UNit 26: Selection and use of teaching aids.

Hullo outside!

It’s amazing when you have the chance to notice how each aid at school is made for! There are plenty of purposes and ways to use one aid, however sometimes we forget these amazing tools and we used to do the same in the same boring teaching way.

Let’s see some of these aids and their purposes…

YOU WILL FIND THE NEXT VOCABULARY ON THE FOLLOW EXERCISE:

Wordsearch	Grid	Graph	Flipchart
Dice	Crossword Puzzle	Brochure / Leaflet	Board game
Self-access centre	Finger correction	Charts	Puppets
Cue / Prompt cards	Mind map , Word map	Flashcards	Language Laboratory
Information-gap activities	Overhead Projectors (OPH)	Classroom equipment	Language laboratory
CD player	Computer	OPHs	DVD player
Board	Aids	–	–

TEACHING AIDS

 

Unit 25: Selecting and use of supplementary materials and activities.

Howdy everyone!

Do teachers have to use supplementary materials? As we saw in the previous unit, sometimes coursebooks are not according at all with the syllabus or there is not enough and good material for learners to practice or for teachers to teach. Thus, teachers have to find those activities that could help them to improve and to extend the information, in order to help students with further practice.

There are some important reasons why we might use supplementary materials:

• to replace unsuitable material in the coursebook
• to provide material missing from the coursebook
• to provide suitable material for learners’ particular needs and interests
• to give learners extra language or skills practice
• to add variety to our teaching

Even though, there are some advantages and disadvantages while using supplementary materials, let’s find them out on the next exercise…

YOU WILL FIND THE NEXT VOCABULARY ON THE FOLLOW EXERCISE:

Differentiation	Mixed ability / Mixed levels	Scheme of work	Syllabus	Authentic Material
Communicative activities	Games	Electronic material	Language practice books	DVDs
Websites	Teacher’s resource books	Skills practice books	Class library of readers	–

SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS

 

Unit 24: Selection and use of coursebook materials.

Hello Folks!

Here I noticed that a coursebook package it’s formed for at least three things:

1. Teacher’s book
2. Student’s book
3. Audio / video recordings

Nevertheless, there is always a problem with the books: the material. Sometimes the books don’t have the necessary teaching materials or they dont’ get along with the students, so what do we have to do if the material doesn’t suit with my learners’ needs? Most of the teachers used to adapt the material in other ways.Let’s practice them in the next exercise.

ADAPTING THE COURSEBOOK MATERIALS.

 

Unit 23: Consulting reference resources to help in lesson preparation.

Hello friends!

there is another exercise for this unit. During this unit we learned that there are “sources of information about language and about teaching that we can refer to help in lesson preparation.” 

Moreover, we saw that these resources could be:

• materials
• dictionaries
• grammar books
• articles
• teachers’ magazines
• supplementary materials
• websites

Besides, we found interesting that there are many reasons for using reference resources:

1. Checking the form and use of grammatical structures
2. Checking the spelling, pronunciation and use of lexical items
3. Developing your own understanding of language
4. Anticipating learners’ difficulties
5. Looking for new approaches to teaching lessons and new classroom activities
6. Finding out how to use the material in your coursebook
7. Getting advice about particular lessons materials.

YOU WILL FIND THE NEXT VOCABULARY ON THE FOLLOW EXERCISE:

Reference resources	Reference Materials	Supplementary materials
Grammar books	Grader reader	Teacher’s books
Worksheets or Handout	Progress tests	Language Awareness
Cross Reference	Headword	Thesaurus

REFERENCE RESOURCES

 

Unit 22:Choosing assessment activities

How you would prefer to be assess as a student?

In my case I hate to be tested with a formal assessment because it is too objective, unfortunately most of the schools test in this way. By the way, teachers have to assess students in a formal or informal assessment.

• Formal assessment: through test and examinations
• Informal assessment: During a lesson by monitoring and observing learners while they are doing ordinary classroom activities.

There is a huge list of different kind of assessment activities, let’s list some of them:

1. Cloze test
2. Gap-fill
3. Jumbled sentences
4. Sentence transformation
5. Proofreading
6. Multiple-choice questions
7. True/False/Don’t know (T/F/DK) questions
8. Information transfer
9. Matching
10. Sequencing
11. Dictation
12. Summary writing
13. Guided discovery
14. Interview
15. Information-gap

Some of these are on the next Hot Potatoes exercise; find out their meaning by practicing them.

Choosing assessment activities

Even though some of these are easy to mark (e.g. numbers: 6, 7; those which test single items), these ones just can provide us information about some specific areas of the learners’ language knowledge. Some advantages are that these are very practical to design and can give us reliable results, and these are useful for assessing receptive skills, where we want to check that learners have understood a text.

On the other hand, those that are difficult to mark (e.g. 14, 12) focus on particular areas or learners’ performance. Activities that require learners to produce whole text, are far less practical to mark and the results may not be very reliable. But these activities help learners to produce language which is very similar to the language they need in the real life.

 

Unit 21:Planing an individual lesson or a sequence of lessons.

Do we have to base on some teaching approach while making our lesson plans? Yes, we do!

While planning our lesson we have to think about the next things, which are going to help us to achieve our goals:

• Aims:  through the shape of the lesson, and the most appropriate techniques for learners
• Technical approaches: Which technical approach I’m going to use: a TBL or a PPP?
• Skills: for receptive skills, we can use activities to do before, while and after a reading or listening; for productive skills, we can use an introductory stage to set the scene, input language, and a feedback stage after the speaking or writing activity.
• Procedures:  I can use available materials, the length of the lesson and the information we have about our learners.
• Sequence: related lesson that develop language knowledge/language skills.

There is a thought-provoking tip from the TKT book:

“When planning lesson we may need to think about the needs of individual learners or groups of learners, e.g. those that always finish first, those that can’t concentrate for long, etc. A coursebook can’t provide material and activities for needs that are specific to our groups of learners. This means we may need to plan part of the lesson that adapt the coursebook or work with supplementary materials activities.”

YOU WILL FIND THE NEXT VOCABULARY ON THE FOLLOW EXERCISE:

SPECIFICATION	RECYCLE	SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIALS
SCHEME OF WORK	EXTENSION TASK	INPUT
SET THE SCENE	PRODUCTIVE	RECEPTIVE

FEATURES OF A LESSON PLAN

 

Unit 20:Identifying the different components of a lesson plan

A lesson plan help us to think what we are going to teach and how would do it along the term. But, our lesson plan contain different components that we must follow. Some of them are:

1. Class profile
2. Timetable fit
3. Aims (which we have already seen in the unit 19.)
4. Assumptions
5. Anticipated problems
6. Possible solutions
7. Aids
8. Procedures
9. Timing
10. Homework

This is a huge list, however some teachers don’t follow these rules and some lesson plans don’t’ have all of these components, which ones do you use?

Besides, I found some interesting “tips” on the TKT coursebook, and I want to share them with you:

• “A lesson plan should be clear and easy to read during the lesson. Different colors, boxes, underlining, etc. are useful . It is often helpful to include drawings of the way the board will look at different stages.”
• “…to keep lesson plans as simple as possible…”
• “…younger learners need frequent changes of activity…”so as teachers we need to improve the variety of our activities.

I liked most the first one, I don’t know because I’m kind of a visual learner, but think about it and I hope these could help us as teachers now and in future.

YOU WILL FIND THE NEXT VOCABULARY ON THE FOLLOW EXERCISE:

DIFFERENTIATION	VARIETY	RATIONALE
MONITORS	WORKSHEET	TRANSCRIPTS
INTERACTION PATTERNS	ANTICIPATED PROBLEMS	TIMETABLE FIT
CLASS /LEARNER PROFILE	–	–

IDENTIFYING THE DIFFERENT COMPONENTS OF A LESSON PLAN

 

Unit 19:IDENTIFYING AND SELECTING AIMS

In this unit we learned that a lesson plan needs more than one simple thing, is not just to copy and paste the same things according to your coursebook, it involves more than just that.

For example we learned that a lesson plan contains the next aims:

• A main aim: this is the most important aim.
• Subsidiary aims: these aims usually contain language that is already known to the learners.
• Personal aims: these show what we would like to improve or focus on in our teaching.

Furthermore, we found that the main and subsidiary aims have something in common: the stage aims, in which we can see how the lesson should be developed.

• Stage aims: these aims should contain a clear purpose for each activity that we plan. Moreover, it helps us to check that the activities in the lesson are relevant to our main aim.

We can find helpful the next simple steps in order to make a lesson plan:

1. Identify and select the main and subsidiary aims
2. Design or select the most appropriate stage aims and activities
3. Choose the most suitable teaching aids and materials

In my humble opinion, the most important thing while planning a lesson is to think about our learners needs and abilities, it is not easy for students try to keep up with the syllabus of our coursebook. What I want to mean is that when we are teachers, sometimes we just try to stick to the coursebook materials, and we forget that learners could do it by their own at home. Let’s make the difference between a teacher lesson and a coursebook lesson!

So, go on and think about extra information with could be worth not only for our learners, but also for our personal aims.

YOU WILL FIND THE NEXT VOCABULARY ON THE FOLLOW EXERCISE:

Subsidiary	Stage	Outcome
Exponent	Procedure	Aids
Sequence	Syllabus	Aim
Timing	Timetible	Personal
Main	–	–

IDENTIFYING AND SELECTING AIMS.