March 13th, 2014 Seating Plan
As I
mentioned earlier, there are 11-12 students in classes. A perfect classroom
environment is available for learning English. However, the students' seating
plan doesn’t seem okay for me. Since they split the class into two because they
want to increase interaction during English lessons, this kind of seating plan
doesn’t fit their purposes at all. The students sit wherever the like, when the
half of the class leave. When we look at 4C, we see that at least they
arranged the desks for the group activities, but at 4G, the desks are arranged
in rows, classic seating arrangement. (The classroom 4G used is narrower when
compared to the one 4C used.) Also, the girls sit next to girls, and the boys
sit next to the boys generally. It is clearer in 4G. The students sit
randomly and there is no specific seating plan. When I look back on my
experiences from last semester, there were boys and girls in each and every group
and there were plenty of group activities which require their interactions with
each other.
Simple Past Tense
When we move on the
lessons, I have so much to talk about. The topic of the day was Simple Past
Tense. They just started to learn the topic. Maybe, they had an idea, but they
didn’t know it consciously. The teacher has an activity which is called Broken
Eggs. The eggs are cut from the lines in the middle. (19 different verbs like
in the example. She pasted the upper part of the eggs on the board, asked the
students the meaning of the verbs, asked some nouns, phrases which can go
with these verbs. (e.g.: eat an apple, eat in a restaurant, eat slowly). Then,
she pasted the bottom part of the verbs, which are the past forms of verbs.
Students tried to match them. I liked the idea of teaching past forms of verbs,
introducing the topic. When I was a student, the teacher gave me a list and I
memorized them, just like everyone else. I have never thought that we should
really spend time on that, but when I see the outcomes of it, I absolutely
think that we should. There are some problems, though. For example, some
students said “ates” (eats –ate) a couple of times. I thought this was quite
normal because of overgeneralization. Our mentor teacher reacted differently
and said "Where did this come from? Have I ever said something like 'ates'?" She
looked so surprised, which is very surprising for me. The teacher kept asking
“Do you understand?” during the lesson. This is not an effective way of seeing
whether the students understood the topic or not. As expected, none of the
students said “I didn’t understand.” even if they look so confused. The
teacher said we have a song today, but she meant something else and the
students got excited, but when they realized that it isn’t a song but it is
just a rhythm, they kinda got disappointed. One of them, Baha, even complained
and said this wasn’t what he expected when he heard “song”. The rhythm involves
two taps on the lap, two claps, and two clicks, one of them was for saying the
present forms of verbs and the second one was for saying the past forms of the
verbs. Interestingly, the students couldn’t manage to keep that rhythm. I
thought it is because they didn’t like the activity, so they don’t try to do it
correctly or so. According to our teacher, they aren’t good at kinaesthetic
activities because of computer games. When they pronounce the past forms of
verbs, they had difficulties. They confused “were” with “where” in terms of
pronunciation.
Hiç yorum yok:
Yorum Gönder