Reading between the Lines (CAE class/Sept 2010)

In today's lesson I revised some of the vocab from last week's lesson via a vocab cards where the students have to give a definition of the word/expression on the card and their partner have to guess the word.
Did a warmer actvity from British Council Learn English;the 'How to ' video section in which a colleague pays another colleague a compliment.The students enjoyed watching the video and then did a matching vocab activity and also did a role play activity complimenting their 'colleague'
Warmer:word bank from the Flo Jo CAE web site(later look at the reading section)

Focus on developing reading skills:

During the reading pre discussion
on what kinds of books they read,whether they were 'fast' or 'slow' readers one of the students said he his reading skills were actually better in English than in Arabic;some of the other students said reading in Arabic was really difficult.


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?