It was Group 3’s last class-teaching, and their finale of the semester ended with a dazzling performance. The fact that G3 was officially declared off the hook carries weight since the other two groups want it more than anything--.
Back to the lecture, the task was to compare and contrast, and students were encouraged to discuss advantages and disadvantages. In the first activity, students were given fake money and bid for men. The idea was brilliant and interesting (a tad uncomfortable to me^^though). I wish there had been more choices than just two men since students didn’t look much interested as soon as those bidding items turned out to be not their favorites. The activity itself was fun though. I thought the fake money would be used for other activities to come but it wasn’t long until I realized that the bill became useless no more than a souvenir after the activity.
In the next role-playing activity, students were encouraged to act two different roles in turns, customer and salesperson. G3 prepared a bunch of diverse items in pairs so that students could compare and contrast them and thus provide decent output. It went great, and I saw many students coming up with reasonable advantages and disadvantages during the stint. The idea was excellent, students seemed to enjoy it, and the amount of output was more than expected.
The third and fourth activities were basically similar. Students were encouraged to discuss good and bad points of certain items, and fill out the organization charts. Then, they did a presentation. It seemed that students felt more comfortable speaking and discussing in small groups, as it had always been. Nonetheless, they looked quite secure in speaking to the class over time.
The very last activity was a comprehensive one; it was about comparing and contrasting online and offline shopping. Somehow, my little sisters failed to designate a secretary who would write on the chart (or I should say I forgot to remind them of that in a clear way). We eventually had to pay a handsome price for the tiny fault; my little sisters did come up with decent ideas for both kinds of shopping, nothing was put down though during the discussion. In the end, around the time we were supposed to wrap up the chart and get ready for the presentation, we turned out to be far behind other groups. Little sisters had to hurry up and ended up omitting a few ideas. Their presentation was better than expected though.
I felt thankful to Dr. Nam for letting every group be a winner. I’m sure, even though the award was a piece of tiny chocolate, that must have done a lot to boost their self-esteem and sense of accomplishment (not quite sure about other groups, but that can be said about my little sisters).
Overall, it was one memorable performance executed by Group 3, as the saying goes ‘Well-begun is half-done, and well-ended goes for a lifetime’.
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haewon
5/21/2011 07:54:38 pm
It was group 3’s last teaching class and their class theme was about shopping and the function was discussing advantages and disadvantages using the task 7 (compare and contrast). As usual they started their lesson very smoothly by activating their schema in the area of shopping in an exciting way. Students were to participate in an auction for man avatar and before they started the auction, students were given with some questions based on the reading homework in order to earn the money to be used in the auction. I thought it was a great way to reward those students who really tried to do their homework beforehand. After students were to bid on some celebrity photo but the auction itself did not go very actively as we originally thought it would be. Students would rather save their money just in case the money could be used in other following activities. Maybe if they were informed about the money being only used in the first activity, students would’ve participated more actively. The next activity was role play. Students were assigned with two different roles as a salesclerk and a customer. Group 3 prepared 5 or 6 different working stations for students to play different roles. Students quite enjoyed playing the roles however when Dr. Nam stood around Eunsun, she got so nervous all the sudden and she even forgot what she was about to say. Group 3 first modeled the activity first, and I thought it was a great way to introduce the role play to our students. After students were initiated by group 3’s modeling, students would use the exact phrase and did not bother to create their own story somehow. The third and fourth activity was about making an organization chart. It was a great activity to practice and prepare students to come up with supporting ideas to back up their opinions. The last activity was about compare and contrast on the topic of online/offline shopping. Since we were short of time, my little siblings did not have enough time to prepare for the presentation, and even I ended up helping them organizing the ideas during other group’s presentation. I felt bad about not letting my little siblings to concentrate on other groups’ presentation but I could not stop answering their questions to correct and finalize their performance before their own presentation.
Overall, group 3 did a fantastic job to wrap up their last teaching of the semester. They were well organized and prepared a lot to introduce the difficult task to our students.
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Jeongeun
5/21/2011 07:56:56 pm
Week12’s theme was shopping, and students’ task was comparing and contrasting advantages and disadvantages. Jumping to the conclusion, students produced very well-organized paragraph in the end of the class.
The first activity is Avatar shopping. The objective of this activity is to tell an advantage of the avatar. Students completed this objective by giving their opinion. Auction was a good activity to activate students’ thought, but it would be better that the teaching group prepared more than two avatars because students wished to have had more and would give student smaller value of money such as 10 dollar or 20 dollar paper money than 2000 dollars check.
In the second activity 2, Role-play, students were assigned with two different roles: a salesperson and a customer. The material that the teaching group prepared was real objects. With the authentic material, the students described well advantages and disadvantages based on quality, design, price, and so forth. The teaching group’s modeling guided well for the students to understand the role-play. The students did a pretty good job, even though it was spontaneously speaking.
In Activity 3, the students discussed three advantages and three disadvantages of I-phone. The chart of worksheet helped the students organize their thought. In my group, students knew about I-phone better than me, so there was no problem for them to come up with the advantages and the disadvantages. I learned about the functions of I-phone thanks to them. However, the problem was their lack of vocabulary, and I didn’t know the right words for the specific term such as calling fee, either. Thanks to the teaching group’s help, I could keep my face by giving the right word that the students wanted to know. In addition, it was a great idea to put the students’ worksheet on the wall for the students to have a chance to look at others’ opinion.
As for activity 4, the sub-topic was Netbook comparing and contrasting to laptop or desktop. The students were good at considering organization and linking words. However, they had difficulties with thinking about the introduction and the conclusion. However, the students could learn kinds of conclusion such as summarization type and persuasive type by listening to other teams’ conclusion.
The last activity was about comparing and contrasting online shopping and offline shopping. It was the most productive activity. The students already thought about this topic through reading homework. Thus, they could develop their thought well. I believed that
In short, the productive skills such as writing and speaking were combined well for students to successfully compare and contrast the advantages and the disadvantage under the theme, shopping.
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Soyun
5/22/2011 10:49:05 am
The theme for week 12 GEP class was about shopping and the objective was for the students to be able to talk about advantages and disadvantages and compare and contrast. Soohyung and I were the teaching group this week.
The first activity was Avatar shopping. In this activity, students were involved in an auction and were supposed to bid money on the avatar they’d like to buy. Students had to give a supporting detail, in this case, an advantage for wanting that avatar. Since this was the first activity and for the time being we thought that two avatars would be enough. However, students did not show much interest to the first avatar, Johnny Deep. I think he was too old for them. I once again realized how important it is to prepare the lesson from the students’ point of view. Also, it would have been better if we had prepared more avatars for cases like this. Another problem was that students didn’t want to use much money on this auction and instead they wanted to save the money for upcoming activities. To be honest, I didn’t see this coming when I was preparing the activity. I wonder if we should have told them that the money was just for this activity.
The second activity was the role-play. Students were divided into two groups and each group had the role of customers and salespeople. Customers were shopping for a present for their friends’ birthday and the salespeople were giving advantages and disadvantages of two objects. We first thought of having pictures first but then decided to bring in real objects. I think that was a good idea since students seemed very interested to do the role play with real objects. We introduced the role play by modeling in front of class. I hope this modeling helped students understand better about the activity. During the activity, I had a chance to observe three pairs. The first two pairs did a very good job in explaining the advantages and disadvantages of the given objects, however, the last pair which was 소현 and 페페 struggled to complete the task. Observing this group, I wondered if it is better to jump in and make it clear about the task or to least interrupt the students for them to concentrate on the role play.
The third and fourth activities were thinking about the advantages and disadvantages of an object and filling in the organization chart. The topic for activity three was the advantages and disadvantages of smart phones. Students discussed about the advantages and disadvantages of smart phones and made the organization chart. Their organization charts were posted at each side of the classroom and students had a chance to look at their peers’ work. The students surprised me because they were very eager to look at other groups’ work and came up with some point for further discussion.
The topic for activity four was the advantages and disadvantages of netbooks. In this activity, students now had to come up with a nice introduction and conclusion part and give a presentation. Even though it was a difficult task, students did a good job discussing about the advantages and disadvantages of the given topic and organizing their presentation. I could see that Mr. Lee’s group was having a little more trouble than other groups since the group consisted of students with lower proficiency level. 은정 even complained that the task was too difficult. However, once that I complemented her that she was doing an excellent job by giving brilliant ideas; she got lightened up and tried to give more ideas. The best thing about this activity, in my opinion, was that the students learned how to make a nice conclusion at the end of their speech.
The last activity was to compare and contrast two different things: online and offline shopping. Since Professor Nam has commented on how important it was to have a nice introduction and a conclusion in activity 4, I could feel that students were putting more attention to making a nice introduction and conclusion for their presentation. At the end of the class, I thought about if we had given enough time for students to spend on each activity. I wondered if we maximized academic learning time within this lesson.
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Soohyun
5/22/2011 12:50:12 pm
The theme of week 12 lesson was shopping and the task was to compare and contrast. The first activity didn’t go as we expected. Johnny Depp wasn’t students’ taste whereas they showed high interest in the second one. We should’ve considered more about their perspectives. Also it would be more fun if we made some points where students could use up some of their money during other activity.
The second activity was a role-play with two different roles of a customer and a salesperson. Using realia seemed to prove its effect. Students looked very motivated to speak and it was interesting to see each counterpart’s points to negotiate as an observer. Some little siblings strayed from the topic as they deeply got involved in persuading to sell the item, however, thanks to big siblings’ help, they were eventually well-guided to our original task, giving advantages and disadvantages. Also, it would’ve been better if I gave a bit more clear instruction how to change the role since I saw some confusing looks from the students. As I repeated the role-play a few times, I saw Professor Nam try to stop me to continue for another around but it was too late. Even though I felt students were very interested in the task, I realized that it still is important to manage the time for each activity so that I won’t need to end up rushing my students to finish the rest of the activities.
The third and fourth one was quiet similar to its structure except including intro and conclusion by using organization chart. Professor kindly gave us an idea to post the chart on the wall and put the question marks on which they had different ideas. I didn’t know how much it could activate students’ thinking before I started it out. It turned out that students were very active in thinking and stating their opinions. Some of student that I thought of being very introvert surprised me by not hesitating to defend themselves when they faced to different opinion even though they were not fully capable of saying what they thought. Posting charts, putting question marks and giving a chance for students to defend to different ideas were all decided by interactive decision. It was definitely a better picture than what we deigned it in the first place. It taught me how important it is to quickly adopt plan B if things could be better, instead of sticking to original plan. As for the topics for activity 4 and 5, they were all about technology device, smart phone and netbook. The students who were keen at such things could benefit from coming up with ideas otherwise students who were not could become passive in giving ideas. Thus, a variety of topics would have been beneficial for more students.
In the last activity, students compared on-line vs. off-line by completing five short paragraphs. It was pretty quite when students were working on the task so I couldn’t really realize how much they were interested in doing it. When they were doing presentation, I could finally see they really worked hard and had some sense of organization in the end.
Overall, although the task of comparing and contrasting must have been quite demanding, students seemed to be very engaged and produced a promising result. I learned that the task’s difficulty can be overcame through step-by-step practice with motivating elements to get students to work.
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