I would like to start my blog by putting my
thoughts about my microteaching on paper.
I felt that it went better than I had
expected. However, my classmates could not exactly portray my students’
proficiency levels. They were very participating and long-answering, which in
reality my students are not. Their participation is increasing. However, they
are not able to produce long or complex utterances at this time.
As I had already taught this preview in class
and in fact I was re-teaching to my classmates, it was nice to have a second
chance. I was able to correct some problems I had experienced. For example, I
had practiced greeting in pairs instead of choral repetition, which had originally
taken place. in addition, when I first taught the preview in class, although I
had asked students to nominate others to follow, I had not asked them to pose
the question, which after the fact I had realized and changed for re-teaching
last Saturday.
After watching the video, I realized that I
took a real long time with the greeting. The reason why I had to explain why
there was a need to greet at the beginning of class and why “Good afternoon”
was an appropriate greeting was that until teaching my preview I had not
officially practiced this in my class and hence, on that day, I had made a point to
explain to students thoroughly why this change suddenly after four weeks. For
re-teaching then, I kept this part intact, which made me feel afterwards that
perhaps my classmates thought I was a little strange.
Lastly, I would have loved to see myself
smile more. I will be watching out for this very closely.
Now, I would like to talk about my class
yesterday…
Upon realizing that greeting in pairs would
depict a more real-life situation, we started with that followed by an
ice-breaker. I had planned to talk about K-pop Star as it is nearing to an end
and is a very popular show among Koreans. I did not know and did not anticipate,
however, that my students had no time to watch this show (or any TV for that
matter) lately. I had printed out pictures of the top 3 contestants, whom they
did know. Luckily, they had watched this show at least once and they knew what
it was about, the judges, etc. I kept it short and sweet, and moved on to assign
their homework. However, I was able to bring up the difference between who one
thinks will win versus who one wishes to see win a competition.
With the homework I assigned, I will be able
to recycle the Target Language Content from last week’s class (preview) as it will enable them to keep working with
the newly-learnt vocabulary as well as obtain information online by using
Google. I was initially planning to have them individually work on it. However,
I changed it to a group activity instead and they will be completing it in a
group of three. I am realizing that they need more pair and group work
activities to develop skills, which will be important for them later in the
professional world. Given that they do not know how to work in pairs and
groups, I believe that they do not get to do much of these at school or private
institutes. Group work offers additional benefits to students compared to
working individually including having an opportunity to discuss and explain
concepts/words/phrases to one another, which would help to refine their
understanding as well as helping to break assignments/tasks into steps, which
would help to complete more complex tasks than they could on their own. Moreover,
I changed the due date for this assignment to April 20th as they
will be having exams all week this week and I did not want to add more stress
to this very stressful week already. They will be preparing a country profile
for Korea similar to that for France, which we went through in class. I instructed
them to include basic information on Korea’s climate, cuisine including staple
foods, currency, official language, sub-division of land (provinces, etc.),
surface area, population, capital city and other major cities, neighboring
countries and surrounding bodies of water. They can include other information
above and beyond these categories. On April 20th, the two groups
will be sharing what they have prepared in class. I will ask both groups questions
as well as allow students from the other group to ask the presenting group questions
for comprehension check. I emailed them France’s country profile to keep as a
reference and I will be available to answer any questions they may have via
email or text messaging.
Next I did a warm-up for the lesson topic to
activate their schemata in preparation for learning new information. The topic
was imperatives. It was self-selected by the students (I had suggested three
topics to them via email to choose from). For my warm-up, I asked two students
to volunteer to come up to the front. After much encouragement, one of my
high-level students half raised his hand. I took that as a yes... He then
persuaded (or shall we say forced??) to bring the student who was sitting next
to him along. I gave them two to three imperatives each to follow (e.g.: sit
down on the floor, touch your chin, take off your glasses, etc.). Then I
invited the other students to give them some imperatives as well. They took
this opportunity to even ask one student to dance lightly. They had a ball with
it. Little did they know that I would be next asking them to come up to the
front. This time, after me, the other two students gave some imperatives and it
was revenge time (two of my students could not attend the class yesterday hence
there was a total of four students). The student who had been asked to dance
asked back to this student to sing a song. Boy, we had a good time!!
After the warm-up, to get them to work with
the concept, I passed out two worksheets that I had put together. After working
through the worksheets in pairs, we went over them altogether where I offered
corrective feedback as necessary and suggested alternative ways to answer,
where appropriate. Afterwards, I summarized the uses of imperatives with one or
two quick examples (to give a direct order, to give instructions, etc.). I
mentioned how we could be more polite while still giving orders by using the
magic word “please”. In fact, one of my high-level students had guessed it before
I had told them, which made me very happy. Lastly, we talked about positive and
negative forms of imperatives. During these activities, I was surprised to see
them use certain words, which I had no idea that they knew. For example, in one
of the worksheets, they were provided with some signs (like public signs) and
they had to write down what wording would go with each sign. There was one
which meant to indicate that pets were not allowed. It was a picture of a dog
on the sign and yet they knew the words “pet” and “allow”. I had expected their
answers to be something like no dogs, don’t bring dogs, etc.
While they were working on the worksheets, for
the first time, two students asked me questions. This was one of the highlights
of the class. One student asked what bin meant and another student (one of my quiet
students) asked me to tell him the meaning of cheat as well as the correct
spelling for “quiet”.
I wish to end my blog by mentioning something
rather surprising. I found out yesterday that they did not really know what it
meant to work on a worksheet in pairs. Even after I had clearly matched each
with another student, I realized that they started writing answers on their own
worksheet from the get-go and there was absolutely no discussion happening. So,
I intervened smoothly and explained to them that they should work on the
worksheet together and, if they wished, they could just write the answers
together on the same piece of paper. Although they improved afterwards, I have
to keep guiding them to really work in pairs in the true sense. I guess we
never really know what we may end up teaching in our language classrooms…
No comments:
Post a Comment