"Mismatches are unavoidable. They are a part of the practice of everyday teaching. Even highly structured and meticulously planned lessons will result in perceptual mismatches of one kind or another" (Kuma p. 90). Personally, I feel that this piece of information is good to know up front as a perspective teacher because it helps eliminate the pressure of always having to be "perfect." By no means am I saying that because mismatches are inevitable one should not consider how to avoid any confusion in a lesson. Rather, I am trying to point out that these types of communication failures do happen-- no matter how prepared, experienced, or well planned out a teacher is. Even in a mainstream classroom with native speakers, mismatch situations may arise. We just have to remember that nobody is perfect, not even teachers (as shocking as that may be), and the teacher and/or student may not always communicate their thoughts or ideas clear enough for others to understand.
As a future teacher, I need to remember that these moments of language misunderstanding are going to present themselves, and that I should not be discouraged by them. In fact, as Kuma later points out, mismatches can actually be used as a learning opportunity. For example, I am a resident assistant on one of the international floors and earlier this year, I was writing a reminder message on my residents' whiteboards using the "common" phrase ASAP (meaning as soon as possible). Later that same day, I had a resident come up to me and ask, "what does ASAP mean?" It was at that moment that I realized many of my residents may not understand what the expression means. After informing my one resident of the word's significance, I then went and wrote, "= as soon as possible," next to ASAP written on the whiteboards. By adding the meaning on the whiteboards, my residents learned what ASAP means, and I recognized that I have to be careful with the terminology I use because sometimes I take advantage of my audience's language background knowledge.
I wrote about the same thing in a sense where I wanted to know if we should adapt these mismatches and teach non TESOL people these as our society moves towards a more diverse classroom. I do believe it's important to understand a student's lexicon to avoid common mismatches but as Kuma states "They are unavoidable." This makes it important for teachers to be able to identify them for when they do happen during instruction, a mismatch is turned into a meaningful instructional bit.
ReplyDeleteI like your intake on this issue of mismatches being unavoidable and how this fact takes pressure off of us to be "perfect." One of my worst fears is not being perfect, as sad as it may seem, but your blog puts me more at ease. I can definitely see how mismatches can actually be used as a learning opportunity. Your ASAP situation was excellent example of a mismatch from one language to a next. Just yesterday, I was confused about an English word that my teacher used during class-a REAM of paper. Through my questioning, everyone who was confused around me learned another word for a huge packet of white printer paper :).
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