I spent a lot of time choosing the format and content of the presentation, originally I planned to do an activity that I could offer to upper-intermediate students as a demonstration of task-based/role-playing speaking activity. It is called "The people of our neighborhood" and I really like both administering and taking part in it. The storyline goes like this: there are several families in the neighborhood, so the students are split in 3-4-5-6-10 groups with same number of people in each group. Then the roles are distributed: mother, father, son, cousin etc. Each family also has a secret, so the groups receive a sheet describing their mystery. Maybe, one family sold a fake Chinese vase to another, and the third family accidentally killed the dog of the first family, you get the picture. Anyway, the family gets together, reads their secret and decides on one person, who will tell the real secret. The rest come up with cover ups. Then members of different families meet to talk about the secrets, like all fathers get together and all aunts, and all uncles. After everyone had an opportunity to talk to everyone the families reconvene and try to decide what is the secret of other families. Then it moves to an all-class discussion. It is a fun activity to do, and it also gives opportunities to talk about question techniques, answer evasion and other discourse problems.
And now to something completely different like things that I have actually included in my presentation. After I did some time calculations, I realized that "The people of our neighborhood" are not going to happen, so I decided to do a small warm-up discussion and then do two application activities. I probably should have done some more time calculations, but I always over plan.
For the discussion I chose two questions that seem most controversial to me, fluency vs. accuracy and pronunciation. I was thinking about including feedback instead of pronunciation, since pronunciation is a huge topic, I mean, we spent half a semester on it alone, but then I remembered that we have already talked about feedback, so I went with those two. For the activities I had the teaching scenarios, and for the second activity I was going to split everyone into pairs and have each pair design one activity that would enforce one of Brown's principles. But we didn't have time for that.
Overall, I felt that the presentation went pretty well, although the discussion part took longer than I expected, but I decided not to break it up, since we were having a really valuable conversation about really important topics. The scenario activity also went pretty well and it was, I thought, a nice change from the discussion format.
Teaching speaking is a huge topic and there is no way to touch, even briefly all of its issues, but I hope we got a chance to talk and think about at least some things tonight.
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3 comments:
Hi Mariya, I heard about you immigranted to the states when you're little. If this is correct, I'm curious about your experience. Do you still have the feeling that you faced the difficulty of learning Enlish at the beginning? Or it's not a challenge at all. Thank you.
Lilian, I think that you have me confused with someone else. I moved to the States three years ago. I did start learning English, when I was three, and then I spent six months in the US when I was 13. But I am definitely a relatively recent immigrant.
And since I practically grew up bilingual I don't remember any major challenges :)
I think that your discussion went well. I agree it was a helpful learning kind of conversation.
It is important to discuss what we read to get a sense of how we all experience the things that we read about. We can all experience the same thing and draw different conclusions about how we as teachers should respond. We don't all experience the same thing so that makes it even more interesting to converse.
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