The document discusses strategies for student teachers to effectively summarize and analyze their recent teaching experiences. It provides guidance on how to ask good questions in the classroom to engage all types of students, including silent, dull, lazy, bright, and slow learners. The document also identifies some common difficulties language teachers may face, such as limited time, lack of exposure to the language outside the classroom, large class sizes, and wide ranges in student abilities. It explores how to structure exercises and assignments to minimize errors and discouragement.
The document discusses strategies for student teachers to effectively summarize and analyze their recent teaching experiences. It provides guidance on how to ask good questions in the classroom to engage all types of students, including silent, dull, lazy, bright, and slow learners. The document also identifies some common difficulties language teachers may face, such as limited time, lack of exposure to the language outside the classroom, large class sizes, and wide ranges in student abilities. It explores how to structure exercises and assignments to minimize errors and discouragement.
The document discusses strategies for student teachers to effectively summarize and analyze their recent teaching experiences. It provides guidance on how to ask good questions in the classroom to engage all types of students, including silent, dull, lazy, bright, and slow learners. The document also identifies some common difficulties language teachers may face, such as limited time, lack of exposure to the language outside the classroom, large class sizes, and wide ranges in student abilities. It explores how to structure exercises and assignments to minimize errors and discouragement.
The document discusses strategies for student teachers to effectively summarize and analyze their recent teaching experiences. It provides guidance on how to ask good questions in the classroom to engage all types of students, including silent, dull, lazy, bright, and slow learners. The document also identifies some common difficulties language teachers may face, such as limited time, lack of exposure to the language outside the classroom, large class sizes, and wide ranges in student abilities. It explores how to structure exercises and assignments to minimize errors and discouragement.
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
Download as docx, pdf, or txt
You are on page 1/ 2
Lesson 1
STUDENT TEACHING – SUMMING UP
The aim of the lesson is to enable you to analyse your recent teaching experience in more or less objective terms, by means of selecting and classifying the information offered. You will deal with some teaching problems - large classes, minimal equipment, scarcity of materials, restricted floor space, etc. You will discuss how to ask good questions, to organise, sequence, and supervise the lesson.
1. Read the information and say what other aims in asking questions a foreign language teacher may want to achieve. In lessons on any subject the teacher's aim in asking questions may be any of the following: to create interest, to elicit information dealing with the topic discussed, to test whether information has been retained, to revise, to stimulate thought. These aims may be present in an English lesson; they often are, but they are not the only objectives. ...
2. Every teacher finds himself, at one time or other, asking a bad question. It is a bad question if it results in silence, if it is too difficult or the pupils do not understand what the teacher is getting at. It is a bad question if the teacher gets an unexpected answer. It is a bad question if the teacher, having received blank looks instead of answers, withdraws the question and modifies it so that the pupils have to start thinking all over again. A multiple question ("How, why and where did it happen?") is bad for obvious reasons. Questions which interrupt a pupil's reading or his thinking or his efforts are all bad. Compose six bad questions and say why they are bad. Show the classroom situation, if necessary, which may illustrate that the question is bad.
3. The good question is one that takes account of the fact that a class is made up of: silent pupils (who will not offer to answer though they are able); dull pupils; lazy ones; bright and active ones and "wool-gatherers" (slow pupils). All these types have to be borne in mind by the teacher, and a good question is one that is within the competence of all of them. Characterize your group at school and compose six good questions. Any lesson might do for the purpose.
4. Read the information, choose the difficulty(-ies) that may most complicate the work of a foreign language teacher. Arrange them in the order of their importance/influence (judging by your own experience) and add some others. If we are going to teach to understand and speak a second language, we should start by asking ourselves what our difficulties really are. Some of them are fairly obvious: a) the TIME available - this is always too short, no matter how generous the allowance on the time-table for English lessons; b) the SCHOOL ENVIRONMENT: the pupils will not see or hear any English at all outside the classroom; c) the SIZE of the class: this is a common difficulty and special measures must be taken to cope with this serious obstacle to language teaching; d) the wide RANGE OF ABILITIES among the pupils: this is a difficulty in every subject, but it is likely to become a major problem in language lessons.
5. Does a teacher himself present any problems? What are the qualities a language teacher should possess? What is the sphere of a language teacher's competence?
6. Express agreement or disagreement with the following:
a) Pupils can never understand a sentence they hear unless they are able to break it up in separate words and explain the function of each. b) Pupils at every stage should be able to say everything they hear at the lesson, and not hear anything they are not able to say. c) Pupils may well understand more than they say; it means that the teacher's choice of the classroom phrases can exceed the pupils' productive abilities. 7. Children's education is changing very rapidly today. In the past, teachers made children sit still for hours. They made them memorise all sorts of things. In other words, children had to go on repeating things until they knew them by heart. Today, many teachers wonder if it is possible to make children learn at all. They say you can only help them learn. They say you must let children learn and discover things for themselves. Discuss your own school years in pairs. Is there any difference between your own attitude to classes and that of your pupils? (recording dialogues and sending them to your teacher via WhatsApp)
8. How can things be improved, to your mind? (...if they have to be improved.)
9. So that your pupils are not discouraged or ashamed do not set exercises which you know will produce a large crop of mistakes. Reduce the possibility of error as much as possible. There are various ways in which this can be done: a) by relating the written work very closely to the textbook; b) by giving half the sentence which the pupil has to complete; c) by indicating in the questions where the answers can be found in the textbook; d) by giving the answers and requiring of the pupils the right words or sentences to match the question (e.g. six questions and six answers are given in random order with the instruction: "Write out each question and under it write the answer that belongs to it"); e) by putting headings and other guides on the blackboard (for example: "These are answers. Write out questions to which they could be the answers: (1) "Yesterday." (2) "About three months ago". (3) "I don't think so"... etc.; f) by allowing or requiring the pupils to use dictionaries. What other techniques can be used to reduce the possibility of error?
