Ballagan 1

Mandeep Ballagan
Dr. Gonzalez
C&T 491
15 June 2016
Narrative Part 1

English as an International Language (EIL) is becoming more and more prominent as the
influx of English speakers keeps rising and the demands of English speakers also keeps rising.
Marianne Celce-Muria states that there are three domains of speakers in her article Teaching
English in the Context of World Englishes. The first domain is the inner circle and that consists
of people who speak English as their native language. Examples of countries where they have
English speakers that are classified in the first domain is the United States, England, and
Australia. There is also another domain called the outer circle which are countries that have had
English in their country for a long time because of British colonization. An example of a country
where they have English speakers that are classified in the outer circle domain is India. The last
domain is calling the expanding circle and English is the main foreign language that is spoken in
that country but there it is limited. Examples of countries where they have people who speak
English in this particular domain are Korea and China.
It is important to note that World Englishes are basically a different version of English
that is spoken depending on where one is. There is not one right way to teach language and there
are a couple different approaches to teaching language. One really important approach that was
mentioned in chapter 29 is learning through doing. The best way a student can learn a foreign
language is to actually speak it and practice it rather than seeing it on text and only reading or
writing it. Another really important thing to remember, especially in the case of World Englishes

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is that there is not one English that is more correct than another type of English. Many
instructors sometimes believe that they should teach their students English that is the correct or
standard English that is spoken in America but they fail to understand that there is no correct
or standard English that is correct. The English that should be taught is the local English, the
English that people where they live already use and the English that they can use to communicate
with other English speakers where they live as well as their friends and family. An important
principle of EIL is contextualization. Make everything relatable and relevant. The English should
be contextualized to the English that they will actually use.
This is my fourth week in Korea and I have gotten to see some of these principles and
practices of EIL in real life. The very first thing that I have seen is that Korea is in fact in the
expanding circle. Especially in the school I have noticed that English is becoming more and
more prominent but if you go into the city which is a five-minute walk away not very many
people can speak English or understand English. At the school many of the students speak it very
well and that is where I can tell that English is becoming more prominent because it is being
taught in the classroom but it is still in the limited domain because it is not being spoken by
everyone.
Greg does not really teach English in one set way. He has to teach to the curriculum but
he makes a very great effort to include lots of diversity and culture that has to do with English.
One really interesting lesson that I got to observe was his music lesson and he included music
that has English in it that is from America and even from Jamaica. It showed the students that
America is not the only country that can make music in English and that other countries have just
as much of a right to sing in English and even more importantly, the lesson proved that all of the
varieties of English are just as legitimate as any other English.

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I am teaching both first and second graders and they are between 15 and 17 years old.
Katie and I decided on the theme of superheroes because we noticed that the students really love
superheroes and every time they were ever mentioned the girls would get really excited. We
really wanted to choose a topic that the girls genuinely liked and were interested in so we could
have them pay attention in class and want to actually learn. Another reason is because we see that
the girls are always so stressed out and under immense pressure because of all their high stakes
exams and rigorous courses and school schedule so we wanted the lesson to also be fun and kind
of be a get away from their other lecture based classes.
The English proficiency levels really varies from grade level to grade level, from class to
class, and from student to student. In some classes many of the students speak English very well.
In other classes they do not speak English as well. All of the students are very smart and that is
how they got into this prestigious private school so they are all working really hard to get into the
SKY universities. Most of the students are interested in learning English, many have learned in
school, but I also have spoken to many students who learned it on their own or have gone to
study abroad and picked it up there. Many of the students also go to private tutoring sessions and
Hagwon, which is a school that the students go to after school. Many of the students also want to
work abroad or work in the business industry where speaking English is vital and imperative to
ones success so they are working very hard. But there are also some students who are only
learning English so that they can do well on the high stakes exam they have to take to get into
university.
The content objectives for this unit are to describe what a superhero is/does, describe
different parts of a superhero, verbally express different parts of a superhero and what makes a
superhero, learn vocabulary specific to superheroes, be able to speak clearly and enunciate

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well, and to listen carefully so that they can understand what other people are saying. These
will lead us to focus on vocabulary, present tense, future tense, the imperative tense.
We provide comprehensible input by showing examples, by using video and picture cues,
and we also provide relevant background information that the majority of the kids already have
experience with, which is the Avengers trailer that we always start class of with for this week.
We also allow our students to express their ideas and express their creativity through the Make
Your Own Superhero worksheet activity that we do. The students elicit output by speaking and
creating their own superhero and expressing the different parts of their superhero. They will also
show output in next weeks lesson by listening and speaking the phrases and getting points for
their team every time they heard something correctly.
The way that we are going to gauge that is that Katie and I walk around during the
activity to listen to the students to see if they are actually speaking English and to see if they are
writing down things on their worksheet in English and we also walk around during the
presentations of their superheroes to see if they are speaking English and present gin English
only and seeing if their tenses and vocabulary and things like that are being spoken. During next
weeks lesson we will also be listening and walking around to see if they are actively listening to
their group member to figure out what that group member is saying.