Rubric for Final Presentations

Your final presentations will be judged on Performance and Content

Performance -- 15 points
The performance component of your grade will consider your use of language, your ability to express ideas clearly, and your ability to present an engaging and lively speech to your classmates. Your performance score will be broken down into two categories:

Enunciation: 10 points
Is the speaker's voice clear? Does she or he speak at an appropriate volume? Are there aspects of the speech that are inaudible or unclear? Does the speaker use appropriate language (complex but comprehensible vocabulary)? Are there structural or grammatical issues that make the speech difficult to understand?

Engagement: 5 points
How well does the speaker engage with the audience? Is there sufficient eye contact? Is the speech natural and unscripted?

Content -- 15 points
The content portion of your grade addresses the quality of your research and the ideas you are presenting to the class.

Clear explanation of an issue: 10 points
Does the speaker clearly explain the purpose of the speech? Is it clear how your portion of the speech relates to the inquiry project as a whole? Is the argument or explanation logical and is it easy to follow the logic? Are the claims reasonable?

Relevance: 5 points
Does the speaker convince the audience that this is a meaningful topic worth discussing? Is there a clear goal or purpose for this inquiry project?

Survey Website

The survey website can be found at http://www.ask500people.com/
Please create an account and ask at least one question related to your issue

Suggestions for your speech

You will be utilizing your blog as the background and the structure of your final speech. You should consider the following points when constructing your talk:

1) Introduce your topic - try to capture your audience's attention immediately. Explain why you selected this topic, why it's important, and why we should care. No one wants to see a speech that is not important or useful. So your job in the introduction is to prove to us that your speech is worth our time.

2) Explain your issue - use examples and clear descriptions to show us that this is a relevant issue worth exploring. Clearly express the social tension or problem you are addressing with your speech.

3) Describe your sources - where did you find information on your issue? What kinds of websites did you use? Was the information from various websites considerably different? Why did you choose the use these sites as data sources?

4) Share some of the comments and quotes you found in your data - What categories did you form and what different points of view did you find? You may want to show any websites, headlines, or (short) video clips that you used as data sources. Make sure you give clear examples of data from each category so your audience has a clear understanding of why you have organized your data in such a way.

5) Share the results of your survey questions - are these answers interesting? Did you expect these kinds of responses? What do these results say about the issue? What inferences can you make based on the responses?

6) Give a brief summary or conclusion - Summarize your work briefly so everyone understands your main point. What have you learned from this? What should we learn from your speech? What new questions do you have about this issue?

Assignment #3- Gathering and Analyzing Evidence

Find news articles, video clips, or personal websites that present a story that is related to the issue you developed last week and post them to your blog.

Select various viewers' comments related to the article or clip.

Analyze these comments:
Develop 2 to 3 categories for these comments. Do not decide your categories before analyzing the comments... let the categories emerge from the comments!

Paste 2 to 3 comments from each category to your blog and describe them.

Views of Native and Non-native English teachers

This video offers a satire of attitudes toward English in a Korean university. It shows several clips from popular movies and juxaposes them with personal interviews with Korean students.

A video on teaching English

This comment seems to indirectly support the view that the spread of English is a neutral political phenomenon and that learning English is a necessary undertaking that inevitably leads to greater opportunities. While that might seem like common sense in some respects, I think this completely misses the more subtle cultural effects of English as a world language.

Assignment 2

For the second task of your inquiry projects, I would like you to expand your topic into an issue. By that, I mean that I would like you to find some problem, questions, tension, or argument that is related to the topic you have addressed in your first blog post.

In order to do this, you will need to do some background research utilizing a number of web sources, including:
Online news sources
Video clips
Blogs and personal websites
Comments sections of various websites

Next I would like you to post two photos, creating a juxtapostion that shows the tension or the question that you intend to investigate.

Finally, briefly explain your issue. Tell us what the tension or problem is, why you are investigating it, and why it is a potentially important issue.

Juxtapositions

One of the primary goals of standardized testing has been to give everyone an equal opportunity to succeed in school. While that's a wonderful goal, it must be noted that zip code is still the most accurate way to predict academic success. Why is this? There are plenty of explanations (or attempts at explanations).... and I'm not going to go into these in any detail here. Instead, I'd like to consider they way that our general approach to education that relies on standard knowledge, standard assessment, and increasingly standard teaching methods (both in the U.S. and Korea) might be turning English into something it isn't... a set of patterns and forms that can be divided into an ordered curriculum. I wonder if these structural issues have anything to do with the resistance to English among some Korean students and high levels of English success among others.

Here's a website that discusses the achievement gap in the U.S.

Tuesday Projects

Please leave a comment beneath this post with your topic and your URL

Monday Topics

In the comments section, please paste the URL to your group project

English Education

I've been in education for over ten years now (that makes me feel old). During that time I've come across a lot of different students with a lot of different needs, desires, and goals. I've also worked in a lot of different settings. I've found that particular students and the teaching/learning settings where I meet them have forced me to constantly rethink my approach to teaching. I have a habit of trying to reinvent the wheel with every course.
One of the primary reasons I do this is that I can't stand the feeling that what I am teaching is irrelevant and I hate to think that I'm just another person with just another set of rules and expectations for my students to negotiate on route to someplace else. The picture to the left was taken in one of my classes a couple of years ago. My initial question is, how can this be avoided? Is it necessary to turn language into a 'subject' in order to educate? Is is possible to make classroom language relevant? I haven't found the secret, but I'm still looking.

Inquiry Project

Your first tasks are pretty simple.
- Make a small group (2 to 3 people)
- Choose a topic of interest that you want to know more about
- Sign up for a blogger account (one for the group)
- Select a template
- Post a picture and a caption that briefly introduces your topic