Group B–Teaching Lesson Plan: Taiki, Danbee, Mavis, Allison
1. Language barrier is an issue that originally bloomed when immigration became popular. This topic is extremely important because we live in a city with the highest diversity percentage in the whole world. Unfortunately, the high percentage of diversity casts a problem—language barrier. This barrier causes miscommunication which can sometimes lead to unwanted altercations. In our interviews we want to establish a solution that will allow people with language barriers to communicate better.
2. We hope to attract attention from Asian Americans in bubble tea stores. We believe a face to face conversation is the best way to understand a persons emotions and attitude
3. We believe the most logical way to communicate with strangers is to have a normal conversation. Although it is an important topic we don’t want to get into a heated debate because we don’t know how well that will end
4. We will need a camera recorder to film the conversation. We will also need a set of questions prepared.
5. We will begin by giving a brief summary of the book assigned to us. Then we will share our personal experiences of language barrier and we will follow this by asking them if they would like to share any personal experiences. From this we will transition into how we can alleviate this issue.
6. We believe that if the audience can answer the questions (we are going to prepare for them) sufficiently then it is a sure sign that they understand
So right now your objective is not so much to teach but to create a forum for other Asian American’s to discuss their feelings and experiences around the issue of language barriers. Is that right?
I think creating these kind of forums is a good and important thing. What I want is to see if you incorporate a specific learning goal into your forum. For example:
perhaps your group believes that literature like American Born Chinese that deals with issues of assimilation and language barriers helps people create these forums and helps inspire change, SO part of your goals for your forum is to make your audience aware (teach them about the existence of) other such books. This would mean you need to make a reading list of literature and other texts (i.e. movies, websites) that could be a resource for starting a discussion around the issue of language barriers. Your list of course would include all the accurate bibliographic citation information.
OR perhaps you are interested in making your audience aware about how books like American Born Chinese should be in middle school English class as a way to both educate people ignorant about ways they may perpetuate the problems of language barriers and to encourage those students who are experiencing such difficulties. Your teaching goal might be about making your audience aware of the facts and statistics about language barriers in public schools in New York and how the core curriculum could do more to at least reflect the existence of this problem if not help shape it. In this case you would present on the book, have a forum about people’s shared feelings based on thinking about the book, and then you would teach about the state of language barriers in NYC public schools, and teach how your audience could advocate for inclusion of books like ABC in the curriculum. In which case maybe your forum wants to get people talking about their own feelings and experiences as a way to motivate them to act.
Do you see how I’m adding possible teaching component to your forum objective? You only need one teaching goal, but you do have to have a teaching goal.