Target structure: For vs. Since (to indicate time)

Level of students: 12 intermediate ESL adult learners

Time: 30 minutes

Task Card 1

This is a short bio about Mr. Thomas:
Mr. Thomas has been legal to drink since 2003. A year later, he graduated from the University of Washington and found a job at a non-profit organization in Seattle. He worked for the organization for 3 years before he got a job at a local bank in Monterey. Since then, Mr. Thomas and his wife have lived in Monterey and he has been working in the bank for 5 years.

Task Card 2

I have read this chapter _____ five times.
I have been at this school ____ 1998.
I have been in this room _____ 2 hours.
I haven’t see you ____ a long time.
I have been studying this lesson _____ two o’clock.

Instructions: *(the underlined words indicate students’ action)
Stage 1

• Teacher divides students into 4 groups. Distribute Task Card 1 to each group. Students are given one minute to read the paragraph in the group and discuss how old Mr. Thomas is based on the paragraph.

• Teacher tells students to reconvene as a whole class. Students call out their guessings and state their reasons. (Solution: 2012-2003+21=30; OR 21+1+3+5=30).

• Then teacher asks students to discuss in groups again and come up with the rules of when to use for and when to use since.  

• Teacher asks students to report their findings as a class. While students are reporting their findings, teacher writes down the rules that students has come up with on the board. Teacher either confirms or negotiates with students on their students’ findings. After all the rules are listed, teacher debriefs on the grammatical rules as a summary/reinforcement.

Stage 2

• Each student gets a sheet of Task Card 2. Give students a few minutes to fill in the blank by themselves. When they finish the exercise, ask students to discuss/compare their answers in groups.

• Teacher tell students to reconvene as a class and discuss the answers with them.

I used Jeopardy with the students from Yokohama students as one of the class activity.

Link to the slides: https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2vNGYRTLDhYTGp2ejFUOFdnSUE/edit?usp=sharing

One of my dearest friend who has studied psychology always receives my phone calls for personal consultations. I just notice recently that she has this little rountine she uses to consult me. She listens quietly to my complains about the frustrations and stressful situations that I’ve been through. She asks me some clarification questions when I explain things. After I’m done with talking, she always asks me a question, “so what can we learn from that experience?”.

When she first started to ask me the question, I didn’t know how to respond to that. It was usually some “pissed-off” things that I talked about. I knew I felt angry, frustrated and overwhelmed and I simply wanted to get the negative feelings out of me, but I never thought about what I could learn from these negative experiences. By asking me the question, she guides me to reflect on the experience not as an experiencer, but as a viewer. And the responses I give surprise myself too. I start to think what I should do to avoid the negative experience, instead of blaming the faults on others.

Relating to teaching, I think maybe we, as teachers, don’t necessarily need to help students avoid bad learning experiences and failures. However, we should, like my friend, ask them, “what can we learn form the experience?”, “what can we do to avoid the mistake or frustration?” and “what can we do to prevent the unhappy incident to happen again?”. Thus, the experience is not merely an experience or a piece of memory, but a learning process.

Also, as educators, we also can use that sentence to reflect on our teachings. It’ll be really common that we have some uncooperative kids in our class. Instead of kicking them out of the class (which is quite impossible) or being miserable, we can regard it as a learning opportunity to reflect upon our classroom management skills and strategies and the ways to improve them.

http://www.wimp.com/homeroomteacher/

This is the video that Peter Shaw showed us in class. I call this the “empathy” video. 🙂

So I showed this video to my students…and I made the ladies cry :s

Our lesson was about expressing feelings so this video was a really good introduction. For my class, I had my students write a diary everyday, but…… they all seemed to be very shy in expressing their thoughts. I wasn’t sure if it was a trust issue or a language issue. Anyway, so after showing the video, we spent sometime sharing our thoughts, reflecting on what we just saw. I shared first, of course. I told them the reasons why I’m teaching (or why I love to teach). I also shared my experience as an international student living with a host family in the U.S. I told them that although I might not completely understand what they’re going through, I am AWARE and open to listen to their stories. After sharing my story, other students shared theirs. I think we all got to know each other at a deeper level. After this event, I noticed that students were more expressive and honest about their feelings. Students began to write about their stress and difficulties living in the U.S.

Anyway, thank you Peter for sharing this powerful video.

Dear Abby Activity: 

Link http://www.uexpress.com/dearabby/?uc_full_date=20130202

So we did a picture storytelling activity. I gave them a bunch of pictures (see slide 2 on the right) and asked the students (in groups) to make a creative story. I got this idea from Kathi Bailey 🙂 Anyway, so all of the stuff below are written by students. We presented this PPT during their graduation in front of the host families. 🙂 Students had a blast doing this! 🙂 Oh, I’m also involved in one of the stories below (“crazy love affair”).. :p naughty kids

This was the first part of my PP lesson plan that I had also used for my class in Korea.

I know that PPP model (Present – Practice – Produce) has a controversy over the effectiveness; the long term acquisition of the language they learned. Thus, I was told to use TBLT which is more useful and effective way to help students acquire language. But I also learned that many adult EFL learners prefer learning grammar rather explicitly from many surveys as well as my personal teaching experiences. So my question is that “do I have to stick to TBLT instead of PPP or explicit teaching style, because the studies say TBLT is more effective, but I know my target students (adults) prefer the latter?” What is your take?

After reading the Yinghua’s reflection about her teaching guidelines, I wanted to think about my own teaching guidelines and I came up with the list as follows;

• Keep learning about the target language whether it is about language itself or about the related knowledge such as different cultures or social backgrounds. Stay up-to-date!
• Try to use authentic materials so that the students can be exposed to the target language as much as possible. (I think this is especially important in EFL settings)
• Remember that you don’t necessarily need to follow conventional (Korean) teaching style. Try to apply what you have learned to your classroom. It is your classroom!

Teaching at PRC gave me various new experiences, and one of them was that I taught the students who didn’t share the first language with me. Since I have been taught English only to Korean students, when I had trouble explaining difficult grammar points or some abstract concepts, I could switch to Korean to explain. It was easy! However, as a person who doesn’t know anything about Spanish, I felt intimidated to teach the students, especially the beginner students because they could not understand what I said. So Vicky and I started to rely on the English-Spanish dictionary in class. Even though it took some time, we could at least make ourselves understood. Then, we met our rescuer, Elizabeth, whose English was quite good enough to translate English into Spanish for us. Up until the last class, I think we depended on her quite often, especially when new comers (beginners) attended the class. On the last class, the students were asked to create their own recipe in groups. In the group I was guiding, one girl was working on it by herself while the other two guys were just looking at the papers. Soon I realized that only the girl knew how to make that food, but she could not explain the steps in English. So I just told her to use Spanish to explain all the procedures to the others and then, finally they could talk and finish the recipe together. By that time, I realized that I felt okay as opposed to the first class. Since now I am here in Korea and will teach Korean students, I think I will not have the same experiences anymore and that is why the experience was so special to me.

I just remembered that on the first day at PRC, we conducted a needs analysis with the students because we would like to incorporate the topics the students wanted to learn into the class. It was a simple questionnaire written in English as well as Spanish as shown below. Then, based on this needs analysis we (four teachers) made our syllabus (attached below) and tried to teach the class according to the plan.

Needs Analysis

In this class I want to:

A.  improve my speaking skills

B.  improve my listening skills

C.  improve my reading skills

D.  improve my writing skills

E.  learn more vocabulary (for school, work, etc.)

F.  work on past tense

G.  work on asking questions

H.  have homework to do on my own

And here is a translation, just in case:

En este clase, quiero:

1.) Mejorar mis habilidades para hablar.

2.) Mejorar mis habilidades para escuchar

3.) Mejorar mis habilidades para leer

4.) Mejorar mis habilidades para escribir

5.) Aprender más vocabulario (para la escuela, el trabajo, etcétera)

6.) Estudiar el tiempo pasado.

7.) Practicar haciendo preguntas.

8.) Tener tarea que hacer en mi propio.

Things you want to learn at PRC:

PRC0001

PRC course outline 2