Reflection of visiting Lishan High School(1)

Class:207  Teacher:劉日蓮

Lesson objective: Listening & Vocabulary

Teaching materials: English textbook

Opening

In the beginning of the class, Ms. Liu asked some questions about what have taught last class in order to refresh and recall students’ memory. She also can tell which part students might feel confused from their response and facial expression. By doing this can make students feel more relaxed and be prepared to what they are going to learn next. However, Ms. Liu seems didn’t explain the lesson procedures and activities in the beginning. She just moved from one to another fluently, and students didn’t show many anxiety and uneasy. Maybe they are used to this pattern of teaching.

 Body

1. Listening activity (1) —In this part, she tried to make students answer the questions on the textbook.

After asking the warm-up questions, she played the CD. Before getting started, she asks students to listen carefully and explain what she’s going to do after listening to the CD. Then during the whole listening part, Ms. Liu walked around in the classroom. When starting asked the questions, Ms. Liu repeated the same question for many times to make students understand the questions or seek for volunteers to answer it. During this process, here are something she did to help students:a.        Ms. Liu would correct students’ grammatical mistakes and want them to use their own words instead of looking for answers from textbook.b.        When mentioned vocabulary, she would stop to explain its meaning.Ask students to use their imagination to answer those questions and do not be afraid of doing wrong.

2. Listening activity (2) —In this part, she brought students to listen a section from textbook but without any text to read for.    

Because here are not a certain text foe them to read, in order to make students won’t feel too much pressure on listening. Ms. Liu provided some information about the context to make students have a concept about the story. So during their break before this class, she wrote down the vocabulary below and its simple meaning on the black board:

* Tantalus→ tantalize v.

* ambrosia→ the sacred food for gods

* Tartarus→ the underworld zone of punishment    

After those pre-listening activity, she start the listening part. Then she asked students to answer the questions, of course they would not do very good without any visual aid in the first around. So Ms. Liu would put emphasize on those difficult parts for students.  At last, Ms. Liu gave them a typed-text and listen to the CD with it for the last time. This can make sure that students really understand the content of the listening text.

3.Vocabulary—In this part, teacher select certain difficult vocabulary from textbook then want students to do some sentence-making practice.    

First of all, teacher led students to read the sentence below the vocabulary and highlight some phrases on the textbook. After that, she asked students come to board to translate the Chinese sentence she said into English. If there are any difficult words for them, Ms. Liu would tell the students first.

Closure

     In my observation, here is not a so-called closure in the end of the class. However, Ms. Liu did make a brief summary to impress students after each section of activity and that is definitely quite good enough for me. There were not any formal evaluation of the lesson, but I think Ms. Liu paid her full attention to students’ presentation and she tried to content every student’s need. When she walked around during these activities, I think that could be a kind of evaluation.

Feedback     I think the way Ms. Liu taught listening class could be a great model for me, because it is really a hard part to teach in class. However, she made this class become interesting and informative at the same time. She also gave students enough repetition to memorize the information; she played CD for three times on each listening part .However, the repetition on question part is too much, that might help teacher to attract students’ attention and help students understand the question better. That is true, but it also could be very disturbing and boring at the same time. Besides, I really like the listening activity (2), because Ms. Liu did a great job on the pre-listening. She gave students enough information of the content of the text and also generated students’ interest to go on the story. The typed-text idea is also brilliant; I really appreciate the procedures she took in this listening class. Maybe she didn’t state it clearly in the beginning of the class, but I think students were already used to the pattern so it is not necessary to mention it again and again. At last, I want to thank Ms. Liu being so generous to open your class for us to join and observe. I did have a great time and learnt a lot, thank you once again!

Questions of grammar teaching

1. As the article “teaching a grammar lesson” remarks, “Fortunately, nowadays with the emphasis on a communicative approach and a wealth of stimulating resources, teaching grammar does not necessarily mean endless conjugation of verbs or grammar translation.” In reality, grammar translation is needed in teaching. Then, how can we make a compromise between the two extremes of a structured based curriculum and a purely communicative classroom when teaching grammar?

      Nowdays we do have more resources for teaching, but we also have to face a dilemma. There are too many so-called efficient approaches. As a teacher, we have responsibility to decide which one is better for our students, but are there any principle for us to follow?

      We have to know that there are absoultely no certain panacea for grammar teaching, in this case the variety of teaching approach become very important. As the “planning a grammar lesson”remarks “…deductive and inductive approaches are both have their advantages and disadvantage.” Take grammar translation and communicative approaches for example, the former one is not only time saving and make students spend more time to practice the language items but definitely with less fun. The latter one, on the other hand, is more stimulating than the former one. Furthermore, it does not only focus on the memorizing part but also focus on the comprehension and activate. Then, how can we make good use of both approaches in our grammar teaching?

      In my opinion, communicative appraoch canbe used in designing the opening of the class and activities. We can generate students’motivation and observe students’learning achievement. Then while entering the body of the class, we can stress on grammar translation approach. After all, this approach can not be totally removed in grammar teaching because it do have its efficiency. At last, we can arrange pair-work activities for them instead of a lot of homeworks. In this way, we offer them opportunities to do oral practice and comprehend the rules at the same time. That would be more fun than the traditional ways and could be useful in other subjects teaching.   2.                  In what way can we help transfer the rules/patterns learned from the classroom context to the outside world?

     I was turtoring two high school students since six month ago, and during this period of time I found that there is a pattern in their learning. They can easily memorize some complicated phrases and grammatical rules, but somehow they always have difficulties to make their own sentences with those items. They can get good grades on multiple choices, but they just can’t do good on sentence making part. It seems hard for them to according to the hint of the question and make a proper sentence. I belive that is just because that they are used to some kind of questions, once they encounter some “new” questions, they will feel intimitdated. However, if we can develop their ability of organizing meaningful sentences would be help on their learning. Take our English teaching for example, Alice showed an interesting PPT she made for her students to us. There are a lot of pictures of her families with thought bubble, and students can practice a certain grammatical pattern with different materials slide by slide. It is absolutely interesting than doing a lot of exercises from textbook or some copies of “grammatical bible”, and it also can help students to practice the rules they just learnt. 

     Furthermore, they can try to create a possibility of using everything in their dailylife to do the practice. Then when they are familiar with this learning pattern, they will try to find out different resources by themselves and create more possibilities. Their learning won’t be limited in classroom anymore ,and it can help them to overcome their weakness of disablity on answering various questions. I always believe that grammar learning is not only about memorizing but also about comprehending and praticing, however , if it can connect with our dailylife would be better.

Feedback to Group Two

       Actually I had a good time while Group 2 teaching their class. I can see they are well prepared. Their grammar teaching activities shows that they attach great importance to the reading assignment. They try their best to design those interesting and appropriate activities for us. Besides, each of them has a charming personality which will generate students’ interest. 

       The advantage of their teaching is they stick to one goal and make good use of their time, and that is one of the hardest things to do in reality. However, they not only did it but did it quite well. They didn’t even make us to memorize a lot of grammatical terms; we just learnt those spontaneously during the game playing. Their summary also makes us understand the theories and practice of teaching. I think the way Group 2 adopt in teaching is more like student-centered, we participated in almost every part of their teaching and had a lot of interaction with “teachers.” So I think their hard work should be very highly regarded.  

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.