As if the pressure of Teaching Practice was not enough to kill us, another tension came. It was first of the four assignments that we had to finish during our four weeks long CELTA course. First Assignment title was, "Know your learners". As for as myself is concerned, I always had a trouble of not remembering the names of my students. I always believed that it was enough to point to some student if you want to ask or tell something. After all teacher is the central figure in the class and everyone should fix eyes towards them.
Here we learned the golden point, "NOMINATE". Each individual has their own personality and they like to be called by their name and not with you or boy etc. In order to learn the name of the students, we learned the technique of pasting the names of the students on their desks in the beginning and after a few days of nominating them one can learn all the names.
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| While asking something call the students with their names. |
For the assignment, we interviewed the students. I still feel for those poor guys. During summer holidays when their other friends were enjoying their lives, these people were asked to come and take some lessons. Anyhow, we started interviews and found some interesting facts about our students.
I found that most of them were shy, having problems like pronunciation, fluency and spellings. This is mainly because of their L1 (in this case Turkish) influence. Halit, Sana, Yasemin and Beyza Nur were few of the students in our group. Later on as the course progressed, they opened up a little and by the end of 1st part of our CELTA, the time when the group was to be handed over others, these students were not ready to leave us at all. I believe that it was mainly because of our efforts to make lessons according to their interest and taste. How could we come to know about their liking was only due to the assignment, "Know your learners". I advise every teacher to know their learners and design the plans according to strengths, grey areas, likings and dis likings of the students.
Receptive Skills:
On fourth day of CELTA we attended an input session on receptive skills. Caroline gave us a wonderful model of reading strategies. In order to check our students performance we check their written and spoken skills. For these productive skills, we need to focus on strong receptive skills. Reading and listening are the two receptive skills which need more systematic teaching. Most of us teach in the same way as we were taught. Unfortunately some bad teaching practices of few of our teachers stick to our minds and then it is very difficult to throw them away. We all must understand that reading is not a passive activity and in order to make it more fruitful, our lessons must be equipped with some basic techniques.
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| Pictures could be useful to activate background schema |
- Activate students' background Schema. (Check students prior knowledge about the topic)
- Use pictures to arouse interest. (Make the students guess for the information they are going to get)
- Pre-teach important vocabulary (the words which may be necessary for the task)
- Always task before teach.
- First task should be a gist task. (A question or couple of them to make sure quick reading/skimming)
- Detailed task (To make sure that students can find some specific information; scanning)
- Peer checking (Students can check each other's work)
- Answer key: Instead of wasting time on discussing each question, you may paste your answer key on a wall where the students may go and check their answers)
- Feedback: (Some delayed error correction could be done, without pointing out the students.
We teachers need to make our students realize that they are not required to read each and every word of a text. It is enough to focus on the answers of the questions and at the same time they may get gist and deeper comprehension of the passage.
Lead-in stage of the lesson is the most important part of lesson, since it sets the tone. Laura Greenwood, in her article writes about this fact. She says:
"When doing receptive skills work (listening and readings) with your students, it is important to take time at the very beginning of the lesson to activate your students’ experiences with and knowledge of the topic of the listening/reading. In TEFL this is called activating background schema. Doing this immediately engages your Ss, gets them using English, and sets them up for more successful listening/reading comprehension. Read more about Schema Theory to understand why this approach is successful.
• This component of a receptive skills lesson is called a ‘Lead In.’
• Include visuals, realia, discussion, and personalization – a broad look at the topic/subject/content area of the listening or reading.
• Ask some general questions and have your Ss brainstorm ideas/knowledge of the listening/reading topic or ‘What I want to Know’ (about the topic).
• Read a background text, watch a video clip, listen to others discuss the topic of the listening/reading, etc. to stimulate discussion.
• Make an explicit link between the topic of the text and students’ own lives and experiences in order to prepare them for successful listening/reading.
If you don’t activate your Ss background schema when teaching English as a foreign language, your Ss might not be interested in listening/reading, have a purpose for listening/reading, or even be ready to successfully listen/read.
Beyond all of the above excellent reasons for activating background schema when teaching English as a foreign language, is the fact that you will learn a lot of interesting and remarkable facts about your Ss.
The lesson of the day is "An English Language Teacher is a magician who could turn a simple piece of realia into a wonderful learning opportunity."
By the way today is my birthday and I am going to celebrate it with my family. See you next time with another episode of my CELTA experience.
