What's that?

SITUATION: The students had just finished taking a break and the teacher had sat down ready to listen to the start of the English class. One of the students was swinging a kendo stick, but noticing that the class was about to start was putting it back against the wall behind where the teacher was sitting. The teacher was curious as to what the stick was and so asked:


T: Oh, what's that? The teacher was asking about the kendo sword that the student was holding.

S: Oh, home run. This is just a one word answer that doesn't really explain anything.

T: Oh, really?

Me: Come on [student's name], what is it? Here I tried to get the student to explain about "kendo." Since the student wasn't that forthcoming I decided to throw the question out to the whole class with some prompts from me.

Class together: Kendo is a traditional Japanese sport that uses bamboo. A very long time ago people used this. It is used for practise only. We use it for baseball.

T: It reminds me of the Maori fights that they do with their sticks too. We can see here that the teacher is now giving some knowledge to add to what the class said. This is where the conversation really starts to take shape about a certain aspect, i.e., kendo. I then drew a diagram on the board showing that the students have knowledge from their background and people in NZ have knowledge from their background. When the two pieces of knowledge intersect then there is a conversation where both parties can share and expand upon - as happened in the conversation above.

I was really pleased that this conversation took place - it happened by pure coincidence in a very natural way. The conversation illustrated that even though the students have been practising such responses to questions just like this, they still revert to missing the opportunity to converse by simply giving a one-answer response (which wasn't even understood by the teacher). I intend to use this type of situational question to remind the students on how they should be trying to respond.