2007年5月25日金曜日

My experience of the communicative activity

Hello! How was the Karuta game? I hope you enjoyed it. Today,I'm going to reflect my communicative activity.

1) What kind of language I tried to review
I tried to review progressive –ing.

2) What the objectives of my activity were
In the original plan, students listen and write sentences, but I changed the plan into listening and speaking activity. The goal of my activity was being able to listen to what teacher said and communicate in English using picture cards and be used to speaking English.

3) What new things I discovered about conducting communicative activities
In the activity, we did role play, so there were some difficult students in learning English. For example, a student didn’t join the activity, and a student seemed not to be willing to do activity with others and didn’t put the desk to other members’ desks, although I might not have noticed them if JH hadn’t told me so. I didn’t know what to do for these students. The communicative activities may be bitter time for them. If I could have some devices to let them join the activity, it would have been more enjoyable one. I realized that a teacher needs to plan activities in consideration of both students who like English and students who don’t like English or aren’t willing to join the activities.

4) My overall reflection of my experience
I felt how difficult communicative activities are. I need to plan the lesson thinking of students’ characters, explain the activity simply and comprehensively and observe how every student is doing activity thinking “Are there any students who have trouble in doing the activity?”(I didn’t walk around in the class room but it is important because I can look students well, so I want to do it if I teach again.)And I should have looked the clock more to finish the activity on time.

Please comment if you have any reflection. Thank you for reading!

2007年5月16日水曜日

Review of communicative activities

Today, I would like to review two of the “typical Japanese junior high school” communicative activities presented in ETM 3. The activities I am going to review questionnaire and カルタ. You can view them
here.

*Questionnaire*
I think questions students ask as questionnaire should be based on what each student is interested in. Students make questions using grammar they learned and ask friends as many as possible. After they asked questions, they tell the results of the questionnaires saying that”I searched about ~. I would like to tell you about it. ”
In this way, student will talk with many people and be able to be motivated to asking questions because they ask what they want to know.
*カルタ*
I think it would be better to do カルタin the following way. 
1.A Teacher read sentences which express a card printed pictures.
Ex)”The boy running in the park is Bob.”
2. After the teacher read the sentence, student try to find the card and the student who found the card will be asked by other students “What is Bob doing?” If he can answer the question, he can get the card, but if he can’t answer, he must return the card.
In this way, students can be used to both listening and speaking and making English sentence.

2007年5月6日日曜日

Precious people

I think people around me are very important for me. Others let me know who I am.
I often tend to be go-it-alone, but if I talk with someone about my problem, I can know other way of thinking, and I can awake from go-it-alone mentality. Thanks to the people around me, I can see myself in a calm manner.
I have been supported by many people since I was born, so I want to cherish my precious people, my family and friends. If they are in trouble, I want to do anything I can do for them.