Entry 4: About Dictation Quiz

March 20th, 2014

This week, our mentor teacher began the lesson with a quiz. Dictation quiz.... I have never heard of it before. I was thinking what this dictation quiz is like when the students were getting prepared for the quiz. Unfortunately, I had no idea. I was trying to understand from the words, but I couldn't. Since it is a private school, I was expecting a new quiz type which is very effective. To my surprise, it was the most common quiz type I had when I was in primary school.  She distributed some blank papers and said the verbs and the students were supposed to write what they heard on the paper with the past forms. After they finished writing, they exchanged papers with their peers to check the answers. Since they connect the letters while writing, as a part of new education system, they couldn’t read their friends’ handwriting. This created a problem and they spent a lot of time completing checking the answers. All the students were asking their friends from one corner to another. “Hey, what is written here?” I think that’s not about the peer check, it is about their handwriting style. I don’t know why they insist on making students write in that way. They look so messy and it is really hard to read even if it is written neatly. If we go back to quiz, our mentor teacher asked “Who made 20 mistakes?” when they finished checking, and she continued with “Who made 19, 18 … mistakes?” I don’t know whether she did this on purpose but I think it isn’t motivating at all. It would be better if she began with asking “Who did zero/1 mistake?" Also, she said the ones who made mistakes when writing the correct form of verbs’ have to write them three times at the back of paper. I didn’t know that this method is still used in a private school.

After the quiz, they needed to form sentences with verbs. However, some of the verbs are intransitive so it was difficult to form sentences out of context (e.g. sleep, run). Besides, when it comes to the teacher’s wait time, she doesn’t wait enough for students to answer. Students volunteer to give an answer and they are enthusiastic to participate in the class but they need some time to do that. 

Finally, they played puzzle. The letters were jumbled and they need to write the words and its past forms correctly. I think this kind of activity is neither fun nor effective. It isn’t logical to use this kind of activity to teach spelling. They are already confused because some of the verbs take only –(e)d, but some of them change completely. Even I had some trouble finding the bare forms of verbs.

abker	break	broke
wsim	swim	swam
tae	eat	ate