Best Lesson...

The lesson which reaped the most satisfying results was probably the one whereby I used a game to teach the students vocabulary. In my practicum school, explicit teaching of vocabulary ( in the form of vocabulary lists) was made compulsory. However, my class was the weakest English class in the entire school and consisted of mainly international students. Many of them had problems with even expressing themselves in simple English and were actively using English-Chinese electronic dictionaries to understand my instructions. Thus, imagine my horror when I saw the vocabulary list on sentences related to a fire, which consisted of a whole chunk of difficult words all clumped together! Thus, I decided to chop up the list into two parts, teaching part one in lesson one and the remaining words in the second lesson. I shall focus on lesson one in this posting.

For lesson one, I played a short video clip from "Heroes" whereby the cheerleader enters the scene of a fire to save some people. I got the students to take note of the different things they saw from the outside of the scene and within the burning building itself. Then, I did a word splash and got them to come up with some words related to a fire. After that, I gave them the list and did a quick run-through. In my edited version of the vocabulary list, I divided the list of sentences according to their different perspectives-- what one would see from the outside and from the inside of a burning building would obviously be different. I did NOT provide detailed explanation of the phrases at this stage as it would be too dry. Also, understanding the lengthy explanations itself would constitute a problem for many of my students.

After giving the students some time to look through the list, I did a modified win-lose-or-draw game whereby I flashed pictures of the various scenes and got the students to identify the main sentence/phrase that best described the picture. The pictures were direct illustrations of the terms and were thus rather easy to identify. For example, one of the sentences was "Shrouded in a blanket, I crouched down to avoid the toxic smoke." Though the students may not understand the meaning of the word "shrouded", many of them at least were able to identify the blanket and the smoke, thus identifying the right sentence. This was a competitive group activity, and the students got quite excited and even the weaker ones tried to participate. The use of visuals also made it easier for the weak students to understand the meaning of the phrases. For additional incentive, groups which identified the relevant sentence/sentence were also given a bonus activity, whereby they had to attempt to define the difficult word in the sentence to earn extra points. Thus, the students also tried to infer and guess the meaning of the individual difficult words.

Finally, for the second part of the lesson, I made the groups produce a one-paragraph personal recount from various perspectives-- such as the perspective of a passer-by, a victim and a fireman etc. To make it easier, I gave them actual scenarios to work with. They had to select at least 2 RELEVANT sentences and phrases to use in their paragraphs according to their perspectives. I modelled an example using the perspective of the cheerleader they saw in the video clip before they started working on it.

On the whole, the work that I received was quite promising, as the students were able to select and use the phrases and sentences in the vocabulary list appropriately, thus demonstrating understanding of the terms. They also seemed to recall the definitions when I tested them during the next lesson, whereby I taught the second part of the vocabulary list through role-play etc.

--Mandy