Week
9-10
Class: 8/C,
8/D
Muhammed Emin Yüksel
Date: 11.12.2015/ 18.12.2015
Caner Koca
School: Celalettin Sayhan Primary School
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9th
Week
During the 7th week, we were supposed to reflect on the use
of blackboard in an English language classroom. Two different board contents
from two different class hours were taken as samples. In this report, we will
examine the blackboard, the teacher’s most traditional resource in ELT, on the
basis of teacher’s use, and its effectiveness in the classroom.
As it was a class that
includes 8th grade students preparing for the TEOG, the board was mainly used as a tool to indicate
grammar and vocabulary activities. The activities were written on the board by
one of the students while the teacher sat on her desk. During the first hour, we
observed two different activities that was written on the board, the first of
which we took as a sample. The sample table is presented as follows:
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As can be seen in the
table, the board was used for a multiple choice activity. However, what we have
thought wrong at this point is that writing down every activity on the board
caused a huge time loss. For this reason, we were able to observe only two
activities in an hour of class. Instead of writing down every activity on the
board, the students could have been provided with worksheet consisting of
various activities. That would have been a lot more practical and convenient.
The second hour of the
class was allocated for a listening activity that included unknown words of the
section ‘Internet’. The teacher played a video about internet using and the
students were asked to carry out a couple of comprehension questions. After they
had finished the comprehension part, one of the students wrote down the unknown
words to be memorized by the students for the next week. The second sample
board is presented as follows:
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The unknown words were
written on the board during the last ten minutes of the class. All of the words
had already been taken by the teacher during the listening activity. Instead,
the students could have been asked to pick out the unknown words out of the
listening record. In this way, they could have made some effort to learn the
words. We should remind the crucial rule that learning, or internalizing an
unknown word depends on how much you put effort in attaining the meaning of the
word. Later, of course, the word should be used in an context.
The board is one of the
most common resource in ELT classroom to provide practicality and convenience,
and it should be used according to these purposes. It should mainly be used
while giving a lecture of a subject or emphasizing important points. Above all,
it must be stated that the board is not a resource to indicate activities,
which can easily be printed out and handed out to the students to avoid time
loss.
10th
Week
In the last task of our internship training, we were
required to focus on oral correction techniques that the teacher used in the
ELT classroom of 8th grade students. The first hour of the class was spared for
a listening activity about ‘internet use’. The video was the second part of the
listening activity that had been played in the previous week. The teacher
played the same video for three times and it almost covered all of the first
lesson. The only chance we had in order to observe the oral correction
techniques was during the second lesson. For this reason, we can report only a
few examples of oral correction in this report.
During the lesson, when the students gave correct answers,
the teacher praised them by giving positive feedback or simply giving short phrases
for praise like ‘aferin’, ‘çok güzel’or ‘aferin, çalıştığın çok belli’. All of
the praise words were in Turkish. As for our primary focus, the teacher mostly employed
the methods of self-correction and peer-correction. We could not observe any
situation where the teacher herself corrected a mistake. She always wanted the
students to detect and become aware of their mistakes, which is a significant attitude
in language teaching domain. One of the mistakes for which the teacher signaled
self-correction was the incorrect use of ‘s’ in simple present tense. One of
the students answered a question as indicated below:
- She like
surfing on the internet.
The student was probably
aware of the rules of the simple present tense very well because it was
reviewed for a couple of times during the semester. The reason why he made such
a simple mistake could be because of the lack of attention. Having been aware
of this fact, the teacher allowed some time for him to correct his mistake, and
it took less than 10 seconds to detect the mistake and answered: ‘She likes surfing on the internet.’ It is
important to ensure the students’ self-confidence and enthusiasm for English by being constructive
while correcting errors. Otherwise, the students may be dispirited by prompt
corrections.
As for the peer-correction example that we observed in the
classroom, the teacher employed this method when a student, for example, gave a
wrong answer to define the meaning of an unknown word. One of the students gave
the definition of the word ‘register’ as ‘giriş yapmak’. The teacher waited for
other peers to correct the mistake, and the correct meaning was provided right
after the wrong answer. In general, we observed that she mostly gave
appreciation when a correct answer was given, and when the students made
mistakes, she waited for self-correction and peer-correction rather than displaying
a behavior of auto-correction.
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