Giving students time

My class today was the focus of my module 3 paper. As a result I paid a lot of attention to new vocabulary and grammar and tried to get the students to make sense of the new information themselves.
The grammar focus was the present perfect continuous and the students all had a working knowledge of this. So the idea of the class was to give students practice using this grammar and to see how it worked in real situations, like in a film clip I showed them. There was no vocabulary that popped up in the text and I dealt with them as they arose, but did not give them any hint as to what it meant. I put them in pairs and gave them a few minutes to think about the word themselves. Most times they managed to figure it out. I had no reason to explain the grammar as such as the already knew that.
I used the video in the isolation part of the lesson and used a gap filling exercise and the students filled in the gaps of the utterances in the clip. We then verified their answers as a class later. I then prepared a questionnaire  and the students asked one another  modeled questions such as , have you been enjoying the festival lately? They were made to answer with full sentences. They then had to choose a follow up question, since when? or for how long?
 Both of these had been touched upon earlier in the lesson so the students knew when to use for and since and in what situation. After tis practice of the grammar the students were given about 5 minutes to make their own questions aimed at a particular person in the class. they then asked this question, with the follow up and any other questions that anyone felt like asking. This was the production phase of the lesson.
I felt it went quite well. i made a concerted effort to reduce teacher talk in the class, and I believe I collected good material to focus on my module 3 assignment.

Pronunciate!

I used a section of my class today to focus on pronunciation. As there were not really any interesting aspects or rules to follow in the text I was teaching this week I focused on stressing certain words. I used the technique referred to in Harmer, example 4 page 259. I wrote a sentence on the board, "Where can I buy a cheap computer?". This sentence is found in the text book I was teaching on that day. I then prepared different situations and passed them around to pairs in the room. Some of the situations were:
1) I have found cheap phones, cheap TVs and cheap MP3 players everywhere, but no cheap computers!
2) Everywhere I look the computers are so expensive!
3) Everybody else has bought a computer, but I can't find one anywhere!
4) I have looked everywhere, but I can not find a place that sells cheap computers!
By discussing in pairs they worked out on which word they would place the stress to emphasize the situation they had. It was a difficult task and i had to model it a few times with another sentence before a few of them understood.
This was not so much a practical lesson on pronunciation that cam up in class, but a planned lesson on stressing certain words to convey different meanings. I do not think the students got the hang of it in the 15 minutes we focused on it but after a few reviews I hope they get it. It did make them realize that stress on words is very important in the English language, which was the point of this activity I believe.

Vocab!

So after reading Nation and Harmer I tried to incorporate vocabulary into my lesson plan today. I usually am pretty lazy when it comes to vocabulary so focusing on it was a little alien to me. The reading the vocabulary came from was quite long. Usually I would get the students to read the sentences out one line at a time as they go around, but after thinking about this approach in class a few weeks back I decided that having the students read themselves was a better idea. So we took it one paragraph at a time and told the students to underline a word if they did not understand it and thought it was important. I had already underlined ten words and pointed them out after each paragraph. The majority of students also picked the same words.
What I did next was to pre-make a question activity. I wrote 5 definitions with the correct answers relating to the vocabulary just covered on one piece of paper, and 5 on another. I then did PW where one student quizzed the other on the definitions and elicited answers from them without telling them the answer. By doing this the students began to get a feel for the new words themselves. As nation puts this, the "learning burden" of the word. They can give hints by using words that sound alike, by fitting it into a sentence, by spelling the first few letters, and I even had them use collocations as hints. They learnt about collocations in a previous class.
So I then asked the students if this exercise had been useful and they said yes...I think they would say yes anyway, but it's always good to hear.
I could have followed this up by a word activity, like a jumble or crossword in Harmer, or better still had the students use the new vocabulary in their own sentences. Time was not on my side however and I had to get through certain pages of the text to keep up with the syllabus. I guess this is when the students could do homework and show me their sentences in the next class. I am lazy like that also, it just adds to an already high marking workload for me. But if I had my students best interest at hand then that is what I should be doing I guess...no excuses.

TTQ

Today I recorded my entire class, which was 2 hours long, and it used up all of my phone battery life haha.
So there were a variety of different aspects to go through the text book with in this class. Ten students attended, (it was an academy class at the University) and it all went quite well i thought.
The focus of the first half of the lesson was phrasal verbs. These were in a reading, and phrasal verbs were highlighted throughout the text. I got the students to close their books and I prepared pictures describing the events as they happened in the text. The students then got into pairs and came up with their own stories based on the pictures on the screen. It worked really well to activate their schema, and it got them interested in the reading which we did next.
When moving into the practice stage of the lesson I gave the students a few verbs and particles and in the same pairs got them to make as many phrasal verbs as they could. They then volunteered their answers to the class. I did not get them to put them into their own sentences which was a mistake I believe, as just saying the phrasal verb does nothing to really enhance their language, other than maybe learning new vocabulary.
The text book then took us into a dialog focusing on softening, and thereby making it more polite. I modeled a few sentence examples on the board and nominated students to say the answers. This worked well and the students grasped this fairly quickly. The last point was the use of the word "though" in contrasting opinions. After going through the examples in the text the students had a chance to produce the language with me as I nominated students to contrast my opinions with the use of the word "though". For example:

T: Brad Pitt is so old now!
                                                       L1: Yeah but he is still handsome though.

I was happy with the way the ideas were picked up in class and I hope that the students continue to use this new language point in future lessons.
My only gripe is that I feel I still over explain too much and maybe even offer too much feedback to student responses. Reducing TTT is important I know but how much should we reduce it. Harmer brings up the point about TTQ (teacher talking quality) and I guess I am still trying to work out this balance. TTT needs to be used wisely and I think i would like to focus more on this aspect. How much talk is too much and what constitutes quality?