Abstract
No lesson is successful unless the students “get it.” To find out whether students are "getting" the material, teachers need to monitor their students’ comprehension. Unfortunately, questions like "Do you understand?" rarely reveal how much students have understood. A comprehension check is unsuccessful when students do not respond or pretend to understand. Likewise, the comprehension check fails when the teacher overestimates the ability of the class because of a few responsive students or does not follow up by helping the students who do not understand. This workshop will demonstrate six comprehension checking techniques: eliciting L1 translation, requiring a physical response, grading the difficulty of comprehension questions, monitoring written work, using pairwork, and cold call. Teachers can effectively check comprehension of even the lowest level students by eliciting either L1 translation or a physical response because these techniques do not require the students to respond in English. The teacher can support English responses to comprehension check questions by using yes/no and either/or questions effectively. Since questions addressed to the class as a whole do not help teachers find out which students are struggling, teachers may gauge individual students’ progress by monitoring written work or pairwork or by using cold call, which is directing oral questions to specific students. Workshop participants will practice generating and evaluating comprehension checks.
Biographical Sketch
Heidi Vande Voort Nam teaches in the Department of English Education at Chongshin University, where she prepares English education majors for student teaching and for the national English teachers’ exam. Within KOTESOL, Heidi serves as a presenter for Korea Teacher Trainers (KTT) and facilitates KOTESOL’s Christian Teachers Special Interest Group (CT SIG), a group that hosts meetings and online discussions for Christian English teachers. Heidi holds an MA TESL/TEFL from the University of Birmingham. She lives in Seoul with her husband TaekHyeon Nam, who is a public high school English teacher, and their children, Joseph and Miriam.
