Methodology of English Teaching

Lesson Plan

2006-06-01T09:59:00.000+08:00

Topic: It looks interesting (Lesson 4) Category: Warm Up, Vocabulary

Teacher:Olivia Tseng
Purposes
1.to interact with other classmates
2.to involve classroom discussion and communication
3.to enhance comprehensible input from providing visual aids
4.to encourage contextualized learning
Skills involved:Listening, Speaking, Reading and Writing
Duration:15 minutes
Teaching material:
1.Lesson 4: It looks interesting (from 康軒：第四冊);
2.Worksheet: Survey (questions);
3.PPT files (sentences from the textbook )
Summary of activity implementation (Procedure)

I. Warm Up
Briefly introduce the topic today "movies" and the type of movies: romance, western, action, animation, horror, science fiction.
Survey: Students are going to interview three classmates about the topic "movie".

How often do you go to the movies?
What kinds of movies do you like to see?
Which movie is your favorite?

Homework: students are going to organize their surveys and write a report about their classmates’ interest of movies. Students are going to turn in their findings next week.

II. Vocabulary
earthquake, theater, cheap, coffee, newspaper, steak, office, preview
1. Vocabulary will be introduced by telling the content of the dialogue in the textbook.
2. Students are going to see slides which are presented by complete sentences
from the textbook with pictures.
3. The target vocabulary will be blanked. Students are going to guess from
reading the sentences and pictures.
4. Students are able to internalized the use of specific vocabulary and transferred
into other uses of vocabulary.

Final Product:a short report of the survey (word files)

Hypothesis of Microteaching

2006-06-01T09:55:00.000+08:00

I believe that language acquisition occurred with comprehensible input in authentic environment which is based on input hypothesis (Krashen), noticing hypothesis (Schmidt) and communicative approach. I also believe that natural environments promote learning.
The way input performs will influence the way people get them. Krashen (1983) asserted a theory called input hypothesis which explain how people acquire a language. He claimed that input hypothesis is that "we acquire (not learn) language by understanding input that is a little beyond our current level of (acquired) competence" (Krashen & Terrell, 1983, p.32). Schmidt (1995) also asserted another hypothesis which called noticing hypothesis. Schmidt argued that language learners can learn a lot from someone's instruction which is to said, learners need to notice what they should learn and then, they can acquire input correctly. He concluded that "…subliminal language learning is important, and that noticing is the necessary and sufficient condition for converting input to intake" (Schmidt, 1990, p.129). That's similar with Krashen's input hypothesis. Thus, what Schmidt further emphasized is the relationship between attention and learning. If students learn through noticing the key elements in the input, they will get exactly what they need. These two hypotheses proposed different ways of receiving and acquiring input. However, I believe the combination of these two will be a good way to teach a language.
Communication is the ultimate goal of learning a second language. Therefore, learning in communication is the main task in my classroom. Language learning is through interaction with others in the target language and negotiates meaning with each other. Moreover, being able to communicate requires communicative competence—grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic, strategic competence (Hymes, 1972) which means knowing when and how to say what to whom. Therefore, I would implement this idea in my teaching.

Reference
Krashen, S. D., & Terrell, T. D. (1983). The natural approach: Language acquisition in the
classroom. Hayward, CA: Alemany.
Schmidt, R. W. (1990). The role of consciousness in second language learning.
Applied Linguistics, 11(2):129–158.
Hymes, D. (1972). On communicative competence. Unpublished manuscript, University of
Pennylvania.

School Visit III: Fu Hsing Junior/Elementary School

2006-05-16T21:49:00.000+08:00

The school
English education, the main education task of Fu Hsing School, started since kindergarten and one and a half year ahead of public schools. I can feel this school worked very hard on English teaching since their students entered the school.

The classroom
The class star with writing landmarks of twelve places. They are China, Japan, India, London, Egypt, New York, Italy, Beijing, Australia, Paris, Canada and Singapore. These places have different specialties. However, I think the teacher should stick the places to either countries or cities. Then, the teacher asked students to write either Chinese or English of any landmarks that they knew. They will discuss the answer later. Then, the teacher played the slides and discussed the landmark with students together. During the discussion, the teacher asked “Has any one been to America?”. Most of the student raised their hands. However, when the teacher asked has anyone been to the martyrs' shrine in Taipei, no one raised their hands. It is funny that students there seems praised everything outside of country and forgot the fundamental stuff that they had in here, Taiwan. Then, the next activity was to answer the question “Where have you been to?” One of the students said “I have been to Tainan.” I heard someone immediately response “That’s socks!”, but the teacher didn’t say anything to that girl. I feel sorry for that girl and feel sorry for this classroom. This school was mainly composed with high income families. Maybe some of them came from average families. That doesn’t mean they are bad. The next activity is to look at sentence patterns and make a sentence immediately.
For example, ________ __________ for __________ ___________
V O V-ing Pro N.
If students cannot answer it right away, they have to stand until they came up with a sentence. I don’t like the way she forced the students to answer it immediately. I think they could still give them some times to think and pick some one to answer it. Or she could ask students to write down the sentences together and hand in the sentences after all.

Reflection to Group 6's presentation

2006-05-10T21:46:00.000+08:00

Today, Group 6 gave us a clear introducation for Hot Potatoes, IWill and Yahoo Groups. They've done a lot of work on giving step by step explanation. Actually, I'm pretty appreciate whay they have done to us. It brings me another vision of teaching on line.
Hot Potatoes was first introduced to me when I was in college. I used it to construct a website for teaching "the techniques and principles in language teaching". It's a lot of fun in developing activities. However, this software cannot keep the records of running the activities. The teacher have no way to find out how the websites work out with the students.
Yahoo Groups are easy to use. Teachers can set a poll or sending messages through it. There are lots of ways to exchange information and personal opinions. I will consider about using it when I teach in high schools. The last part is IWill. This system is built by a group of teachers in Tamkang University. It has been cooperated with severl senior high school teachers for the reading club and now they even have a reading club for Chinese.
Group 6 gave us an introduction for these three systems and they are so clear to me. However, I would love to see some successful examples of using them. How do teachers implement them in real teaching? And how do thoes teaching come out? Are they good or bad?

Interview: an English teacher in junior high school

2006-05-08T21:26:00.000+08:00

Introduction to an English teacher
The teacher that I interviewed is an English teacher in Kuang Ming Junior High School in Taichung city. (光明國中) Her name is 許碧純 and she is in her early thirties. The interview took placed through e-mails and face-to-face interview. We had the interview on May 5th, Friday afternoon. The weather was very hot. Fortunately, our interview was at five o'clock when students went home and the teacher just finished her teaching for the whole afternoon. She is the first grade homeroom teacher. I can feel her attitude about teaching is very positive.

Interview questions
How long have you been teaching?
How many schools have you been teaching?
Could you tell me your educational background?
Do you have any plans for further study?
When are you going to do it?
Can you briefly introduce your job here?
How do you usually start a class?
How do your students react to your teaching?
How is the interaction between you and your students?
Do you exchange opinions with your students while you confront any difficulties in teaching?
What's your belief in teaching?
What's your philosophy of teaching?
Have you ever met any difficulties in teaching?
How do you over come the difficulties?
Have you ever had any trouble to interact with students?
What's your teaching orientation? Practical or test-oriented?
What are your idea roles of students and teachers?
What's your idea way of teaching?
Why is it difficult to practice in the real situation?
What's your career cycle?

Background of the English teacher
Ms Shih got her English bachelor degree from National Chung Hsing University （中興大學）and after-bachelor mid-school educational credits from National Changhua University of Education（彰化師範大學）. She has been teaching English for seven years. In these seven years, she taught from cram school to vocational school then to the junior high school that she is teaching right now. While she first graduated from the college, she initiated her career from teaching children's English for two years. Teaching with kids was a lot of fun in there and she learned how to create an enjoyable environment for learners by then. However, she felt insecure by having a part time job like that. Later on, she took the program for educational certificated and became a private vocational substitute teacher for one and a half year in Zen Del Senior High School（正德高中）and Tung Der Home Economics and Commerce Vocational High School（同德家商）. Then, she went to be a private junior high school teacher in Shinmin Senior High School（新民高中）(junior high school department) for two years. And now, she is teaching in a public junior high school. She is planning to get a master degree in the field of methodology of language teaching in the future, but before that she will pay most of her attention in teaching in the junior high school. She has been teaching in Kuang Ming Junior High School for two years.

Philosophy of teaching
Ms Shih philosophy of teaching is self-learning. She believes that self initiated learning could engage students to lifelong learning. Moreover, this school doesn't have any policy for grouping students into different proficiency level. Some students even don't know any words of English. Therefore, as long as students learn something, the teacher is happy about that. She did help students doing a lot of activities about practicing speaking English in class. At that time, students are centered in the classroom. Otherwise, the teacher is always the main leader in the classroom. In daily teaching, she doesn't provide additional materials for students because the main task is difficult enough for some of the students. She usually starts a lesson from giving practical elements for a lesson. For example, while she is teaching a lesson about food, she would give the students the real menu from some restaurants and ask them to act out the conversation. She would also mention her experienced in foreign country and showed how native speakers order foods while they were in a restaurant. Students knew what it is about in the daily life and knew exactly how to use it. She tries to module her teaching not only focuses on test but also on real life conversation. Although the test is very important for students, there are still some basic speaking skills that students need to have. Moreover, owning to the time strain, forty minutes may not enough for both grammatical and conversation practice. She still wants to keep the idea in teaching and figures some way to realize it.

Teaching in Class
Ms Shih always acts energetically in class and tries to raise students' curiosity of learning English. Sometimes, she will provide some fun riddles or puzzles at the begging of the class. The interaction between students and teachers are good. Students who are interested in learning English always wants to communicate with her when there are some unclear parts. However the most serious barrier that she is facing is the motivation of the false beginners. It's very hard to lead students to the interest level of the energetic ones. Therefore, she doesn't know what do deal with it yet. Now, she is always giving tangible rewards while lower motivated students doing something great in class. For instance, she will give them extra points if they are willing to participate in the in-class activities. Sometimes, she would talk to them.

Career Cycle
The English teacher's career cycle begins from pre-service and going on to stabilization. The period of discovery the way of teaching is in the first two years of teaching in cram schools and kindergartens. Pre-service period is while she is taking the programs of mid-school credits in National Changhua University of Education. She induced what she learned from the programs and gradually build competency in English teaching. Then, she was enthusiastic in the first year of Shinmin Senior High School（新民高中） When she finally got her first official job in Kuang Ming Junior High School（光明國中）, she moved from enthusiastic to frustration. Then, little by little, she became stabilized in Kuang Ming Junior High School（光明國中）. There are three more steps where she has not reached yet. This is her second years in this school. There are lots of frustrations and difficulties waiting for her. I believe she will be a very successful teacher in the future.

Reflection on the Interview
After this interview, the first thing came into my mind is this is a hardworking teacher. Owning to her experience of teaching young kids, she is able to bring more fun stuffs in class. I taught in cram schools and kindergartens before. The way of teaching is really a lot difference. In there, the main task is to help kids learn from games. However, in high schools, students are grounded by exams. The teacher needs to give students more chances to practice how to do a test. Nonetheless, this teacher refused to do so. She insisted that students can learn in an enjoyable environment. Therefore, she doesn't mainly teach things about the test but also things for daily used.
In Ms Shih's classroom, she is usually in the leading role. Students are centered when they are having a conversation with each other. My idea of teaching is students-oriented. The teacher should be the facilitator. I believe she knew theories too, but she just cannot follow it because the reality is the reality. The grades of the students are separate into two different scores either are very high scores or very low scores. Sometimes, the teacher needs to compromise with the reality and they have nothing to deal with it.
The teacher thought that as long as the students learn something, she is very happy about that. I'm wondering what the average proficiency level is in the junior high school. I assume that students learn English since third or forth grade in the elementary school. Therefore, they should obtain some vocabulary when they are in seventh grade. It seems there is such a big gap between students' language skills. However, why is this gap getting bigger and bigger? Is it because teachers usually praise students with high scores and ignore the students with low scores? Therefore, students with low scores feel frustrating in learning English. Then, they give up and the gap becomes bigger and bigger.
I found a very interesting thing in the interview. Although students need to take the exam, the teacher could still do something different. Games and activities are ways to help students learning. This teacher tries her best to create a pleasant way of learning and students really enjoy it. I hope she could keep doing it and show the others that students can learn in fun.

Reflection to My Groups' presentation

2006-05-03T12:22:00.000+08:00

Files in our presentation
How to teach writing?

As a matter of fact that we worked together on preparing the subject of our presentation. Tim and Pauline did the demonstration although they are very nervous at that time. We've been rehersaled. Though there are some disadvantages of our presentation, I still want to thank Tim, Nancy and Pauline for thier hardworking.

School Visit II: Zhongshan Girls' High School

2006-04-25T00:30:00.000+08:00

This school is located in Taipei city around the main busy center. Old school remains her tradition of providing enjoyable environment for every student. The principal is an optimistic woman who's responsible for everything in the girls' high school. The staffs of this school are mainly female only few of them are male. I'm wondering how they are going to teach the lesson of gender relations especially when students are in an age of curiosity of sex. This school is a highly technological environment: a projector for every classroom and a notebook for every teacher. Therefore, every student is familiar with operating electrical equipment.

In this school, there are chairmen for each subject who are the coordinator for the teaching events. For example, in English, they especially value the benefits of team work. They pay a lot attention to students' performance from different kind of perspectives for instance, storytelling, debate and speech. From the video we saw, I can feel the English teachers' hardworking on facilitating English teaching in all over the campus. The teachers even got an excellent teacher award on English last year. I'm sure they worth the prize.

I observed the third class which was taught by teacher Stephanie. There are twenty five students in this math and science class. They spend most of their time in doing researchers with college professors. They are under great pressure especially this week, because they are going to present their findings in the same week. The class started with visitors' self-introduction. The teacher, Stephanie, a well-experienced teacher, tried to raise her students' curiosity on visitors. After attracting everyone's attention, students began to perform their project. The lesson and additional listening activities that they've been taught last week was about garage sale. Therefore, Stephanie asked them to do a project about it. They needed to have a garage sale online and promoted why and for how much will they sell the product. What are the specialties of the product? Then, everyone got to vote for the best group.

Students made their own PowerPoint and wrote some important features on the slides. Although, there were some mistakes on it, their presentation was not interrupted. Students were allowed to perform freely without interruption. At the end of this class, the teacher did a brief introduction to start a lesson about migration of foods. She didn't jump to the text of the lesson directly. She started the lesson from a question like what the famous dessert in French is. What do we eat with English dessert? What are they? Students are allowed to guess. Her class doesn't follow the traditional way of teaching. Basically, she will do the summary first and go to the vocabulary after all. Students should do their job to look over some of the important vocabulary. More and more, students are trained to do read a article by their own and develop their own philosophy of reading and studying.

I think this class went pretty well. Students got the chance to do their own project. This is not something they can catch from the internet, but a project to make by their own. There is no error correction in this part, because in the real world, the other interlocutor won't correct your mistake during a conversation, presentation or online shopping. The materials are based on authentic events. Students gathered and brainstormed the subject that they hoped to sale. They are encouraged to think and be creative about their project. One of the most interesting projects of their presentation is that they are selling a "pitiful book bag". Instead of saying "beautiful", they said it is "pitiful". They did a mini-play about the story of the book bag. This group was very creative and gave interesting ideas of selling stuff.

This class is really great enough; however, I have some suggestions. At the end of the presentation, the teacher should give some feedbacks or comments on their presentation. For example, she could quickly review some big mistakes that some of the groups make. Or, she could give comments on how she will sell the product. What change they might make to improve the quality of garage sale. By doing so, the teachers is giving the students the construct of the lesson and they will know more about what they are doing and where to improve.

School Visit: Fanghe Junior High School

2006-04-12T22:00:00.000+08:00

This is our first visit to junior high school. The first thing came to my eyes is a nice and quiet school. The principle is very nice and do pay great precaious in facilitating English learning. I can see a lot of English signs around the campus. Then, we had an observation on one of the B classes. This lesson divided into three parts--quiz, review and new text. Though students may not as good as advanced students, they are highly motivated and energetic in doing in-class activities. However, I've got some problems in the quiz of recogizing the vocabulary. The task of this quiz is to translate some English words into Chinese. I don't like the way of testing recognizing the words. I'm sure there are more better ways to test thier ability of recognizing words. For example, there could be a list of similar English words for students to choose the correct one. Do not simply asking them to write Chinese. I think by asking them to write the direct Chinese translation will mislead their idea of specific words. They will think that one English word has only one meaning which is not the truth.

The activities for "not only... but also..." promoted team works and peer editting. While students are doing the activities, they are quiet involved. Peer edditting is strongly encouraged. The activity was held by combining two sentences into one "not only...but also..." sentence. A Group who writes the correct answer wins two points. If they wrote the answer, but it was worng, they still got one point. The one who correct them wins another points too. Students are allowed to think and find out the answer from peers. This activity is student-centered. The teacher didn't provide the correct answer immediately, otherwise, she provided sufficient time to let her students think.

The next activity is to learn the different sounds of ue and u_e. Students read after the teacher and identify the differences of sounds. The activity is very interesting. Students are given two flags: /ju/ and /u/. They need to listen to what the teacher said and identify the sounds immediately. In this game, students know the differences through listening. However, they are not taught meaningfully. The teacher didn't explain why sometimes "ue" and "u_e" sounds /ju/ but sometimes doesn't. If they see any unknown words, they don't know when to use what.

The teaching philosophy of this teacher is student-centered. Her tolerance of ambiguity is high. She allows her students to make mistakes, but she doesn't correct them immediately. The other students can provide correct answers. In this way, the students who don't know the correct answer get the correct answer without pressure, and students who help the others gain the sense of success and achievement. I think this is why this teacher could make this B class become an energetic class becuase students are the main role in the class and they know they are helping each other. Students are very busy in learning English at every moment.

Teaching Listening in Fun

2006-03-26T22:52:00.000+08:00

Last week, Group 3 demonstrated a great way to teach listening. I could feel thier hard working on preparing every activity. The procedures of this lesson seem to me very fluent. First of all, Rosanne reviewed what they taught last time and moved on to provide listening procticing. Then, Sandy gave us a real menu from two restaurants and asked us to create a conversation between waiters and customers. The menu wasn't just presented with words but also authentic photos. It is a very good way to facilitate understanding of reading. The most interesting part of this presentation is while students are asked to perform in class. All performers wore customs, so everyone paied attention on what they are doing. Further more,other students needed to write down what each person ordered. Not only performing students but also everyone in the class are involved in the class activity. I think the only problem is that students' English proficiency must be very high. Otherwise, they might not know what to do on stage.

A great website for authentic listening practice

2006-03-21T13:13:00.000+08:00

Practicing listening comprehension is not an easy job. However, the activity is basically for students to get a lot of input. I am a TA in language drill courses. I always wonder how to give students sufficient information to facilitate thier listening skills. The ultimate answer coming up to my mind is through the wideless internet. A website that I would try to use in the following semesters. It's called English Language Listening Lab Online(Elllo). You could find five different language translations. There are eight parts of this website.

1. This week!: each week this place will provide different interviews from all over the world. Providing aural and oral input, students can learning authentically and evaluate themselves after all. It also provides the content of the text with mp3 files.
2. Mixer: a topic question will be asked to different country people. One of the topic is "when do you get up and go to bed?" They will make comments on it. These answers will reflect the fact of different cultures.
3. News Center: news are presented in video style. After listening to the video, students are asked to answer some questions. If the answer is wrong, they are asked to listen to it again and again.
4. Songs: songs will be played online and lyrics will be showed line by line immediately.
5. Listening games: watch some pictures first and guess who is the speaker and answer some questions.
6. Speakers by Country: speakers from many countries are having interviews with a reportor. This part gives the idea of culture respectively.
7. Search:providing instant google links for checking vocabulary and additional information
8. Links:providing useful links for listening.

Reflection to Group 2's presentation

2006-03-20T16:20:00.000+08:00

Group 2 provided losts of activities to teach English. The first teacher suggested a good way to teach grammar by simply letting students to find the rules of placing frequency adverb on verb to be or regular verb. They also made very good use of powerpoint. However, sometimes, I feel kind of distracted by too much information on the same slide. I suggested that they could devide some of the slides into two, such as dividing 10 sentences into 5 sentences per each slide. The following activities are good too because they help me to practice the same grammar rule for many times. If they want to practice this lesson to junior high school, they need to slow down a little bit and part this lesson into two courses.

Good Website for Grammar and Vocabulary

2006-03-09T00:30:00.000+08:00

1. Animated grammar: grammar rules are presented in animation. After the animation, students can examine thier understanding immediately on the following test. http://www.csjh.ttct.edu.tw/%B0%CA%B5e%A4%E5%AAk.htm

2. Non stop English: a website designed for vocabulary and grammar practice for different level learners.
http://nonstopenglish.com/

3. Vocabulary University http://www.vocabulary.com/
4. Interesting Things for ESL Students: a website providing lots of interesting activities, puzzles, games and some listening comprehension http://www.manythings.org/

Amazing Power Point

2006-03-08T21:48:00.000+08:00

Breaking the rules of the traditional examination, teacher Alice used power point to encourage students choosing thier credits. Students got the power of control and they were willing to try the difficult one with higher scores. Technology really brings us lots of interesting ways of teaching and evaluation. I wish I can know more about usinlg powerpoint in the future.

Reflection on Group 1's presentation

2006-03-08T21:34:00.000+08:00

I think this group gave us a clear idea of vocabulary teaching and inspiration of vocabulary teaching for our own. Owning to the lack of teaching experience to junior high school students, student teachers like us do not know exactly the language proficiency there. Maybe this is the main reason why the teaching is so difficult. Teaching vocabulary in this lesson seems to me like a review rather than "teaching". Although it is good to enocurage students to say any names of food first, students may not be such highly motivated and energetic like us. A conversation practice at the end is also performed like a review. The teacher can give more instruction before starting to ask someone to speak up. Moreover, some students who didn't speak anything in class could practice with the others as long as the teacher engaging in-class activities to help them practice. As a English teacher, he or she should provide as many chances as possible to facilitate authentic conversation. That is the way students learn in class.

A trend to teach young children reading

2006-02-28T19:33:00.000+08:00

L1 home-based reading has been widely proved to facilitate emergent literacy. Current studies also show significant improvement on preschoolers' success of reading in helping to gain first language proficiency. Since reading is such a good way to learn languages, people should encourage the action to develop self-initiated reading in L1 and L2.

The following websites are designed for home-based reading.
1. BBC--little animals activity center http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/laac/menu.shtml
2. A website designed by education department of Hong Kong to teach story reading bilingually http://resources.ed.gov.hk/story_telling/
3. A well organized website providing novice readers to advanced a fun and useful way to learn how to read. http://www.starfall.com/

Philosophy of teaching

2006-02-25T10:22:00.000+08:00

As a future English teacher, I'm hoping that through my teaching, students can learn authentic knowledge of the world. To teach language, a teacher should provide as many chances as possible to encourage his or her students to speak out. However, teachers and students' interactions has been constrained by time limited . Teachers can still find a way to endure learning at home. For instance, to assign homework to students or to create a blog for further investigation of thier own thinkg, just like what I'm doing now. While students are in the classroom, teachers propose questions to promote in-class discussion. While students are at home, they are all depending on thier own. I believe that the teacher shouldn't be the only one speak in the calss. Students should have the reponsibility to involve in providing information they had and discussing with the other classmates in class. As a facilitator, the teachers draw a map for language learning and encourage students to explore by their own. Through adventure of learning a languae, students can learn well from authentic experience. Moreover, it can bring lifelong learning to every students.

A new semester

2006-02-25T10:12:00.000+08:00

This course was made to let us reconstruct the idea of methodology of English teaching. After this first course, I find that most of the learning process are required teachers' hardworking. As a matter of fact, teaching is not that easy as it was. The syllabus for this course is kind of rush. Though, the most exciting part is when we can have school visits. It also give me a chance to work on my own blog which is totally brain new for me.