This week I was not able to teach any class material as it was revision week for the midterm exams next week. Next week I will be away as well, followed by the delayed midterm exam after that. So I will not be teaching any CREDIT classes for the next two to three weeks. So i will now switch my focus on to the hagwon classes that I have to teach three times a week. This week I forgot to record any class time, I have been running around like a headless chicken this week trying to get my trip and everything else organized. But I did manage to use one new method of reading in the hagwon class. The reading topic was different snacks around the world. It seemed a pretty uninteresting topic so I decided to take 8 words from each snack description in the text and give those 8 words to a pair of students. i then gave them the task of talking about the particular snack, how it is made, where it is from etc to the class using the 8 words as hints.
It worked really well. The students became interested in the text as the compared their answer to the original. It also proved to be a great idea for learning the new vocabulary in the text as I included the difficult words in the 8 I gave them. This activity took 30 mins of the class. Usually I would spend 5 minutes on the reading. A big improvement.
So tonight I am going to be teaching the hagwon class for the final time before I leave. So I am going to use this upcoming class to record and use for my module 2 assignment. The topic is "Managing Life" using the future tense of going to and will.
I was thinking about brainstorming ways in which people spend their weekends. I will then model a question on the board "What are you up to this weekend?" I will get students into pairs to ask each other before reporting back to the class.
I then intend to use visuals on the board for weekend activities. I will nominate students to practice saying the modeled sentence about the future and the pictured activity.
I will then ask if there are any different ways of asking about the future and write those up on the board.
From there I will work into the study phase of the lesson.
This is my rough plan. I will teach the class tonight and then write about what happened next week. i will not have time to write about it tonight, will be headed to the airport.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Thursday, April 12, 2012
revised lesson
After watching my fellow peers model their engage phase of their classes last weekend I have altered my engage lesson previously taught last week, and tried it again with a different class. This time I focused more on developing the target language they will use later in the lesson while activating their schema. The last time I tried this class I did not introduce the language they will be using at this stage of the lesson.
I started the lesson off with a brainstorm on the board of different kinds of bad habits. Basically these were one or two word shout outs, which I let go at this stage of the lesson. I feel that getting the students involved at this stage rather than on full sentences was more important at the beginning. I then further progressed into the topic by showing pictures on the screen from the computer of different kinds of bad habits. I then asked questions such as "who has this habit?" "What is this habit". Again the responses were small and the dominant students answered. I asked 3 students and tried to personalize the feedback with them as much as possible by asking follow up questions, such as "how often do you eat hamburgers? and "what's your favorite hamburger?" ...
It was at this stage when I modeled the 3 sentences on the board that I wanted the students to focus on. They were:
1) I've picked up the habit of ___ing
2) I'm addicted to _____
3) I need to kick the habit of ____ing.
The students then did 3 minutes of pair work practicing these 3 sentences with each other before I nominated 3 students to say their examples to the class. From this point we worked into the area of smoking and focused on that topic where students started to come up with reasons as to why certain groups of people start smoking while using the new modeled sentences.
The pair work worked really well at this stage of the lesson, even though it was short. The students all seemed to use this new language later on in the class also. My learners definitely feel more comfortable when speaking to other students as the conversations in pair work was great compared to when I utilized volunteering and nominating. I tend to have my students in one large horse shoe shape (U) for the start of the classes, so the pair work was just done with the person sitting next to them. In future lessons I need to think of a quick way to partner them up with other students, however I do not wish to spend too much time on this at the beginning of a lesson.
Overall my warm up, preview start to the lesson lasted 20 mins. Is this too long? Should there be a time limit on this phase before the study phase begins?
I started the lesson off with a brainstorm on the board of different kinds of bad habits. Basically these were one or two word shout outs, which I let go at this stage of the lesson. I feel that getting the students involved at this stage rather than on full sentences was more important at the beginning. I then further progressed into the topic by showing pictures on the screen from the computer of different kinds of bad habits. I then asked questions such as "who has this habit?" "What is this habit". Again the responses were small and the dominant students answered. I asked 3 students and tried to personalize the feedback with them as much as possible by asking follow up questions, such as "how often do you eat hamburgers? and "what's your favorite hamburger?" ...
It was at this stage when I modeled the 3 sentences on the board that I wanted the students to focus on. They were:
1) I've picked up the habit of ___ing
2) I'm addicted to _____
3) I need to kick the habit of ____ing.
The students then did 3 minutes of pair work practicing these 3 sentences with each other before I nominated 3 students to say their examples to the class. From this point we worked into the area of smoking and focused on that topic where students started to come up with reasons as to why certain groups of people start smoking while using the new modeled sentences.
The pair work worked really well at this stage of the lesson, even though it was short. The students all seemed to use this new language later on in the class also. My learners definitely feel more comfortable when speaking to other students as the conversations in pair work was great compared to when I utilized volunteering and nominating. I tend to have my students in one large horse shoe shape (U) for the start of the classes, so the pair work was just done with the person sitting next to them. In future lessons I need to think of a quick way to partner them up with other students, however I do not wish to spend too much time on this at the beginning of a lesson.
Overall my warm up, preview start to the lesson lasted 20 mins. Is this too long? Should there be a time limit on this phase before the study phase begins?
Thursday, April 5, 2012
Engage 2!
As the last class went fairly well, I did much the same in this class (different students, same topic) for the engage part of the lesson.
However, after thinking about Daniel's comment, I was not too sure that the students in the class were being too honest with me about the initial question of whether smoking is cool, sexy, or romantic looking. Of course students do not want to "stand out" from the others, and this could be culturally based, so I was thinking about other ways to activate their schema on the topic of smoking without asking and answering based on themselves. So instead of just putting the pictures of celebrities on the board, I put pictures of people (including celebrities) smoking in all walks of life. I then asked the questions "How does this image make you feel? Why do you think that this particular person is smoking". The results were different and a lot more like what i expected as they were based on unknown people and not on themselves. There were pictures of students smoking, celebrities smoking, young children smoking, parents, and workers smoking. The words and opinions varied depending on the images which is what i expected and wanted. From there they could start thinking more in depth about the topic and discuss in GW and PW.
Monday, April 2, 2012
Engage!
In the engage phase of my lesson this week I was planning on activating the students schema in order to get them thinking about the topic that we would study for this weeks class. This week the class topic is "Drinking and Smoking in Korea", which I believe is a topic these students would already be quite familiar with.
To open the class I presented the students with the question, "is smoking cool? sexy? romantic? The resounding answers were no. Then to conflict with their first answers I put a picture on the projector screen of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie smoking a cigarette on the street. The same question was then posed with a variety of different answers this time. Suddenly smoking was kinda cool, sexy and romantic. By creating these contradictions by using their schema of smoking and celebrities I was hoping to engage the students into more interesting conversations that could be had later in the lesson.
The answers given from the engage phase of the lesson worked quite well for the rest of the lesson. I had to be careful not to be too negative on the smoking and drinking topics however as there were smokers and drinkers in the class, so even though the conversations in class were interesting, I will focus on the negative AND positive aspects of smoking and drinking in the next class to avoid bias. But over all the activation of the students schema worked well and I was satisfied, but with room for improvement on Thursday.
To open the class I presented the students with the question, "is smoking cool? sexy? romantic? The resounding answers were no. Then to conflict with their first answers I put a picture on the projector screen of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie smoking a cigarette on the street. The same question was then posed with a variety of different answers this time. Suddenly smoking was kinda cool, sexy and romantic. By creating these contradictions by using their schema of smoking and celebrities I was hoping to engage the students into more interesting conversations that could be had later in the lesson.
The answers given from the engage phase of the lesson worked quite well for the rest of the lesson. I had to be careful not to be too negative on the smoking and drinking topics however as there were smokers and drinkers in the class, so even though the conversations in class were interesting, I will focus on the negative AND positive aspects of smoking and drinking in the next class to avoid bias. But over all the activation of the students schema worked well and I was satisfied, but with room for improvement on Thursday.
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