Participation Point 4 - Selecting Topics for the Individual Teaching Unit

Guidelines for choosing your topic:

• Suggest one or two topics for your integrated teaching package in the order of your own preference (the first topic is your own favourite and so on).  
• Topics must be suited to the students' educational needs, cognitive maturity, and personal interests (as much as possible). 
• You should choose topics of current relevance, which may include aspects of personal, social, moral, or scientific interest. 
• Topics that provide rich language resources , text types, critical thinking and creative thinking potential are desirable. 
• Topics should be neither too broad (food; love; environment) or too narrow (Hong Kong egg tarts; romantic break-ups; the plight of Brazilian rainforest frogs). 
• They should be balanced to allow students to generalize skills to other topics (broad, divergent activities)  as well as allowing some depth of  learning (narrow, convergent activities). This approach also facilitates creating top-down and bottom-up language learning activities. 
• For ideas, first consider current events, news items, Hong Kong social issues, opportunities and ills, etc. You should refer to textbooks only after you have brainstormed several topics of  your own.

For your reference, some good topics from previous year groups include:

• Online Shopping
• Our Robotic Future
• The Power of the Media

Submit your own teaching topic ideas here before 12:00 midnight, 24th Sept 2018 (Monday).

Grammar-in-Context Activities

Right/Wrong/Acceptable/Unacceptable:

What is appropriate when using English?

Activity 1 - Acceptable or Unacceptable English?

Open Options: 
Are students' language choices open or forced?

Activity 2 - Sentence level, Open Choices

Activity 3 - Sentence level, Forced Choices

Authentic Assessment of Grammar Use:
How do we make assessment meaningful for learning?

Activity 4 - Meaningful Assessment Alternatives

Learning and Using English Grammar:
The Marriage of Form and Meaning

Dictogloss Demonstration Activity: The Moroccan Meal

Complete your dictogloss activity here with your group members on the slide with your number.

Scott Thornbury's 6 Rules of Effective Grammar Teacher

Scott Thornbury's 6 Rules of Effective Grammar Teacher

1. The Rule of Context
2. The Rule of Use
3. The Rule of Economy
4. The Rule of Relevance
5. The Rule of Nurture
6. The Rule of Appropriacy

The Rule of Context

Teach grammar in context. If you must take an item out of context to focus on it, recontextualize it as soon as possible. Always associate grammar form with the  meaning of the speaker or author.

The Rule of Use

Teach grammar with the objective of improving  the learners’ understanding and use of  real language – never as an end in itself (remembering facts). Always provide opportunities for students to put the grammar to some communicative use:  practice, practice, practice!

The Rule of Economy

In order to obey Rule 2 (The Rule of Use) be economical. Minimize presentation and direct explanation time in order to provide maximum  practice time. By practicing, students think, communicate, experience learning and remember language.

The Rule of Relevance

Do not waste time on grammar items or rules that students already know or will soon forget  (e.g., every kind of question tag in one lesson or more than one or two contrastive examples). Allow Chinese to facilitate learning objectives, not to simplify or replace English.

The Rule of Nurture

The most difficult rule: teaching does not cause  learning. The right environment, conditions and  opportunity for learning do. Language learning is not only discovery learning. It is skill-based and time-consuming.

The Rule of Appropriacy

Consider all these rules according to the level,  needs, interests, expectations and learning  styles of the students. These rules may lead one teacher to focus on practicing much more and another teacher to focus on explicit grammar teaching a little more.

Participation Point 2 - Creating a blog and posting a teaching video

Participation Point 2: Post the link to your teaching blog here by 12 Sept 2018.

Participation Point 3 - Submit the worksheet with your group's vocabulary lesson ideas directly to me in class on 20 Sept 2018.

Introductory Activity: Tabula Rasa (Blank Slate)

Welcome to English 5150. Before we dive into the local English curriculum and the many methods of teaching English skills, we want to ask an important question, "How would you teach if it were completely up to you?" This question is intended to explore your own preference, bias and experience as a novice teacher. But it is also a practical question, as teachers are important stakeholders in the development of a school-based English curriculum. Let's find out what you think. 

Activity Description:

A diverse group of fifteen schoolchildren is gathered in front of you.  They are a mixed-age group, about 12 – 15 years old. They have learned English for between 5-7 years, but are very reluctant to say anything. You don’t know what they have learned, as you are new to their country. You do not speak a word of their first language (L1). You will teach them for one hour, five days a week, and you have two years to teach them to communicate in English so that they may attend schools in an English speaking country. You must work with your own knowledge of English only; as you do not have access to any textbooks, computers, tablets or other IT equipment of any kind, and you are not in a native English-speaking environment. With the members of your group, create a plan for the first day of class and objectives for the first six months of the course.

Follow this link to submit your group discussion results.

For whole-class discussion:

One member of your group should write your "Language Learning Objective" and "Other Learning Objective" in the Comments section below. Use this format:

LLO: Students will ____________________________________________________.

OLO: Students will ____________________________________________________.