It’s reading week for Delta students, but this doesn’t mean much, really…only that we can try and use this time to catch up with all the things we have to prepare, a list of which was included in my previous post.
So, where to start…
It’s the last week with my lovely S 3.2, as both the Czechs and the two French girls who have joined for this week only are leaving on Friday, and for the occasion it will be movie-time again, and possibly scones… if not my own recipe, then supermarket ones, as I doubt I’ll have the time to bake…or learn how to use that oven in time (first experiment went fine, second went baaaad, so have lost my confidence now, and I’m annoyed, being the Queen of Cakes and Muffins).
On the other hand, my S 2 class is suddenly crowded! From 2 to 6, how cool is that? Pair work at last, and discussions, and all that. Of course, things cannot be perfect, so one of the students is a Spanish university teacher who lives in France and teaches any sort of English there, who has lived in the USA for something like 7 years, and who said that the level of the class is too easy for her… Ahem…You’ll excuse me if the other students are struggling enough to keep their head above the water while I pull them down with complicated vocabulary, phrasal verbs, long reading tasks, and challenging listening! So today I did what every teacher should do when confronted with such a student: I drowned my class in idioms, proved to know I know a loooot more than they do, which is obvious, but above all, proved that SHE doesn’t know as much as she thinks she does (and her pronunciation fails her every now and then, which makes me, I confess, highly happy, hehehe).
What I have taught this week.
Upper-intermediate class: having got this horrible book to use, I did try to find something remotely interesting and useful, barely managed to, as it is really bad. I mean, I see the point of it, being highly task-based, so theoretically it’s good, focusing on the grammar, giving a lot of colloquial expressions too, functional language all the time. Bad points, which unfortunately outnumber the good points: the grammar is spread with no logical order (past perfect in Unit 5, present perfect continuous in Unit 11, just to mention something); BORING TOPICS! I mean, BORING! I found a unit with a reading about carrier bags, which in itself is almost as boring as discussing the weather in the Caribbean, I guess, but worse than that was the discussion following the reading, which included questions such as: “Do you have a favourite carrier bag? How long have you had it for?”. I mean, seriously… Also, crap listening stuff! Almost as bad as the ones in the previous book, which is depressing when you consider how important listening is in teaching and learning a foreign language. There would be more, but I’ll stop here. The point is, I used the book twice last week, and twice this week, going back to my favourite text book on Wednesday, and again on Thursday.
Generally, things went well, and I am now starting to think of my diagnostic observation, the feedback I got, and what I should do about my weak points. But this is another chapter of the story, really…
Advanced class: we started off with an easy thing, coming from an upper-intermediate book, just because most of my students are virtually advanced but struggle all the same, especially with specific vocabulary; so this was the beginning of the week, followed by a long article on male beauty, oversaturated with vocabulary, which they tackled and beat clear. Wednesday I attacked them with body idioms, which was seriously complicated for both parts, as there are so many, and I had only chosen a few important ones, that my guys were likely both to hear and to use, but they came up with more, so it was challenging on my part too, in the end.
All in all, not a bad week, albeit my eternal juggling condition… but it’s nice to be teaching such advanced levels.
Next on the list:
Background assignment for the first observed lesson.
Assuming I will have a similar class to the one I’ve had so far, I am focusing on “helping advanced (or upper-intermediate, we’ll see) students with understanding details in listening tasks”. Precisely, I am considering what Anderson and Lynch call “transactional listening”, although I have to double-check the definition; we are talking about the kind of listening where you need to understand in details, activate a lot more than a listening for gist sort of skill, here you are processing the information you receive so that you can then summarize it. As an example, I am considering the kind of listening I did with my guys for the diagnostic observation, where we were talking about mysterious stories, so they had to understand what the story was about, but there was a lot more than that, like years, and specific words that would make the situation clearer, and so on. The idea is that in the case of “interactional listening”, interaction can be minimal, being limited to a simple nod of the head, or random “uh-hu”s, and so on, and comprehension isn’t necessarily deep (talking about a party or something, you may need to understand only words like “good”, “fun”, “music”, or such), whereas in transactional listening there must be a deeper effort to understand/interpret the information so that you are then able to process and repeat it – in your own words, which is evidence of comprehension, rather than repeating from memory.
So this is it, and the weekend will be dedicated to this assignment, and to the preparation of the lesson plan, only the skeleton, thank God, because at the same time I’ll be working on my next point:
Professional Development Assignment – part A.
This is when I consider my strength and my weaknesses, also in view of the feedback I have received after my diagnostic observation, and which underlined the usual things I receive as feedback:
GOOD POINTS:
Language awareness (which include good use of check questions, examples, and so on)
Good and unobtrusive error correction techniques
Clear board work
Good learning environment (friendly, professional, calm attitude, not dominating, good involvement of the students)
BAD POINTS:
Instructions (a really bad point, I don’t know why it’s so difficult!)
Form and pronunciation of the language not on board
Board work, although good, could be more methodical, and things like random language could go there too, which I do, actually, but I tend to put words related to the topic, rather than random words.
Time management (another really bad point)
So, ultimately, not bad, and nothing new under the sun: the weekend will see me reflect on these points and start thinking of an action plan, which will include those students’ questionnaires I’ve been handing out for a couple of weeks during the past 4 weeks.
And for the final thing to do during what I (clearly) expect to be a loooong weekend:
Experimental practice assignment (stage 2).
And this is where I go “uhm, my teaching life is absolutely complicated, rushed, hectic 5 days a week and sometimes more; what can I do to mess it up even more? Oh, I know: I can try and teach using a technique I’ve never used, or teach something I have never taught before, and when I do that, I can get another teacher to observe me, just to increase the level of stress brought on by being completely out of my comfort zone!”.
….I don’t think I need to explain further…
So, this for an anticipation of the next weekend/week…
I do wish I had more time, considering how I am also trying to go to the gym 3 to 4 times a week, and chilling doesn’t sound too bad an idea either, every now and then… I bought this book at the airport, London: the biography, which I can’t wait to read, and will never do, I know, not before the course ends, in June… Even when I decide to take some time off assignments, all I can think of is books, and teaching ideas, and research, and photocopying more materials, and and and…
Yes, we’re all thinking it: I’m a total workaholic, and proud to be.
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