Jiayin's EL Reading lesson

1. The best lesson you conducted during Practicum.

To be honest, I don’t have any lesson that I’m particularly proud of, but this was one of the few lessons which worked, so here goes.

This was a sec 2 NA class, and for this lesson, I taught reading and speaking. The lesson was conducted in a special room because there were 3 people observing me—the NIE sup, EL HOD and my CT—and the classroom, crammed with 44 tables, was simply too small to have enough space for 3 people to sit in. Prior to this I taught the class picture description, where I had the kids practice describing pictures in pairs and reviewing each other.

My learning objectives were simply for students to:

1) practice and pay attention to the common pronunciation mistakes made when reading aloud, 2) learn how to infer the meaning of difficult words by looking at the words around it, and then guess the meaning and pronunciation of the difficult word successfully

As a whole, the class is VERY vocal, and students have no problems expressing themselves verbally (their written work can give you a migraine or a stitch laughing, but that’s another matter). Students have really short attention spans and hate reading, so each activity has to be brief and exciting, otherwise students find it difficult to concentrate on what the task at hand and they’ll start gossiping. The gap in language abilities is really wide, about half the class has problems (usually a confidence issue) speaking out aloud in class because they are conscious of their language abilities, and to target this almost every lesson I picked students to read aloud short paragraphs for me, so that they would have more practice speaking aloud and gradually become more confident.

My lesson was really simple. I nearly killed the girls because many of them were late for my lesson, but I didn’t want to waste time screaming at them for another 5 minutes, so I just scolded them for 1 minute and then I began the lesson. I started with some ice-breakers by getting the entire class to read out some limericks and tongue twisters aloud, and I directed their attention to some of the plosives and consonant sounds which they tend to have problems enunciating. After that, I gave the students a passage to read silently in one minute, and after that I had students guess and shout out the meaning and pronunciation of the difficult words and analyse the emotions of the speakers in the passage (I told them to pay attention to PVP: Pace, Variation of tone, and Pronunciation, and reiterated this rule throughout the lesson).

The class were to then note these details on their own copies of the passage. I then modelled the reading aloud of the passage, and then asked the students to assess my reading based on the N level rubrics which I had flashed on the screen before I gave them the passage. (They thought I was too slow and boring, and my arguments to persuade them by referring to the text and its pauses otherwise left them unconvinced. Idiots.)

Anyway, after that students were supposed to read another passage, and annotate the passage by themselves. I then had 2 students of different language capacities read out the passage aloud, and the class had to assess the students in the same manner which they assessed me previously. They also had to suggest the kinds of improvements that their friends could make in their reading for the next time. After that, I summarised the lesson, and released the students for their next class.

The thing about teaching oral is that if it is not practiced consistently, students will forget the basic steps that they can use every time they have an oral exam, so I have tried to address this problem by including a small oral component in my lessons, so that all the students gradually get used to the idea of practising how to read a passage and speaking up aloud in class, and they can build up confidence in their English that way. At the end of my lesson I asked students for the main rule that they should use when reading a passage, and they all chorused “PVP!”, but it’s difficult to assess how much they retained unless I test them all individually.

So what makes this lesson one of my better lessons? The students actually paid attention and did their work with no complaints (and this had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that there were 4 teachers in the classroom, I’m sure). They were engaged and asked intelligent questions related to the topic (I had students asking me for English rules to pronouncing difficult words, and also for the rules to word stress), so that was good to know that at least some students were paying close attention to the lesson. :)