at the University of Manitoba. It was more difficult, because of conflicting cultural values. The Latin American students were usually more outgoing than the Asian students, so it was hard devising a system that took those differences into account. It’s interesting reading how you deal with it.

Wow, this semester my biggest problem is Monday classes, because of the holidays, but even so, 7 times? That’s… wow. One good thing is we don’t have an organized, professor-involved, during-the-week MT. (I think the students have one, but it’s on a weekend.)

I think I explained my answer to the latter question in my previous comment: it’s pretty rare a truly good participator doesn’t show up. The ones who participate well but don’t show up tend to be coasting on English acquired passively, ie. by living abroad for a few years as kids, and this slackness tends to shine through in their work and participation; they’re usually more lukewarm in discussions, and very often likely to blow off assignments, abandoning more motivated students to do most of the work. (And I catch them in other ways, like group peer evaluations.)

Hell, for some students, even just following class and making one comment per class meeting is a monumental effort in participation, but I cannot reward them the same as people who keep conversations going. Likewise, some people, despite missing three or four classes, are the bloody rock star of the group and I cannot really convince myself to not give them full marks when they contribute so much more in one meeting than the majority contribute in a whole semester. There are always a few people whose names I learn right away because they’re so outgoing, so eager to lead and to encourage others, and so on. I’m not saying that’s necessarily fair, but then again, even “fair” hiring processes rely on a subjective interpretation of skill, personability, and so on.

So yes, there is a certain je ne sais quoi that cannot help but factor into participation grades, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Professors are professionals, they’re hired to be professionals, so of course, you don’t just give grades to the prettiest smiles, but you also sometimes have to make subjective distinctions. In fact, I think that one of the great problems in education here is the widespread, instinctive distrust of subjective evaluations. Subjective evaluation is necessary for anything but the most basic evaluation; thus, TOEIC is a horrible test of English skill, though a rigorous test of TOEIC-test-taking ability. I’m comfortable with a certain degree of judgement-call making.

Also, I should add, I have a couple of lecture courses, in which even participation isn’t necessarily a factor. The philosophy is, if you think you can learn better alone, go for it, and good luck to you. But the discussions and lectures are not based on any text they can dig up, and their peers are unlikely to convey the full depth of discussions or lectures outside of class in a recap, so again, it tends to be harder to pull off as good grade without attending.

However, if I had a young Cory Doctorow in my Media English class, where we’ve been discussing Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown and Lawrence LEssig’s Free Culture, I’d be unlikely to crack down and insist he attend. I’d rather he was off digging into stuff deeper in the field than sitting around explaining stuff to the people who didn’t read the book.

Though the best trick is making the classes interesting and engaging enough that students willingly come. That’s a much better carrot than, “Come or you will get a bad grade,” because people who come only for the attendance grade tend not to participate much, if at all.

I have taught adults at a non-mandatory institute (and even kids, for a year and a half), but I tended to get more of the self-motivated kind. I had a reputation, after a while, of being demanding and not letting anyone sleep, and I also lucked out to get the older, high-level classes for a good chunk of my time at that school. (Often I had free talking and professors-and-fluent-housewives-maintaining-their-English type classes. Good times!) Still, I found the kids much more pliable and willing to, you know, try. Even the adults who wanted to get better didn’t want to open their mouths and make words come out in order to do so.

However, in those days, though I was expected to take attendance, I quit doing it after a few weeks, when I knew everyone’s names. Attendance didn’t factor into anything, since the class wasn’t graded, so it didn’t matter, and nobody bugged me about it, ever.

(With kids was different, of course. Don’t want some kid’s disappearance to go unnoticed for hours at a time.)

I share your frustration with the half-hearted effort matched with tremendous attention to whatever is officially deemed as “going through the motions.” However, I’m pretty sure it’s hammered into place in high school, where vast amounts of time are spent doing the most boring work possible, while evading physical punishment for the most miniscule infractions of the rules.

I also made a large number of my Korean friends (though now mostly out of touch) in that institute; one rarely makes friends among one’s university students, and one rarely should, too. But I think I’d be reluctant to teach at any institute as well.

Mark,

You’re talking high school, right? Yeah, I have fewer objections to that at high school. But universities should be beyond that sort of stuff. I have no idea whether the cleanup among Korean students (high school or university) is as conscientious as among Japanese students, though Lime says it’s similar here, from her experience in high school and university.

(She also noted that high schools had sports days, but not “festivals,” in her day; ten years ago, that is, her high school was exceptional for having such “festival days,” though they’re pretty common now.)

As for attendance and participation, it’s complex.

I’ve seen too many students who are nearly fluent or anyway very high-level who absolutely did not need to be in the room waste three hours a week mumbling baby talk to fulfill a silly requirement to consider it fair to penalize them for not coming — as long as we’ve made an arrangement and maybe they do a different project in lieu of the course.

At the same time, it’s very rare that someone who participates actively misses 25% of the classes. Actually, at 25% you flunk out. And the only people who miss that many classes tend to be the ones who are cruising for a D or an F anyway.

So, as I tell my students at the beginning of semester, attendance does factor into participation; it’s very hard to convince me you deserve an A+ in my class, or even a B+, if you’re missing classes left and right, and in huge classes that’s just begging to be dropped down the wrong side of the require grading curve, but it is technically possible for someone to wow me enough on participation when they do show up, to make up for missing classes.

But (perhaps because roll call is so common here) most decent students equate attendance with effort anyway, and it’s very rare that a good participator fails to show up regularly. It’s happened once in the last 5 semesters.

(Excluding illnesses or deaths in the family, of course. I’ve had two students whose fathers died of cancer, and one whose mother died of the same, I think, and they were all back in class within a couple of weeks and trying their asses off and indeed outperforming others. Illness is a little more tricky…)

As for attendance, I agree it’s a bad system that requires top students to take a class waaaaaay below their level. BUT , IF those top students participate then their just being in class (English conversation classes) greatly benefit other students. For English conversation classes participation is essential; it should be a big chunk of the final grade. How can you honestly give participation points to students who don’t attend class?

Wouldn’t attendance factor into classroom participation? I know you can have perfect attendance and not participate, but why give a good grade to someone who participates but misses 25% of your classes?

Having met my wife and almost all of my adult Korean friends at institutes, then I’m definitely jealous of and miss the social aspects of teaching adults sometimes, but I may well be too frustrated with the majority of adult students to put up with them now! Sheesh, the numbers of university students that were kicked out of bed with a hangover by their (paying) parents and proceeded to sleep in class, or the number that attended 2- hour long, five day a week conversation classes but who appeared hostile to the very idea that I expected them to speak in them, and indeed even complained about it to my boss. Were it not for my tenuous job situation back at my last adult institute job in 2004, I would have screamed at students like that and walked out of sooo many classes.

Unfortunately, these habits continue into their working life, so while you’d expect that the (often) self-paying students at company classes would be more motivated, especially as it meant that (even if they were freely provided by the company) they were coming to work at, say, 7:30am instead of 9, but still the vast majority turned spoke Korean all the time that they were there. For those reasons, I’m not sure I’d tolerate a company teaching job again either!

It’s a common refrain of long-timers here that one of Koreans’ biggest problems is their willingness to only through the motions of so many aspects of their lives, and will not invest the real time and activity required to qualitatively change themselves or negative aspects of their society. Hence I link mandatory attendance at universities to going to but half-heartedly exercising at the gym, periodic crackdowns against prostitution which only serve to displace it, or me being the white face at my children’s institute to show off to parents but only meeting my students once a week…and so on. But as I read your post, now I think that this is all really learned and ingrained at university.

Seriously.

(At this point I would post a rant or something, but I am so out of energy at the moment that I am collapsing to the floor as I type this…)