Wednesday, January 5, 2011

New Year Day Resolutions (Ele 4 Tuesday/Thursday)

Yesterday the topic was on the NewYear Day Resolutions.
the language structure was: going to
stage one:the students wrote/discussed good and bad habits and in their groups
stage two:the students wrote down their New Year Resolutions and then in their groups
compared/discussed them
stage three:group to group interaction:with another group each group compared/discussed
the resolutions and decided the best/most interesting ones.

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 the writing of the journal:
Discussing/making New Year Resolutions:
Group 2:Elementary 3:

1. Did the students contribute actively to the lesson?
Yes, though it was mainly the male students and even though the female students had a fairly good level of English they seemed too shy and quiet to participate and interact with the male students.

2. Were the students challenged by the lesson? 
They interacted in pairs and groups when making/discussing the New Year Resolutions.

3. What did the students learn from the lesson?
They learnt to use the structure 'going to' to make/talk about New Year Resolutions.

4. Did anything amusing or unusual happen?
In this class there are new students and most of these students interact a lot with their peers whilst the old students interacted as they did before in the previous class;ie the confident students:Akrem interacting a lot as usual,though sometimes in Arabic in a conversation with Ibrahim (seems to be a case of code switching,perhaps to avoid misunderstanding and to clarify the meaning of something more clearly),
and Anis,Dhia,Fares interacting only sufficiently to do the activity.

Akrem,Ibrahim,Sami and Mohamed interactions often focused on explaining something to their peers.


5. Were there any problems that occurred? Dhia is still shy and quiet even though he does have the ability to speak and interact much more,seems lacking in confidence.Sometimes he's seems tired from his work.Of the new students the male students:Ibrahim,Mohamed,Sofiene,Sami interacted a lot while the female students Maria,Barbara interact quite a lot but not as much as the male students.Nada,one of the new female students,is a bit shy and quiet and doesn't interact so much.

6. Which part of the lesson was most successful or least successful?
The students discovered information about each other's habits and made New Year Resolutions.


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