Participation Activity no. 8 is a lesson observation assignment that should be completed by logging into our EdPuzzle class (class name: TLSPG 2018; class code: tewluja). The lesson observation and feedback activity can be conducted during class time on Thursday, 25th October. The deadline is Tuesday, 30 October. The lesson will serve as content for instruction and discussion on both the skill of Speaking as well as Lesson Planning.
The lesson is a Secondary 2 double lesson specifically on the speaking strategy of elaboration. In the lesson, the teacher aims to teach the students how to elaborate specifically and effectively in order to increase the length of time they can discuss a topic.
Watch the lesson on Edpuzzle. The video of the lesson is divided into three parts. After each part, there are two questions asking you to 1. specify the most notable strength and 2. make a specific suggestion. The three parts of the lesson are: 1. Input; 2. Preparation and Practice; 3. Group sharing and Feedback
The lesson plan is here.
When you have finished watching all three parts, write a 50+ word comment about your observation of the lesson in the comment box of this post. Possible comment topics may include: What did you learn from the lesson about how to teach speaking? How can a teacher motivate students to speak more actively? Is it important to make speaking activities authentic/realistic? Can fluency be taught as a strategy or must it be learned by practice? Is there anything about this lesson design that would help to improve it significantly? You may also want to reply to your classmates' comments.
Charlotte (32):
ReplyDeleteAlthough introducing strategies may be crucial for students to develop their language fluency, sufficient practice is more important. For stronger students, as they have a solid English foundation, it is plausible to just give a certain structure for their speech. And of course, more practice can make them familiarise with the structure and be more comfortable when talking about other similar topics. For weaker students, however, more scaffolding should be provided. The teacher should better start from providing explicit sentence structures and make students practice the sentences first. Little by little, students will then be able to come up with a complete paragraph and later on a 3-minute long speech.
Anthony (25):
ReplyDeleteWe always simply request students to elaborate more without teaching them how to do so. Therefore, they may not really know how to lengthen their conversation. The teacher of the lesson video lets me understand that speaking skills are really needed to be built up explicitly. Students are unable to speak in a second language if they do not have enough input.
In terms of the lesson planning, the teacher can distribute a handout listing useful sentence structures and linguistic indicators related to talking about past personal experience and giving examples, so that students can refer to these guidelines when they are doing their free practice. Whereas there is only one teacher, there are many pairs speaking at the same time. If the linguistic indicators are not shown, weak students may have already forgotten what have been learnt, leading to an inability to speak in the free practice time, especially when the teacher is catering for other pairs. On the other hand, if various sentence structures are shown on a handout, the teacher can encourage elite students to express an idea in different ways or to include as many sentence structures as possible within the free practice time.
Jimmy (20):
ReplyDeleteThe lesson content may not be challenging enough. The teacher put emphasis on using Wh-words like 'What to do', 'Who' and 'Where'. However, it may be too difficult for the students to have a 3-minute speech when the teacher only gave too easy/little scaffolding. The teacher could give the students more ideas of having more elaboration, such as 'What to see/hear (describing the surroundings)', 'How to get there', 'Why to go there', 'For what purpose of doing such things', etc. Or the teacher could ask the students to at least use five different Wh-words. These set more challenging tasks for the more capable students, catering for individual needs. For the less able students, the teacher had better give them some easy structures to follow. They may not even be able to write some probing questions or develop their ideas using the Wh-words.
David (9):
ReplyDeleteAlthough the aim of this speaking lesson is mainly to instruct and guide students to better elaborate their ideas, the teacher could have also put some efforts into enhancing students’ fluency in speaking. From the video, we may discover that students’ utterances were not very fluent when they were having English conversations with their peers or demonstrating in front of the whole class. With that being the case, it is suggested that the teacher may make use of activities such as the 4/3/2 technique, which students are required to give the same talk or perform the same task to three different classmates with decreasing time to do it. By the 4/3/2 technique, students can be given more chances to better organize and develop their examples and ideas which help improve their fluency.
Serena (18):
ReplyDeleteThe teacher focused on how to elaborate ideas with the help of the mind map, at the same time, the fluency of the task should also be taken care of. Some students showed difficulties when trying to utter a complete sentence, the teacher should also solve this issue by perhaps, providing some sample sentences in order to cater learning diversities.
Also, more peer learning should be encouraged, instead of a long practice time, perhaps more pairs of students can come out and demonstrate for teacher and students to evaluate their performances to benefits the whole class.
Kennie (13)
ReplyDeleteDespite the fact that the speaking lesson mainly aims to instruct the students to better elaborate their ideas & utterances, the teacher could make improvement by putting more efforts on enhancing students’ fluency. It's found that students’ utterances were not very fluent when they were having English conversations with their peers or doing demonstration in front of the class.
To tackle the issue, the teacher can consider disseminating a handout and an explantory notes; listing useful explicit sentence structures and linguistic clues; giving authentic examples & explicit sentence structure, so that students can refer to these guidelines when they are doing their free practice. Whilst there is only one teacher, there are many pairs speaking at the same time. If the linguistic indicators are not given, less able students may have already forgotten what have been learnt, leading to an inability to speak in the free practice time; especially when the teacher is catering for other pairs of students.
If various sentence structures are shown on a handout, the teacher can encourage more able students to demonstrate their utterances/express their ideas in different ways or to include as many sentence structures as possible within the free practice time. Overall, this is also beneficial to peer reflection. The students can exchange their views with each others.
Zoei (Wong Pui Yee), (31)
ReplyDeleteStrategies is important to be taught to students, however, a lack of practice might not help students to speak fluently. Practicing in pair with their peers helps them to develop their speaking skills with no doubt. Also, more practices could build up students confident on speaking English. On the other hand, in this lesson, I have learnt to motivate students to speak more actively. Students usually feel nervous and scared to speak the second language in front of their classmates. Giving out some phrases and words, students will try to think about how to link them up correctly from what they have learnt. Instead of asking students to state a sentence correctly, teacher can also give students hints to complete a sentence.
Isabella (Chan Ying Shuen) (10)
ReplyDeleteThe lesson aims to equip students with their speaking fluency. I learned from the teacher that she asked a lot of questions to students on what they think a good conversation should be like. She elicited some responses by actively invited students to answer her questions. From her teaching, I have learnt to ask more questions in the class and give more chances for students to speak (but not just teacher talk only). In speaking class, there should be interactions but not just simply lecturing.
To motivate students to speak more actively, I think the teacher can divide the class into different small groups. She can ask students to discuss their answers with peers, compare and contrast, find out the similarities and differences, then report back the findings to their teachers and classmates.
In my opinion, it is important to make speaking activities authentic/realistic, that is to involve students in activity but not simply lecturing by the teacher. I think fluency can be taught as a strategy. The teacher can teach students how to construct ideas, make drafts and presentation.
Natalie (Li Lai Na) (19)
ReplyDeleteOverall the teacher can present and explain the context (mind map and wh-Question) in well structure, students get ready to learn and are active in class. However, as in an oral lesson, students should be provided more opportunities to interact with different classmates, so that they can share their experiences, group work and group discussion are highly recommended rather than pair work in the video. Moreover, teacher can create a scenario, such as shopping, eating out in a restaurant, students can do the role play, that can be more interactive.
Kirin Cheung (9)
ReplyDeleteI think this is a well-organized speaking lesson because the teacher has used various resources to facilitate students' learning. For example, the teacher shows examples of good conversation so that students can model their speech according to it. The teacher also offers sufficient opportunities to students to practice, it is a perfect lesson in terms of striking a balance between input and practice opportunities.
Anthea Au (8)
ReplyDeleteThe teacher puts great effort in eliciting students’ ideas using WH question words. During the lesson, she keeps asking students questions and continues inviting the girls to give personal experience and examples. However, after spending half of the time explaining the ideas word by word, some girls still hesitate to speak because they are not familiar with the way to form a good speech. I think the teacher may also consider teaching the basic structure and key elements of a fluent speech. For example, when she is giving different examples, sub-topics can be written on the board. Students can have a norm of classification for different types of examples. It can also make the speech clear and easy to follow.
Other than teaching the skills of elaboration, teacher may make good use of connectives. Most of the students deliver their speech using the simplest sentences. The teacher may help reconstruct their points by using ‘and’, ‘also’, etc, to make the whole speech well-organised. It may, in turns, increase the fluency significantly.
Erica (14)
ReplyDeleteI think the lesson is clear and fluent in the way that teacher has a good practise of checking students’ understanding of the lesson topic. She uses eliciting a lot with manageable qestions such as WH questions. And she even make the lesson so diverse by providing demonstration of what is a good conversation through a video. This could provide a clear picture for the students in the discussion session, also students can learn from peers and senior form students through the activity.
However, I suggest that the teacher should walk around to assist students’ discussions, other than asking the feedback from one or two students.
Veronica Tse (27)
ReplyDeleteThe lesson shows that the teacher has put lots of efforts to encourage students to talk. I like how she clearly states what elaboration is. Making use of examples from students’ work /ideas makes the conversation authentic.
One suggestion is that there are some close shots of a pair of students in the video who have already finished their practice with the time given. Although the teacher has created consistent interactions in the lesson, she might walk by and ask them to share their ideas to her, for instance, so that they won’t murmur and possibly talk about topics unrelated to the task.
Crystal Kwan
ReplyDeleteThe lesson was well-structured in a way that it scaffolded students' learning of elaboration in speaking. The speaking topics were also well-chosen as it was authentic and familiar with students' daily lives. This is important when fluency is to be developed. When the topic is not completely new and distant, students will not find it hard to brainstorm ideas to talk under the topic. Through such practices, fluency would gradually developed. Nevertheless, it is recommended to have a more advanced discussion topic for students to discuss at the end of the lesson. Not only could students try and stretch their potentials from the practice, but also the teacher could have a better idea of students' capabilities and learning progresses.
ReplyDeleteSammy YU (7)
The lesson was mainly good and provided students with scaffolding throughout the lesson. The teacher made sure to demonstrate to students how to elaborate on answers and provide more information instead of only talking about what students should do. She also elicited responses from students first before sharing her ideas with the class, encouraging students to come up with their own answers based on their past experiences. In doing so, students were able to activate their previous personal experiences and use what they had learnt in the lesson to make sentences.
It would be better if the teacher could invite more students to share their answers with the class and provide more detailed feedback, clarifying which part was good and which part needed improvements so that the others could make amendments accordingly.
I think that the class was highly engaging, it can be seen that the relationship between the teacher and students are quite good. I think that this relationship helped the students to be more comfortable while speaking in class because some students are rather shy. Moreover, I think that the teacher did really well by scaffolding the lesson. She simply asked the students about different vocabularies according to the topic, which can help assess the student's vocabulary capacity. Also, the introduction of mindmap could also be helpful. Having said that, I believe that using a mind map would not be the best and most practical method to practice oral speaking.
ReplyDeleteLastly, I think that the teacher should have given the students more time to formulate their answers and also to speak with each other. Although the teacher was able to invite the students to answer questions, some students might still be neglected. Furthermore, the teacher only spent the last 15 minutes of the lesson to walk around and listen to the students. I believe in a "speaking lesson", it should be a student-centric lesson where students are given more opportunity to speak. Hence, it is important to give students a more realistic speaking activity and allow them to gain fluency through practice.
Isha Aditi Dhar (1)
ReplyDeleteThe lesson saw a powerful activation of schema by the teacher, by enabling students to reflect on their previous lesson's knowledge and learning. The instructor chose topics which were of contextual and practical significance to the learners and they could relate to these instantly. This made it possible for students to identify a better conversational style and made them feel sufficiently motivated to follow that. Students' knowledge and efforts were backed by useful scaffolds that teacher injected throughout the lesson at opportune moments.
What really worked in the lesson was a clear structure with well-defined pointers, that had to be borne in mind by the young second language speakers, as guidelines for their prospective conversations with their classmates. The teacher further provided suitable examples of the kind of questions and gambits that could be introduced, to have a smoother flow in conversation. Students' prior knowledge about different conversational topics encouraged them to provide meaningful examples during their conversations, to add greater meaning and realism to their talks.
However I do feel that conversations lacked the appropriate intonations, stress, voice-quality, and an overall emotional content. Perhaps, that is a continuing project that teachers need to focus on, for its important to strike a balance between accuracy and fluency. Also, the teacher could speak a bit slower to allow the weaker students to process new information at a comfortable pace and be more confident in their English language speaking abilities.
Rebekah Lam
ReplyDeleteThe teacher adopted a highly interactive mode of teaching in the lesson. Throughout the class, the students were encouraged to participate. She offered plenty of time to have them practiced talking with the strategy of “turn-and-talk”. It seemed the students respected the teacher much. When she was talking, they listened attentively. Despite not raising their hands, the students were eager to reply to the teacher’s open enquiries by shouting out answers. Whenever a student answered a question, the teacher responded with positive feedback immediately, like “very good” and “that’s right”, before she recapped and elaborated on their comments.
From the observation, I have learned to elicit students’ response by allowing the whole class to work together and construct examples on the board upfront. To lower the degree of difficulty, the example could be divided into parts and I could ask the class one part at a time. Then students would understand how is elaboration of conversations built up progressively.
I think the teacher demonstrated a very well-planned and structured lesson. The comparison at the beginning helped the students lead-in by understanding some qualities of a good speaking content. Moving on, the teacher scaffold the lesson with different activities such as mind map and peer sharing. Since the topics surround students' daily life (eg. shopping, eating out), it is easy to follow and for them to develop ideas. As such, students learn in an interactive and rewarding way. Having said that, it might be a bit challenging for junior students to speaking for three-minutes, the teacher may consider to adjust the time, say one-minute.
ReplyDeletecherry (6)
DeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteLucy (4)
DeleteWhat I learnt from the speaking lesson is that teacher can scaffold the difficulties of the speaking activities by organizing cycle practices for students to step by step learn how to generate ideas for a conversation. And I think it is important to make speaking activities realistic because speaking is an output skill which relies more on daily communication. If the topics of speaking activities are not related to daily use, it is difficult for students to apply the speaking skills to daily life. And I suggest the teacher could give peer assessment paper for students who are observing the demonstration to write on. In this way, students can improve by observing others' performance.
How to Make a Casino Deposit using your phone
ReplyDeleteHow to Make a Casino Deposit 충주 출장마사지 using your phone. Casino deposits work by using the free code MND100. 김제 출장안마 To begin, log 울산광역 출장마사지 into your mobile 충청북도 출장마사지 account and start playing 전라북도 출장샵 at the