Sounds of English~English teaching diary of pizza~

What a teacher can do to be successful teacher

2007-06-25T11:02:00.000+09:00

Listening to Mr. M’s lecture, I knew many difficult problems are going on in junior high school. Mr. M talked about characteristic of junior high school students, for example they lack social skills and attitude to older people including their parents. Teacher should understand this situation, and think what teacher can do. On my opinion, teacher should be a good example for students. In order to be so, teacher must do his or her best on both side of teaching subject and social customs.
And I was interested in Mr. M’s lecture about order of teaching English. When I was a junior high school, classes were just based on the text book mostly. I think teaching text book can be monotonous, for example just repetition of what teacher said. On my opinion, I think following order of teaching can make students active;
1, The teacher does short play using gesture and pictures presenting grammatical feature;
Students will guess what teacher said using the hints (gesture and pictures).
2, Learning new words;
Students’ audible parts in short play will become more than first time.
3, Pronunciation of sentence
4,Learnig grammar
Teacher should make classes interesting in order to make students interested in the subject. And also teacher should decide class order based on students characteristics.
Thank you for your reading!

My experience of the communicative activity

2007-05-25T03:03:00.000+09:00

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!

Review of communicative activities

2007-05-16T05:51:00.000+09:00

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.

Precious people

2007-05-06T01:46:00.000+09:00

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.

My English learning story in secondary school

2007-04-22T15:51:00.000+09:00

In junior high school, students learned knowledge of English grammar by reading and translating sentences and filling handouts. Sometimes we wrote English composition. I enjoyed writing sentences in English. But we had few chances to talk in English with others. So, I could only read and write.
In high school, we had English reading class and writing class. In English reading class, I felt learning English is interesting because I could know wonderful stories by learning English. And in English writing class, we learned knowledge of grammar working out problems on text books. By doing this activity, I became able to write and read English smoothly, so I think this experience is very valuable for me. I don’t think it was enjoyable that a teacher always said “This kind of problem is often given in entrance examinations!” in a class because I think we study English not only for examinations but also for understanding other cultures. And in the high school, there weren’t a lot of chances to talk in English, so we couldn’t learn how to talk in English enough in school (in my case, I learned pronunciations listening to English music). But we sometimes had classes in which ALT joined. In the classes, we enjoyed playing games in English (for example, we did crossword games, writing words in relay with groups). These activities were very effective for me in language learning because I could learn language enjoying games and also feel familiarity with language.
As an English teacher, I think it is important to put reading, listening, writing and speaking in a balanced manner. And it’s interesting and challenging to express one’s idea and talk with others in English, so I want to give a lot of chances to communicate in English to students.

Self Introducution

2007-04-19T15:16:00.000+09:00

Hello!Nice to meet you.I'm Pizza.My major is fine art Education in junior high.And I also learn English.I want to improve my abilities in using and teaching English.