First thing this month is that I've posted some materials on www.talent.ac.uk (or http://www.talent.ac.uk/dsearch_details.asp?DocumentID=1946 and http://www.talent.ac.uk/dsearch_details.asp?DocumentID=1945 to be more precise) I've been meaning to do it for ages but I needed to sort out some concerns that I've had about copyright... it's all Skills for Life stuff just tweaked for interactive whiteboards and powerpoint - so it's not like I wrote them or anything - it's just very useful. It is visually stronger than just using printed notes and allows for some kinaesthetic work to break up long lessons. Having the sound files embedded as MP3s is so much easier than having to faff about with tapes as well...
What I hadn't realised is how much easier it makes it for me to recap what I had covered in a previous lesson - I can easily show the content covered and play the recordings again for students to get further practice (also good for students with v.flaky attendance!). The only problem is that they take a while to produce.... hopefully by the end of this year I'll have a full set of files for E1 (though the first few need a lot of tweaking).
This month I have also been trying to implement a more student centred approach to my teaching and trying to identify individual targets for students, but in a practical way. It seems to be working - I'm still at the learner training stage of the trial at the moment.
Basically the approach I'm taking follows these steps:
- Ask students to identify interests/relevant areas from the front page of each Sfl unit.
- I identify SMART(ish) targets for each student for the unit and discuss this with the students.
- From these targets I extract the component skills ie. The ESOL Curriculum references.
- I compile a list of skills that are relevant to the targets of each student.
- Lessons are planned to include at least one skill from each student's target.
- An end of unit test is compiled to test each student's target.
Today we had a session on the course about teaching the writing process (and other approaches) It was interesting and there was some stuff that I can work on there - especially with my E1s, I've done some similar stuff using the computer, but I should try some on paper.
The other session was on the lexical approach - This had some pointers which I should be able to include in my teaching:
- Always give contexts for words presented.
- Give extra collocations for words presented.
- Train students to look for collocations in texts.
- Train students to record new vocab with its collocates.
- Use authentic materials where possible.
