Pre course 3 – Creating interesting lessons

Still going happily forward in my new (hopefully) future profession I did the 3rd part of the pre course and only now I found out that this is the end of module one, out of four … ugh. Just take a deep breath and keep on going.

Anyhow, this one is something I have pretty much no experience at all. I do am excited about this and judging my level of English I will have to focus more on this point during the course. As every time experience makes you better or as we say “no master has fallen from the sky”.

As before they asked you to watch a video about a teacher who talked about a successful English lesson she held.

Afterwards they asked you to answer these questions:

1) Why did the learners enjoy the listening?
2) What was useful and engaging about the questions Amy had designed for the interview?
3) What was she doing while they did the interview activity? What do you think she was listening for?

Actually, the answers to those questions are quite simple. She enjoyed because the students were learning pretty much by themselves (every teachers dream when he doesn’t have to do anything).

It was useful as she had picked an interesting subject where the students knew about a little bit but not too much so they even learned some (imagine, learning in school, whooaa?)
What was engaging in this listening/speaking exercise, was that she did not provide any pre-made questions the students had to ask themselves later on in an interview but more that everybody had to came up with his own questions and create an interview in their own way, which of course promotes the learning process.

I’d say (and that’s what I would do) Amy listened for the pronunciation and the way they speak naturally without having someone intervene.

Actually afterwards they give you the answers. BUT it did make me thing about some classes I attended. Most of the time it is these “basic” listening thing where you have a sheet with questions.
Doing this – and this is my opinion when I think back of my class – will not be successful every time. Half of my class was just there because they were forced to or did not really be there and if you give them the freedom to create their own questions we would just be like “what day is today?”. Bam. 100 points.

On the other side her class was quite small where it’s easier to achieve such goals. Shout out to the German education system.

It is definitely a good idea to find a general topic everyone likes (like traveling) and then a more specific sub-topic like Amy did in her video where the students had to talk a certain culture group in Asia.
These days though everyone is offended and calls you racist when choose such a topic. This video is from 2011 when it still was a different time. I think that instead of just “listening” exercises you take videos of people close up as you can also see the lip/mouth movement which makes it easier for you to imitate. Also as most people are more an audio-visual learner instead of an just audio learner.

I get this “what about when you receive a phone call?” It’s 2018 now, nobody calls each other anymore. So we take it to next level.
“What about your playing an online game and speak with other guys?” It’s difficult. Because honestly half of those people probably aren’t even English and have a horrible accent or make a lot of mistakes. Currently I have only one native Speaker in my direct environment and this affects your English skills a lot.
I knew some people who got “dumber” over time as they had to speak in a simpler English so others would understand. And I see it myself that you have to put in a lot of effort to fight against it.

Still, speaking with others from other countries is a good practice.
Regarding the exercise I’d prefer to show a video on YouTube, as I mentioned before already, where they discuss a certain.
Idea incoming: same with podcasts. Another idea: I just remembered that one picture I saw a few weeks back, unfortunately I cannot find it anymore, where the teacher held an exam and simply wrote “you are asked to write an exam about XXXX and are asked to provide five questions and answer them yourself.
Rating: easy question – 1 point, intermediate question – 2 points, hard question – 3 points”.

More or less this what he wrote. If I should come across that picture I’ll share it with you guys.
This is just lazy exam preparation but I think it’s a very good idea for such an exercise. You as a teacher check in on what kind of questions they choose to answer and ask.

The good thing about such a way of teaching is that you promote a student’s thinking and processing his knowledge in an all-day situation. My teacher called it “cross learning” – using knowledge you learned in one class in another class as students (me included) tend to only use what you learned in said class with said teacher.

And isn’t that what you want your students to become?