Summer Intensive Pre Intensive

The first day of the Summer Intensive courses last Thursday :my Pre-Intermediate class seem to be a nice group with most of them communicating in English all the time.

Most of the students are either students at school/university or with a variety of different professions.Most of the students attended the first class except for Dora,a young photographer who I'd placement tested last week.

For the first class I did 4 ice-breakers from Jill Hafield's 'Classroom Dynamics' to help the group bond.I shall use the other warmer activities later in the course.

Regarding interaction patterns between the learners I noticed that,though Nabil,a student studying in France,was very confident,he didn't interact with the other students as much as I thought;it seemed he needed thinking time to reflect on the activity/task.In general there was plenty of interactions taking place,for instance when the students were doing the 'My Home Town' activity one of the students,Yoshi,a Japanese man,took out his map of Tunisia so that his classmate could use it to talk about her home town.

From the book Reflective Teaching in Second Language Classrooms,Richards,J.C.,in the chapter,approaches to classroom investigation,some important procedures are recommended:
Bailey 1990,Porter et al.1990,Walker 1985 state that it's important to make entries on a regular basis and immediately spend time after the lesson in writing up about the lesson
In addition to review the journal entries as some things which were not obviously apparent might appear so later on.

On page 16 Richards,J.C. mentions some reflection questions to guide thé writing of the journal:
What did you set out to teach?
Were you able to accomplish your goals?
What teaching materisls did you use?
What grouping arrangements did you use?

Did anything amusing or unusual occur?
Did you discover anything new?
Did students contribute actively to the lesson?
Were the students challenged by the lesson?
What do you think the students really learned from the lesson?
What did they like most about the lesson?
What didn't they respond to?


The students seemed pretty confident in working together,only Marwa,a young school girl was a little shy in the speaking activities.