On top of my regular 22 curriculum and afterschool classes, I've been asked to teach 2 "Textbook Memoriziation" classes per week for the 3rd and 4th grades. The idea is that students will use the class time to memorize dialogues from a 충남 textbook. The book itself is just a series of 3-5 line dialogues, along with their Korean translations, and 3 or 4 vocabulary words per dialogue. The dialogues closely match what they learn in regular curriculum classes. "Is this your pencil. No, mine is red..." That kind of stuff. Students just need to show that they can recite the dialogues from memory in their entirety. The class is appearantly in response to an initiative that started in 충남 two years ago that emphasized memorization of all textbook language as the key to English success (there's a post about it floating around on these forums).
I respect the utility of memorization for many things in language acquisition, but i find memorizing dialogues in this manner, largely divorced from context or meaning, and with no attempt to break down the language so that students can understand how to adapt it to new situations, to be mostly pointless.
On the flip side, I have very little time to plan for these additional classes. Does anyone has ideas about how to adapt this class to something more constructive without adding a lot of lesson planning time?
