close encounters of the Smoo kind

You may recall that I was host to a grad student, JY, whose master's thesis was about communication breakdowns in the EFL/ESL classroom, and the "negotiation strategies" in which teachers and students engage in order to repair said breakdowns. She sat in on two of my classes for about a month, quietly collecting her data, occasionally interviewing the students, and having long talks with yours truly during my two-hour break between morning and afternoon classes.

JY is long gone, but I wish she'd been there this past Tuesday: she would have had a field day with the communication breakdown that occurred in my 9AM Level 1 conversation class.

The task I'd given my students was routine: Get into pairs, select a movie genre, then write a brief dialogue in the spirit of that genre. Practice the dialogue a bit, then perform it in front of the class as a skit. The other students would have to guess what genre the "movie" was. Such exercises are usually good for a few laughs, as long as you've got motivated students.

My 9AM class had five people that day. Three immediately set themselves to the task. They decided on a genre within two minutes, then spent the next ten or fifteen minutes hammering out a dialogue and beginning to rehearse.

The two remaining students put their heads together, and at first I thought they were simply brainstorming. Around the five-minute mark, I lumber-waddled over to them and asked what they were doing, because it had become obvious that they were not on task.

Neither student could put together a decent sentence to explain what they were up to. One student, a lady in her late 30s, is new to the class. The other student is a frequent class-skipper who rarely has a clue. In hindsight, I can say that I should have grouped them all differently, pairing the clueless with the clued-in.

It turned out that the two students had indeed been brainstorming, but they had set themselves an enormous task that had nothing to do with what I'd asked for. Instead of writing a script, they had been listing the characteristics of various genres. After five minutes, they had exhaustively described horror and action movies. It was an impressive job, but it showed a complete misunderstanding of what they'd been asked to do.

So I explained the task again to my students, more slowly, going word by word over the directions printed on the activity sheet in front of them. I paused often, in order to ask whether they understood what various words meant. I received many nods and much blinking in response. Satisfied that I had done my job, I lumber-waddled to the group of three to see how they were progressing.

At the ten-minute mark, I saw that my clueless pair had simply resumed their previous effort: they were back to listing movie genre characteristics (romantic comedy had made the list... it seems to be almost every Korean woman's favorite genre; I'll have to check with the gringas who read my blog about whether they, too, are in thrall to movies like "Hitch" and "The Breakup").

A less charitable teacher might assume that something malicious was going on here: after all, I had very carefully explained, in what I had thought was clear language, what needed to be done. But this seemingly deliberate effort to ignore what I'd asked my students to do wasn't a sign of stubbornness: it was, more likely, a sign of deep, deep incomprehension. At about this point, I began to suspect that the new student needed to be shunted to a lower level class, and my frequent skipper needed either to attend my class more often, or move down a level as well.

I admit I was feeling a bit frustrated. I told my students that this was not-- NOT-- what I had asked them to do. They blinked in confusion and said nothing. I then said, "OK, just stop. Watch the other group." By that point, the other group had already rehearsed a couple times, and they were ready to go.

So I asked the good group to go ahead. Their skit involved a mother, a daughter (played by the only guy in the group), and a houseguest of indeterminate sex. The mother, a creepy lady, let the houseguest in and eerily introduced him/her to the large "girl" sitting primly in a chair. "Say hi to my cute daughter!" the mother commanded the guest. Greetings were exchanged, then the mother said, "OK, I have to go shopping now! See you soon!"-- and she left the scene. Not long after, the "daughter" got an evil gleam in her eye, yanked a dagger out from underneath her lap (a folded piece of paper served as the knife), and stabbed the houseguest to death. The mother rushed back in, saw the body on the ground, and screamed, "Oh! Well done, my cute and wonderful daughter!"

As plays go, that one was not about to win any Pulitzers, but it sure as hell suggested a movie genre. So I asked my two clueless students: "What genre was that?" "Horror!" they replied. (As it turned out, most of my classes chose to do horror skits; horror is one of the easiest genres to portray if you're pressed for time.)

I then asked my two clueless students: "You see now what you were supposed to do?" I had a smile on my face and tried to make the whole thing into a big joke, but I also wanted to be sure they got the message. To ram the point home, I went over the instructions with them again, and to my delight they could finally see what the instructions were saying.

I don't know the technical term for this type of incomprehension, but I think all language learners experience it in some form or other. As a Korean learner, I recall being confused by the Korean expression "eoddeokgae o-shyeosseoyo?" The expression, if translated absolutely literally, means "How did you come?" But that's not what the question really means. It's not asking "By what means did you arrive?"; it's asking "Why are you here?" The first few times I answered that question, I said something like, "I walked here," or "I came by taxi," much to the amusement of my interlocutors.

Knowing the literal meaning of every part of an utterance or piece of text is no guarantee that you'll understand the utterance's or text's gestalt meaning. I suspect that my students did, in fact, understand every word of the instructions printed on the activity sheet. But they were unable to seize the thrust of those instructions, and therefore could not visualize what task was being asked of them.

The performance of the skit by the clued-in students probably provided an "Aha!" moment for my clueless pair. Suddenly, all the words on the page became clear. Here's hoping that, the next time I give my students an activity, my clueless students pick up on the exercise a bit faster than they did on Tuesday.


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