Lesson1 was finished (9/6-9/10)
| This week, lesson one was finished.
On Monday, Alice used powerpoint to test if students memorize all vocabulary in Lesson1. It was creative and interesting. Students became more involved and eager to speak out the answer loudly. Take our class 廉 for example, most of them explained the meaning after a word was projected on the screen, and they made interesting and grammatically correct sentences with certain new words assigned by Alice. I did enjoy the interaction in that class. However, I also realized that some students may feel frustrated when they could not reply to the questions as quickly as others. They may felt frustrated. Besides, in another class, students were not as active as those in class 廉. I found that only certain students kept answering Alice's questions and Alice didn't ask them to creat sentences by certain words in the very end. Therefore, I kept considering if there's any possivle solution to encourage all students to open their mouth, however, I haven't reached the conclusion and still need more observation. As to the Reading in textbook, instead of introducing the paragraphs line by line, Alice played the CD first. Students were instructed to close their books and answer basic questions according to what they listened. To my surprise, they had no difficulties in answering all questions. Perhaps that was because they previewed those paragraphs the night before, but that was still a good start! After they understood the main topic of those paragraphes, they looked up idioms and phrases in those paragraphs as assignment. The importance of dictionary was emphasized AGAIN, which was an important ides I completely agree with. Therefore, when students asked me questions about new words, I didn't tell them directly if I found they could easily get the answer from the dictionary. In the last part of Lesson1, the song "Don't worry, be happy" was played. At first, I thought students would be asked to fill in blanks between lyrics. But they didn't, they were instructed to listen to the main idea the composer tried to convey, and reconsider to their own situation. I think it would make students feel more relaxed and enjoy the song because when I was a student, I myself felt NERVOUS and couldn't really enjoy songs when teachers asked us to fill in the blanks. Besides, students seemd to "suffer from" the reading comprehension quiz on Thursday though still sereval ones got good grades. Therefore, the reading project will be challenging for them. I am looking forward to see their reaction to the reading project, hopefully, they'll feel it interesting! |
posted by Hedy @ 11:05 PM
1 Comments:
Dear Hedy,
I think a couple of factors contributing to students' nervousness. For one thing, they are still new to each other. It is quite difficult for most of them to speak up in front of strangers, let alone in English. For another, the combination of a class plays a role too. As you have observed, one of the three classes is not as responsive as the other two. And I think the whole atmosphere in that class might get worse if more students find English too difficult to cope with or there are more shy students than active ones. One of my tasks is to save them from boring English learning. I hope what I am doing is helpful for them and for myself too.
Actually, there are many ways to reduce students' anxiety when they are asked to answer the teacher's questions or share their ideas. One of the strategies is grouping students. Let them share or discuss in a pair or a small group. Having them practice a couple of times in the group before they come to present in front of the whole class is useful too. But as you can see, the larger the class is, the more difficult it is to get students work in pairs or groups. It takes a lot of efforts from the teacher to monitor students' discussions and sharings. My experiences tell me that we need to give clear instructions and have them repeat the procedures several times until they are familiar with group work. Gee, you see, even in teaching English, we need to learn efficient classrrom management skills as well.
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