I am planning to use much more activities by which my little students can learn actively and unconsciously. I will put more emphasis on group works to manage the crowded classrooms and create more enjoyable activities for the groups and rearrange my English classroom for group works. I will not correct the mistakes immediately or teach the grammar explicitly as I learned that the accuracy can be dealt with later.

There are activities in the coursebooks which are not suitable or effective enough for the most of the students at my school. I am planning to rearrange some of them according to my students’ needs. I may change the type of the activities as we did in today's lesson if needed.

In the 3^rd day, I learned that the meaning is the first thing which must be given. In order to give meaning, we must create a context first. However when I examined my coursebooks, I realized that most of the listening and speaking activities do not have a preliminary study or the preliminary studies are insufficient to prepare the students for the other phases. These coursebooks usually do not support the use of drills and the speaking activities are inserted in inappropriate places. For example, there is a dialog building and speaking activity which comes after lots of “Fill in the blanks” activity which are not related with the speaking activity. Students are also expected to use 7 different sentences to make dialogues and use in only one activity. That’s too much for a child in one activity.

What needs to be adapted?

1.       There must be more speaking activities in the books. If our aim is to develop oral skills, we must change most of the mechanical activities and create speaking activities instead.

2.       These speaking activities must have a preparation, while and post stages and they must last longer. As the preparation stage is crucial before the main stage, it can be reinforced by more visuals and more activities like guessing games, information gap activities and repetition drills etc.

3.       Some speaking activities has no meaningful reason for talking. They must include more natural language, everyday items, and the things which can attract little students.

4.       Some speaking activities must be simplified to be child friendly.

 

During PDCs, we can learn different experiences of our colleagues on the adaptation of the activities. Because we’ll have meetings with the teachers who have similar problems. We, as facilitators, will also transfer the knowledge you taught us about the teaching of 4 skills to our colleagues in our cities. That will also help all of teachers to be broad minded for adaptation of different activities. In a PDC section in which there are 25 teachers, to be optimistic, you can find 25 different ideas. 😊 

I can teach vocabulary in a pre-activity as we watched in our last video today. My students make predictions first by examining the pictures and I help them to learn the new vocabulary. This task can also be given as group by group.   

I can be a model for my students for an appropriate fluent reading behaviour.

But the most important thing here is that the students focus on understanding during Shared Reading tasks. It’s the most important because the aim of the reading activities is comprehension. So I am now sure about that such kind of activities will improve my students’ comprehension of English. They will start getting the whole meaning after a while.

As Simon said “there is no need for a child to understand all the things in a story”. So sometimes ignoring the negative conditions we are in such as the levels of our students, etc., we can always adapt and use the stories in our classes.