Methodology-Week 8

1. (I sort of cheated and looked at Asenat’s journal to answer this first question)

Type 1 task refers to the top-down approach, where you look at the forest. A typical Type I task might be to ask students to find the main idea. Type 2 task is the bottom-up approach, where you look at the trees. Thus a typical Type 2 task might be to ask students to find specific information within a reading passage.

 1a) Harmer directly mentions that we should “awaken the students’ curiosity through prediction so that when they finally watch the film sequence in its entirety, they will have some expectations about it.” So he wants us to elicit students’ curiosity by using various different techniques before the students watch or listen. I think he is implying that teachers should activate the students’ schemata before diving into the lesson.

 2) I have tried the “reading aloud” technique many times here in Korea. The reading aloud is usually a dialogue. I usually model the dialogue with the co-teachers or another student. It didn’t prove to be so effective because the students get easily bored with dialogues and so I have the half the class read aloud a part of the dialogue and the rest of the class, the other.  I don’t think there are Korean teachers who speak English well enough for me to conduct an interview with them. Nor would my co-teachers be interested in the interview and conversation activities. Although once a year, the students that are in charge of the school English newspaper come to me for an interview. They bring in their prepared questions and take notes as I answer them. Then they publish the interview in the school English newspaper.

 3) Actually, my co-teachers suggested I show the students a video this week because the schedule was rearranged due to the two biggest annual school events: Sports Day and The School Festival. (And also because I took a sick day.) I wanted to show them a video without subtitles so I decided to show them “Rio” after giving them some background knowledge. It didn’t go well because only the advanced students understood, leaving the rest of them in the dark. My co-teachers suggested I show them something with subtitles. In the end, I showed them a movie with Korean subtitles. I wish I had done this reading before (well, even if I had done the reading, I don’t think I would’ve had the energy to prepare for it, but that is beside the point.) The techniques that I would like to adopt in the future are the Silent viewing technique, Pictureless listening (music), Pictureless listening (sound effects), and Subtitles. These techniques are easy to employ and would engage the students.

4)

1)    Listening in order to put pictures in sequence- I think this would be a doable task for our students. The accompanying pictures will also help them to understand better.

2)   Prizegiving- bodily kinesthetic activity engages more students (even the sleepy ones.)

3)   Witness statement- this is also a feasible exercise for students of my level and I think would aid students to watch more carefully.

4)   Taking telephone messages- this would be an easy task for my students and since they have similar lessons in their textbook, they will be able to accomplish the task.

5)   Talking about breakfast- This is a lot like some of the activity in their textbooks, so I would like to avoid it.

6)   Imagining a different scene- I don’t know if my students will be able to produce the language necessary to describe a different scene. They would need to know the conditional forms.

7)   Storytelling- this would be too difficult for my students and they would easily lose interest.

8)   Interviewing a stranger- Finding someone to be interviewed will be too difficult.

5) Before reading Harmer, teaching reading seemed to be a boring and daunting task. However, his examples make the task seem more approachable even for young students. Honestly, I can’t say I am ready to implement these techniques right away, but when the situation calls for it, I will definitely refer to Harmer.