Watching my video of my micro teaching. I'm slowly getting used to my own voice on video. I didn't know I slouched that much. But by all means vintage for me. Asking questions was part of my childhood, so when I got into ESL, eliciting (with a bit of help) became second nature. No transcript to this lot thank goodness, but I did get some useful feedback from the tutor and a fellow classmate.
Could have done with more repeats on the chanting. Okay, I did read that if you do it too much then the students will rapidly loose interest and motivation. It's a fine balance. I also forgot to check individually their pronunciation. Damn. It's something I rarely do given the size of the classes. Need better ears.
I still need to engineer it so that the students either initiate or are given a chance to speak, en-masse. To that end, I'm doing that in class. Yes, it does take time to deliver but once setup, the results do speak for themselves.
Some of the comments from our illustrious tutor, Tom are, I have to admit, a little confusing. If I needed the target language, I was taught to elicit it. The previous CELTA training I had done stated that as soon as you wrote something in the board, or gave out material, the attention was off you. If you just happened to be in the process of giving instructions, then they wouldn't be focused on you. Well, as if I wasn't that interesting, but I must say that writing it on the board, speeds things up. I see that now. I guess old habits die hard, if you're eliciting it from them the first time, then okay. When is a good time to write on the board?! Hum.
"Ss helped to speak in complete sentences". Damn, not once did I spot a mal-formed sentence, but then again I didn't have the chance to use finger modelling. One begets the other.
Another notification was the examination of the nature of (my) teacher talk. Possibly because I know little about my own talk myself (videos do help), I didn't make any incisive statements. Well, okay, the essay was put together over a week, barely enough time to put ideas to paper, and then add refinements to clean up the finished product.
*RAM
Yeah -- there's nothing to feel defensive about; we're all works in progress, and the more we reflect, the more the more work we find to do :-)! Tell me what you're confused about...
ReplyDeleteTo preview what I'd like to talk about. I have some questions about what you wrote in my module report "Nature of teacher talk". Would like to talk about that further.
ReplyDelete