As a teacher working in a public school, the inadequacy of the activities in the course books is one of the problems I have experienced. Listening activities are ones in which students participate less. First of all, I check whether the activities in the course book are suitable for the learning levels of the students. The reactions of the students while doing the activities and the feedback I get at the end of the activity guides me as to whether I need a new material. I think that participation is low because the topics of most of the listening activities in the course book do not attract the attention of the students. In addition, the speaker's speaking speed and accent in listening activities also show that the activities are boring for students because as they don’t understand the text, they are unsuccessful. Therefore, the listening activities in the course book can sometimes be insufficient or high in terms of learning level, so sometimes I need new and different materials.

 

More active listening skill is very important in terms of understanding the target language and using it effectively. But as a secondary school teacher, my primary goal is to ensure that my students get a good score in the exam they will take at the end of the year, and unfortunately there are no listening questions in this exam. If I think from this perspective, that is useless fort he moment, but if I evaluate in general, active listening skill is very necessary to learn the target language and use it effectively.

Thanks everybody.Looking forward to being part of tomorrow’s sessions. :)

Today's session was about speaking, the skill that I have the most difficulty with while guiding my students in language education as a teacher. One of the most common problems we face while doing Listening and Speaking activities is shyness. Students do not want to participate in the activities, especially while doing speaking activities, because they are afraid of making mistakes while speaking in the target language and that their classmates will laugh at them. At the same time, shyness can be a personal trait of the student. At this point, it becomes more difficult to involve the student in speaking activities.

In today's session, we have learned and evaluated many methods to solve such problems. We've seen that we can give post-speaking tasks where they can use apps like Flipgrid to encourage students who don't want to speak in front of a crowd. Even if they make mistakes, they feel safer and more confident because they know that only the teacher will see it. This method is a really effective and enjoyable solution for shy students.

I'm grateful for today and excited for tomorrow.

I understood that using techniques such as role plays, digitalisation, making a poster while doing reading activities in mixed ability classes would increase class performance and student participation. Now let's see how we can modify a reading activity :)

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Digitizing writing activities is also a great method. Since the new generation of young people love technology very much, if we adapt their writing activities to web tools such as padlet, they can find it interesting and become more interested in the lesson. Digitizing may not be fully effective just because of the technical inadequacies of the students.