Last year I was using L1 in my classrooms time to time but next year I will pay more attention to the exposure of L2. Also, while teaching main chunks, I will try to use drillings much more. I believe that it will help permanent learning.
 
 Lastly, I’ve gained new perspectives regarding suitability of oral materials. Today we examined oral materials critically and it will help me while designing new materials.

-        Is it natural and child-friendly?

-        Is there a familiar context and meaningful reason?

-        Is it short and simple?

-        Is it contain social language?

To motivate children, we can make them an active part of making-process of dialogues, offering them choices, maybe asking them to make some guesses (i.e. what happened if ...?)
 Also, in order to achieve permanent learning, lots of drilling carried out with the whole class, groups and peers should be added to the lesson plan.

In order to draw students’ attention and motivate them, materials in coursebooks should be updated by adding familiar contexts and meaningful reasons. It should also be improved by adding basic social language expressions.

I have never done storytelling in my classrooms. I didn’t think that it is suitable but acting out ve presenting the story as our mentor did might be a game changer here. Creating a friendly and close atmosphere, producing a context from wide to narrow, presenting the text in an interesting way, using different high/low intonations, creating curiosity, and getting children to guess are great ways to draw children’s attention.

Also, post storytelling activities are useful to practice letters and words, increase awareness of letters and sounds, and recognize words visually and by sight.

I believe this two-step procedure can be very effective and I will be using it in my classes this year.

While managing the session setting the boundaries, using perimeters, giving clear instructions, and encouraging the participants to think, pair and share are crucial elements to help the facilitator. We can use instruction-check questions to check if everyone understands what we have said. We never should use questions like “ Did you understand?” or “Is everything clear?” to ensure everything is understood clearly.

Apart from this, I learned some new techniques for self-assessment that might be efficient such as 3, 2, 1; multiple choice cards, etc. I will give these techniques a try and see how it goes.

The last topic I would like to mention is delayed correction. When a student makes a mistake, I was trying to make her/him think again by raising my eyebrows, sending signals with my eyes, and asking a question regarding it without drawing attention to the mistake. I never use immediate overt correction but after today’s session, I would like to use the power of drilling. I will collect the mistakes and give them to a whole class drilling by building a sentence with errors they made (if possible.)