WEBVTT

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>> We don't know what you're talking about.

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>> Students may not know what you're
talking about if they don't follow the news.

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Other problems?

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Elena?

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>> Too many questions at once.

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In the beginning you kind of
one, two, three, four questions

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and it's hard to know where to start.

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>> Okay. And that's also, that's probably
because I'm not getting any response,

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I'm just kind of asking you more and more
questions, so I'm getting panicked up here.

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Okay. What else?

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Veronica?

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>> The way that the questions are made, 
you're already giving an opinion

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so you have to already decide whether
they agree with professor or not.

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And that could be a little bit too much.

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>> Yes. If there were Israelis and Palestinians
in the classroom, they might have a problem

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with the way I am structuring these questions.

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Because the questions may have
some presupposition and, invade,

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I mean all the words are loaded, right?

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So that's problematic.

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Anything else?

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>> [inaudible].

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>> Excuse me?

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>> There's no support or help.

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>> Yeah. This is, what is this?

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This is a teacher asking a general
open-ended discussion question.

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Let's have a discussion question and there
are a lot of activities that are like this.

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Now that you've done this chapter, we're
going to discuss university system in Germany.

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So what do you think about the
differences between America and Germany?

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Silence. Okay.

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This isn't a task, okay.

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So discussion questions don't
work generally at this, huh?

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>> This seems like it has, what's
the goal of this, like what are you,

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what words are you trying to get out
and what is the identified desired outcome.

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>> So okay right.

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So what do you think the teacher's, what is
the goal, do you think, in the teacher's mind?

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What's the goal here?

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>> To have a conversation.

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>> To have a conversation.

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But this is not a conversation and discussion
can only work under certain contexts

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and it doesn't work in beginning
language classes like this.

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Yes? Laura?

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>> I think in this situation we have, I
mean I don't know when this would happen

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in the lessons, but the students may have just
been bombarded with these questions instead

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of the teacher first saying
what's going on in Gaza.

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Instead of kind of leading into the discussion,
it's just kind of throwing them right in there

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and expect them to start interacting immediately.

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>> That's right.

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>> Which, with four questions
right off the bat, does overwhelm them.

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>> Right so they, they're
maybe not well prepared.

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They may not be linguistically prepared
or cognitively prepared to handle this,

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they don't have the background information.

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There's another really big
problem I think about this.

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I alluded to it earlier about the
kind of, like having...

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The topic. Right?

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>> It's too hot.

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>> It's too hot, okay.

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Or it's a very problematic topic. And we are 
talking about group activities or interaction.