This past week, I had a class on Tuesday afternoon and then spent the remainder of the week preparing for Utsunomiya University, which begins in early October. I also created two vocabulary quizzes for my first and second-year classes at Teikyo University ( there is a lack of textbook resources, so I am making the quizzes myself, which is fine). It turns out that this semester both classes I have at Teikyo are very small. This is a nice opportunity and also a challenge. One, a small group allows us to really have lots of lengthy and deep activities with much communication practice. On the other hand, it means I have to plan a lot of activities for our 90-minute classes. I think there is always a happy medium though, and I feel that the students can take advantage of the class time to explore writing, reading, thinking, and doing ( in many different skill areas). In other words, I don't want to plan non-stop activities, but touch on different areas and go deep into many of these areas, and have the in-class time to do the work on these things. This makes me interested in exploring the role of being a teacher. I am interested in how much should we "teach" and how much should we facilitate, so I want to explore the many ways I can be helpful to my small classes this semester, at Teikyo.
Vocabulary Quizzes
I handed out unit vocabulary last week and we spent time in class looking up sentence examples online. I recommended the Cambridge dictionary online ( probably any dictionary is fine, but I wanted to narrow the choice and the Cambridge online has many sentence examples following each definition, all of which are highly visible. After collecting one example sentence for each word we shared them with the class and wrote them on the chalkboard. After this, we played with them a little more. I asked students to change various words in the example sentences ( new subject, object, verbs, adjectives, nouns etc...). They had the opportunity to make the vocabulary personal.
The following vocabulary quizzes are going to be given this Friday. The students were told via the syllabus and highlighted during our first class that a week after being given vocabulary there will always be a short quiz. I really want these quizzes to be a springboard for answering questions, creating new sentences as a class, and exploring the words. Not a formal judgmental quiz on whether you know it or not. I want to develop a kind of enjoyment in learning new words!
Quizzes, September 30, Teikyo:
Ben's Class & Agenda, Tuesday, September 26
Last week, we finished reading "The Lion Witch and the Wardrobe" (a condensed drama script). We are enjoying reading scripts aloud. One student brought in a new script for us last week, and so this week I made a recording of it and sent it to my students for practice. Taking a poll in class, we are going to aim on working on prosody in reading aloud (I hope to find ways to spin prosodic reading into prosodic conversation activities so that we can keep a realistic and practical element at the forefront (speaking with rhythm, pausing, intonation, etc...). The new script is nice because it's made of up several short dialogues/stories ( a couple pages each). We are going to do a new one each week.
Creating Class & Agenda, Wednesday, September 28
This week we will present to each other the projects that we decided on two weeks ago. I am also planning a short grammar lesson and a game. I listened to some very good ideas and advice from classmates and will perhaps this time have the students work together to come up with ideas for talking. Generating ideas and creating a fairly spontaneous organization (students organizing who will talk about what)- all in a limited amount of time, I think, is a good practice for us. I also want to speak with them about their presentations, offer any feedback I can, and move on to another project. Next, I would like to suggest to them we do something such as create a podcast or radio show recording out of a script or create an original script. Finally, I want to include role-play and find out what kind of situations they want to communicate in now and in the future. This might be related to the radio show idea. We'll see. With this class, I want to come prepared, but also very open to listening to suggestions about the class direction. The only thing I am fairly certain of is that creating projects can really help us learn.
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