Jerry Kim

Professor Shaw

EDUC 8500/8505

10-17-2015

In the last hour of yesterday’s class, Professor Shaw introduced a model lesson for the class to try out in groups. This lesson was based on a reading task, which consisted of six sections. The section 1 was a first pre-reading exercise about content background, and the students had a chance to review their knowledge of 20th to 21st century French history by matching the dates from the given box to the listed events. The section 2 was a second pre-reading exercise about vocabulary, and the students played the Concentration game: in groups, each member selected two of the cards that were faced down and then showed them to his or her group. If a word and its matching definition were both faced up, then the member kept them. If not, then the member had to either give a definition of the selected word or guess a word from the selected definition before returning the two cards faced down to the original place. The game continued until all the cards were matched. The section 3 was a third pre-reading exercise about pronunciation, and the students had an opportunity to practice in their teams French words and phrases that would appear in the reading later on. The section 4 was a fourth pre-reading exercise about discussion, and the students discussed in their groups two profound questions that would have relevance to the reading later on.

After the four pre-reading exercises were done in teams, Professor Shaw distributed the first half of “Recipe for Murder” to the class. For reading, each member was paired with another member in the same group, and each was assigned the character of the story to read aloud. The section 5 was a mid-reading exercise about prediction, and the students answered mid-reading questions with their partners after reading the first half of the story. Once the students had enough time to note their responses briefly, Professor Shaw distributed its second half to the class. The section 6 was a post-reading exercise about comprehension plus analysis, and the students again answered post-reading questions with their partners. Finally, the class did not have time to do it, but this reading task was originally planned to have a differentiated learning workshop afterwards. The students could choose one or more of the following activities: writing, role-playing, language awareness raising, personal writing and art.

I must say that overall, this model lesson is really interesting and instructive in a sense that each section of the task has its specific purpose as to help readers understand better about the story before, during and after reading it. The lesson simply does a very good job in turning the reading into a comprehensible input for English learners; the first four pre-reading sections are well planned to prepare the readers in advance for what may potentially be difficult parts of the reading. For instance, the readers may hardly have any knowledge about the history of France between 20th and 21st century, so they may have trouble picturing the setting of the story. Some of the readers, especially English learners, may lack knowledge of English vocabulary, so they may not understand sentences here and there regardless of the content. Also, those who have no knowledge of French language will have no idea how to pronounce French pronouns or borrowed words from French while reading the story. Lastly, discussing questions that are relevant to the story beforehand allows the readers to expect possible themes. All of the four sections mentioned can help English learners facilitate the reading more smoothly.

In addition, I like the instruction that each student is paired with another and then assigned a character to read aloud. I remember taking my time to read my lines in class because I usually find this style of writing somewhat difficult to follow along at a normal reading speed even though I consider myself fluent in English. Thus, I can definitely imagine how hard it can be for English learners to make sense of the story that may seem foreign to them. One more thing worth mentioning is the mid-reading section, which actually divides up the reading into two at its midpoint; it allows the readers to check what they understand from the first half and what they predict of the last half of the story. Of course, although post-reading questions are nothing new, they are necessary for testing how well the readers comprehend the entire story and guiding them to analyze it more effectively. As a concluding remark, I think that having a learning workshop with differentiated tasks at the end is a brillant part of the lesson plan since it lets the readers make use of what they understand from the reading as to consolidate their learning.

Our group really enjoyed participating and analyzing the “Recipe for Murder” lesson plan. There were many aspects of it that we found to be very helpful in terms of utilizing it in an upper-intermediate, lower-advanced class of students. We felt that the exercises, particularly the workshop exercises that the students choose to work on at the end, cater to some different perceptions of learning styles. The kinesthetic learners have a role play activity, the visual learners have an art activity, and the mechanical learners have writing opportunities (also digital  mechanical learners have an opportunity for a blog post). We also noted that personal writing is also being incorporated, which can further help students establish connections with the activities and thus retaining more of the information. Giving the students these choices really acknowledges the different learning styles and shows flexibility as a teacher in order to get students to learn the way they learn best.

We noted the many connections to other subjects, the most obvious one being history. There is also science and health in terms of the reflection questions and looking at food in terms of what is and what isn’t good for you. There is also an opportunity to connect all this to ones own culture.

Our group discussed some possible workshop activities that could be added to this lesson. The first one was rewriting the ending. Seeing as the students had a chance to talk about what they thought would happen in the mid-reading part of the lesson, we thought it would be cool for them to put those thoughts into writing after finding out what actually happened. They could write this in the same format as the story or maybe a script.
Another activity would be to think of some irresistible and dangerously good dishes from the students’ home country, and if they are visual they can even sketch up or draw these dishes.
Our last idea, which could be a little bit complicated based on the home culture of the student and the amount of creativity present, would be to adapt the story to a modern situation. For example, instead of taking place in France 50 years ago, it takes place in modern day NYC in an interrogation room with just a chair and a table with an American detective. It might bring out some interesting points of view!

There were some things that our group would have done differently. In terms of the fill in the blank section in the very beginning, we had two ideas of how to introduce students to this. Instead of just giving it to them without context, we would either have them read up on it as homework before class or we would show them a short video that gives a summary of some of the big dates of WWII and let them piece the rest together.
For the vocabulary game, we noted that some of the words may be a little bit tricky to know right off the bat so we thought of having the cards face up first and match them up together so that the students have a chance to visualize them. We also thought of maybe doing the game after the reading so the students have seen the words being used, which might help them remember the words better.

This lesson was very interactive, and we definitely had fun acting out the reading and getting into heated discussion during the reflective portion. There is definitely a lot of good material to work with here!

By Sara (Ikea), Dylan (Pickle), Amy (Boba), and Ben (Cleopatra)

I want to reflect on the total physical response method that I witnessed last Friday during class observation.  I do not want to go into detail on the actual procedures of the method because other students have done so already and I do not want to beat a dead horse. I think that in my case it would be more beneficial to write about my reaction to the method itself.

My experience with language learning has been for the most part incredibly standard. The institutions that taught me Russian used methods that were standard in the Soviet Union and continue to be used today in present day Russia. These methods consist mainly of rote learning (memorization of grammar rules, vocabulary words and dialogues), writing essays, reading texts of ever-increasing difficulty and doing never ending grammar exercises. I supplemented these techniques by having constant interaction with the local Russian population in the cities where I lived and over the course of 8 years of living in Russia, I have been able to gain a high level of fluency.

A lot of the techniques that I have witnessed since I have started studying at MIIS are completely new to me and I must admit that as a result of their newness, I sometimes incorrectly form biased opinions mainly because that wasn’t the way I was taught. Fortunately, I am starting to change my mind about much of what I thought I knew about language learning and teaching. The total physical response technique is one example of a method that I wished I had introduced to a lot earlier. Professor Shaw and some of the other more experienced students have stated several times that language teaching is all about variety. I cannot agree more! There are times in my language learning history when I would have like more variety.

I should reiterate that I do not think it is possible to gain fluency in a language with these types of techniques alone but they are a great way to end a language unit and or bring some fun into the language-learning environment.

Sincerely,

Sergio