This week, as every week, has provided me more ideas which I will definitely use in my current classes and the ones coming later on.
I have found myself very concerned with the silence we
teachers should take into account in class so that learners become more vocal
and this has happened to me especially in my larger class, which is not the
class I am using for my project.
This
particular class is a pre-intermediate class and despite the fact that we are
skipping some topics from the text, we have to basically teach four different
grammar structures plus the listening, reading, vocabulary and writing activities
linked to them in a range of four to six days. I usually try to integrate skills
so that speaking is not neglected, but this week I particularly given them the
time and chance to speak more.
I have to confess that I have also given them more
time to think before I check answers and this probably has been due to another
idea stuck on my mind: ‘Each
period of Learning is followed by a period of reflection which is conducted in
silence.’
Time is
really important in an intensive course and I sometimes do not give my students
enough time to solve a task and help them in a way so that they could finish
faster, but again there was another idea going around my mind this week: ‘Do
not make things too easy for the learners, this way they will not use their own
learning resources’. I especially remember having this idea in mind while
working on a reading activity we were working on.
The class I
am working my project with is upper –intermediate and here things are
different, students speak more and it is our job as teachers to just make up
activities so that they could produce language. We also have to rush but a bit less
since we just have to deal with just three grammar topics linked to lots of
vocabulary.
It is in
this class where I have applied think
pair share when they had to think about a new shampoo for men, which involved thinking about a name, shape,
colour, target market, where to advertise and where to sell the shampoo.
I have also
used in this class the technique of paraphrasing.
Finally I
want to share how exciting has been to me two things this week:
1. Learning new things about interactive
power point. The power point I have prepared for the task required, it is
something I am going to apply in my classes any way.
2. Starting the project, I was so
anxious about it, speculating about any difficulty I might encounter not only with the technology , but also the students' response to it.
Dear Belinda,
ReplyDeleteI have read your reflection with great interest. (As always :-) )
Although all four skills are important, I think, speaking is the one that has to be practised the most on the lessons. Reading, writing even listening can be done alone at home. You can read a text, write a letter or essay or anything else when you are alone. Not to mention watching a film in a foreign language or just using some recordings either on CDs or from the Internet. But what about speaking? As for me I never practised speaking without a partner. As a learner I sometimes had to memorise texts as homework but even then I did it silently. So where else if not during the lessons should learners practise speaking? I am very much for communicative language teaching. I know that sometimes my students are quite loud and passing the door of the classroom you can hear a lot of noise from inside but I think that’s normal. I believe in the effectiveness of pair- and group work when the students USE the language for purpose.
Best regards,
Linda, Hungary
Thanks for reading me!!
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