Feedback To Group One

* Which part do you like?

    First of all, I think they did a good job for preparing their presentation in only one week. I can see their effort while they present their topic—- vocabulary. That is the topic which always bothers students in Taiwan a lot. Most of teacher also face a dilemma of teaching as much as they can or teaching as carefully as they can. Of course,  group one also face this kind of situation. However, they made their choice of trying to make students understand what they taught except making students memorize those words. That is a good part for me, and I also appreciate the activities they design  for students. Those activities are quite interesting and challenging. They are considerate, because they did offer some practical advices for us to modify the content of those activities in case of some bombshell.

Secondly, they use many aids such as power point, flashcard, and video. I especially appreciate their self-made video, which is quite professional. It even has two versions: one with subtitle and the other without subtitle. We can see how many efforts put in this part.Last, each group member has different way to deliver a class, and each of them has their personal charm. However, they all create a pleasant atmosphere in this one-hour class. Even when they face the situation that students didn’t give them an expecting response during the whole teaching process, they still not afraid to be more active to draw students’ response. It is quite hard for us, but they did it!  

* Which part do you think Group One have to modify?

    There are some of my suggestions for their presentation below, and I hope it will be help.

* Goals—-Group One try to achieve two goals in a class, but maybe there are too many for students to achieve all in a one-hour class. Try to stick to one goal at a time, and then your class may be more focus on the vocabulary part.  

*Materials—-Using something besides the textbook will help you to develop your ability of designing a class. It’s not necessary for us to obey everything on the textbook.

* Aids—-They used plentiful aids such as PowerPoint, flashcard, and video. However, it’s a pity that the flashcard is not well- prepared, so once interrupt the class. The PowerPoint part also has some problem in the grammar practice.

* Order—-Their order of the presentation is quite confusing, because there are no specific from one part to another part. For example, in the beginning of the class, they suddenly change the color part to the cell phone part.

* Pace—-Their pace is fine. However, it might take too much time while operating the PowerPoint of the grammar exercise.

* Delivery skills—-Two “Irene”s can speak louder or use Microphone to make students hear their voice.  

* Teaching grammar—-It might be help to use some mother tongue while teaching grammar part, especially some grammatical terms. If not, spending more time to explain those grammatical terms before teaching.

* Ask Qs/ interaction—-The questions should be discussed. Try to use some “Wh”-questions instead of the “Yes/No” questions. It is also important to observe students’ facial express during the teaching process. If students didn’t have a lot of response, it may represent that they not quite understand your questions. It is necessary to explain more to them.

* Grouping—-As Alice said, its teacher’ right to decide the way of grouping. Maybe next time, we all can try the way Alice teach us—-deliver the handout with the grouping sticker.

* Teacher-centered/ Student-centered—-Somehow I feel this group is more like the Teacher-centered teaching. Maybe because that most of time they use textbook as their model, and there are not quite enough exercises which are designed by themselves.

* Playing games—-Group One prepared some interesting game, but it will be better for all of the students have opportunities to join the game. It’s also important for us to figure out a way to make students under control while having fun playing those games.

What areas of “scientific knowledge” do you think teachers of a foreign language ought to be familiar with?

I think as a foreign language teacher, there are at least three basic areas of“scientific knowledge”we should familiar with:

*To master our mother tongue and the foreign language– This is definitely the most important knowledge we should devote ourselves to study in. Only when we know a language well, we can teach it well, then our students can learn it well. However, it does not only refer to the language itself but also the culture of the language. After knowing different culture, our students should be trained to analyze them and try to compare those to our own culture. In this case, we have to know our own culture as well to provide learners enough materials to do their study. By this training we can make our students to know better about the origin of different culture. Why is it so important to us? Because culture is the root of the language, just like the soul of the human. If you want to learn any language, you had better set up a firm base.

*Class management–Teaching is not only to help students do good on their exam. We also need to know how to maintain a good atmosphere in class and keep some of our students’ behavior under control. In this way we can make our teaching much more effective and make our students learn how to respect their peers in a group. I think this ability is very important for all the teachers or teachers of the future.

*Computer skills–It is an information age, so the combination of Internet and activity of learning become current trend in language teaching. The computer skills become a basic qualification if you want to be a teacher. Actually, we can build up a e-learning site for our students by using those skills. Students can upload their assignments there, and teacher also can check it in an easier way. Teacher also can set up a Q & A section to answer students’ questions, or set up a chat room for them to discuss their questions. It will improve the quality of our teaching. Learning would not necessarily happened in the classroom, because we find another way to create more possibilities.

*Cultural study–Learning foreign language provide us an opportunity to get in touch with different culture. Except the language itself, we sometimes want to know more information such as politics, culture, history and so on. In fact, those will be excellent materials to arouse students’ interest. Just like our professors always give us some background information before teaching class. That will make us learning in an organized way.

At last, no matter what kind of subject we teach, we always need to slow down a little bit to see if the students can understand those information. Trying to adjust our teaching progress according to students’ performance achievement. No matter how much knowledge we are familiar with and how much effort we put, it will be meaningless if our students can’t understand those knowledge efficiently.

Is teaching a craft or a science?

In my opinion, teaching is not only a craft but also a science. We can not divide it into each category precisely. As a teacher, we should know how to arouse students’ enthusiasm in learning English. Some good activities and teaching skills can be help. Sometimes you can not learn those skills from a certain textbook, because you have to accumulate those over a period of time. Or we can observe some experienced teachers and try to learn something from them. However, those are not enough for a teacher. We always have to collect new information of education and share our experience with other educators. We can “update” our knowledge by doing that, then improve our teaching skills to give our students something new. In this case, we will see teaching is definitely a craft and a science at the same time.

My teaching beliefs & philosophy

Actually, it never occurs to me that I will become a teacher some day.

In the beginning of my learning, I did not encounter too much difficult in learning English. I believe most of you will feel interested when learning a new language.

However, I got frustrated in English when I was in senior high school. Fortunately, I met a wonderful English teacher. Her patience and kindness made me want to learn English well. Furthermore, she made me want to become someone like her. Not necessarily become a teacher, but become someone who can help people like me.

I believe that most of students in Taiwan do not have enough confidence while learning English. Especially we use too much “Grammar Translation” approach in secondary education in Taiwan, that will make students feel stressful and terrifed.

Learning English is not just a subject, it is also a communicate skill in our daily life. I would rather help students to like it than make them to do well on their exam.

Language should be learnt in a natural way.

If we can provide circumstances to help students get used to it, then they will be more patient and confident while learning it.

Indeed it is the goal which is hard to achieve and cannot be done only by teachers. Help and trust from administration and parents are both needful.

Hello world!

This is my first English blog. I will share something good, bad, and new in my daily life with you. You can also know me better by viewing my blog. I hope you will enjoy those stuffs as I do.