Project Rungway was successful overall. All the activities were part of a project and intimately connected. It was quite impressive that the teaching group thought of such fun and interesting class activities under such a complex theme. Above all, every activity fell into the theme, fashion, in an appropriate way. Moreover, the way group 3 dressed spiced up the theme-related atmosphere in the class. Students seemed to enjoy every bit of class, and had a lot of fun doing activities. Some activities were competition-based and that helped students to get more interested. Teaching group was also acting brisk and passionate as a host, and that played a role in keeping the competition more lively and interesting. Showcase activity was especially interesting enough for students to actively participate. They seemed to have the most fun doing that It was also great that they could employ their creativity and originality using a fashion magazine. The reading assignment was also well prepared and thought out including many useful expressions with student-friendly pictures and illustrations. Additionally, the website to which students need to refer for a speaking assignment is quite interesting.
Students might have used those target languages a little more if activities had been slightly less action-based. They seemed to be focusing too much on cutting and pasting, and even though they were advised to use desired expressions during activities, students ended up saying things on a phrase level, not a sentence one. However, this phenomenon will keep emerging throughout the semester as long as students find it somehow burdensome to work on learning and having fun at a time. Our job is to create a fun learning environment which is the hardest thing to do in this life.
Time management could also be picked on a little since the class got dismissed a little earlier than expected. It was not bad from a teacher-in-training viewpoint however. Students seemed to be in high glee due to the fact that they could go home not too late, plus it was snowing at the moment. Therefore, the teaching group made a thoughtful decision at their discretion, and thus established a great precedent for other teaching groups. Thank you^^
Reply
haewon
3/24/2011 03:06:10 pm
Group 1’s Project Rungway was fun and interesting to engage students’ attention at all times. Especially I loved group 1 members’ enthusiastic attitudes in front of the class. Like Jongsik mentioned above, all the activities were connected and they flew from one to another and I think it was very thoughtful and well-planned. I was very surprised to see that Power point presentation was prepared for all through the activities since it is quite time-consuming job to make few slides of ppt even. They were well prepared and the activities that we did in class were enjoyable. I could see group1 members put much thought into it since there weren’t any confusion through the whole class. Before professor Nam came to a class, grp1 did a short presentation using ppt files for us, big siblings, and that helped us a lot to get ready for the actual class. Thank you.
Students tried to use a lot of words given through the reading assignment, however, during the activity 4, students seemed to use only simple words such as ‘cut’, ‘glue’, ‘color’, ‘this page’, etc. Anyways during the presentation they used a lot of phrases from the reading so I think overall, the class went very smoothly. Again, time management was the issue yesterday as well but students seemed to love the fact that they got to leave a bit early and even the very quite non-responsive ones showed big smiles on their faces. ^^
Reply
haewon
3/24/2011 03:10:30 pm
Oh, i forgot to mention that on GEP2011 webpage, i could not upload a doc file which was larger than 5mb. so i had to divide the files into 5 to make them uploadable. (in order to upload a big file, you need a paid-membership there)
Reply
So Yun Kim
3/24/2011 03:42:57 pm
The objective for Week 4 GEP class was for the students to be able to describe a picture. The theme was about fashion and the function required was to use simple present tenses. Like Mr. Lee and Haewon have mentioned, group 1 did a wonderful job with their teaching. The activities were a lot of fun, full of action, and very creative. Activities also encouraged students to use a lot of target language that they have already learned from their reading homework. Group 1 guided the class with very enthusiastic and energetic attitude. I really liked the fact that they put the activities all together in a group competition. (I’m not saying this just because our group has won! haha!) It kind of made the little siblings competitive and thus more enthusiastic in participating in the activities. The PPT slides looked great and it was a very good idea to show the instructions on the PPT for the little sisters. It made the directions of the activities more comprehensive and acted as guidance when little sisters got lost during the activity. Fashion hunting was very creative and effective. Once again, I saw how students like to move around. And it was really good to see a lot of creative ideas from the little siblings when they were preparing for the showcase. They were having fun and at the same time scaffolding what they already have learned. They even asked me for the new words and how to make sentences with them when they were getting ready for the presentation. Group 1 also prepared a lot of fun materials to motivate students. I especially liked the website they used to explain the homework.
But when we were checking homework, one sibling was telling me that the homework was a little bit confusing because there were some pages with little boxes that already showed the answers. I thought we must take extra care when preparing the assignments for our little siblings. One suggestion that I’d like to mention is that in activity 2, the bubbles were kind of confusing. For example, a bubble on a face could trigger the vocabulary for both skin color and face shape. Students complained when they thought their answers were also correct. For a competition like this, I think the rules must be fair and the answers must be clear. And one more tiny thing is about the modeling in activity 3. It was a very excellent idea to model the activity to the class. I think there’s no better way of explaining the activity. However, I think it was kind of too long to model the whole activity. I could see some students losing concentration because it was too long. I witnessed four students having a chat. I made two of them stop in a nice way. Other than these minor things, and these are only my suggestions, group 1 did a wonderful job!
Reply
Jeongeun
3/25/2011 04:19:10 am
Week 4: Fashion and Style
Description:
I’d like to describe how students reacted to the activities and how I performed.
In the interview, I checked group 2. A student produced some words with pauses and hesitation. It took some time for the student from their memory to output. We planned two turns in the interview, but even one turn couldn’t be finished within 5 minutes. I found that students had a difficulty to answer the question spontaneously. Therefore, when I use an interview activity, it could be a solution to give students more time.
In the next activity, Fashion Quotient, even though I and Juyeon planned the lesson plan together from the scratch for three weeks, I thought the details of the activity in a different way from Juyeon’s thoughts. She thought that students answered the question within 20 seconds, but I thought they answered in 20 seconds. After discussing this problem with Juyeon, we agree that rehearsal is needed before actual teaching. One more problem was the concept of pullover. Students thought the clothing that we thought a pullover was a t-shirt. I couldn’t explain what was the difference between pullover and t-shirt because I was not ready to explain them, although I and Juyeon searched the definition through the internet together. I realized that teacher needs to know the target words very well to give students a clear feedback right away.
In Back-to-Back, students produced sentence level output. Demonstration was effective. It was done well.
Next, in Fashion Hunting, I expected that students use the new words that they learned through reading assignment such as paisley. However, according to my observation, a student described the target clothes with the words that they already knew. The solution of this problem is to give students some conditions: physical features, patterns, shapes, colors, clothes, accessories should be included. I believe that the teacher who gives specific direction is desirable.
Lastly, during Showcase activity, students express their idea with words during discussion, not sentences as Professor Nam indicated. I was worried about students’ regression. However, when they presented their collages, they produced sentence level or slightly paragraph level output. For cohesive output, it would be nice to give some format about how to present in a paragraph using linking words.
In conclusion, teaching itself is very dynamic. It’s very rare that actual teaching is done exactly up to the lesson plan. Therefore, teacher need to adjust time or the level of task based on the observation after teacher walk around students by checking how the activity was going. But, to make it possible, teachers should have more back-ups and preparation for unexpected situation. This time I learned more things on the stage of plan rather than actual teaching. I could develop a creative lesson plan by cooperating with Juyeon. It was a great experience. Since I studied at grad school, I’ve dreamed of designing a unique lesson plan. I was inspired by other teaching teams and Juyeon. I strongly feel that I can be closer and close to my dream. Thank all to support and encourage us.
Reply
Jooyeon
3/25/2011 11:32:03 am
For wekk4, we targeted task3, which is to describe concrete objects. We narrowed it down to fashion and physical appearance. The whole class was designed to turn into the show site called Project RUNGWAY, a parody of a famous American competition reality show <Project Runway>. It was a competition based lesson. The final goal of the project was to choose the best fashion stylist throughout 4 different projects. J ungeun and I took the roles of the show host. The siblings took different roles depending on the projects, and the students played the role of the applicants. . Throughout the whole activities, we tried to keep using the lexical chunks and vocabulary from the reading assignments ourselves, and at the same time, to encourage the students to use them. Activity one was a warm-up activity to brainstorm the ideas about fashion. From activity 2-5 (project 1-4), the activities were organized according to the amount of language and complexity of forms needed to perform the project.
Most of all, Jeongeun and I enjoyed teaching, seeing the students gradually engaged in the activities. I’ve noticed many students going over their reading assignment documents to look for the necessary vocabulary while participating in the activities. All the siblings were of great helps in engaging them in the activities, reminding them of proper language, and preparing for the materials.
I totally agree with what Soohyun mentioned about lesson week3, that the instructors must plan their lesson with speculations about every minor detail. As Soyun mentioned about activity 2, there were more than one proper answer for each bubbles. We should have been more flexible in accepting the answers. Also, Jeongeun and I had different thoughts about the rules, which might confused the students and made us look less professional. It would have been better to simulate the whole procedure before teaching.
For activity 4 fashion hunting, I was quite surprised that the students found the correct pictures within such a short time. We planned this activity for producing more complex vocabulary in sentence forms, but the students just called out fragments to win the competition. I realized that competition might be a good way to motivate the students and bring fun, but not as effective with regards to language production.
The same thing happened in activity 5, as many siblings mentioned. The students seemed to enjoy cutting and pasting, but few students were concerned with language. Jeongeun and I tried to remind them to prepare for the presentation as well, going around the classroom. And all the siblings played a great role to encourage them to produce more language. Thanks to them, all the students did a good job in making presentation at the end, where the students finally produced sentence level languages.
Overall, the class was fun and it couldn’t be successful without the help of the siblings.
Reply
Soohyun
3/25/2011 02:02:59 pm
I have seen my little siblings seemed really enjoying the lesson throughout the activities. Maybe in the first warm up section, they seemed to have a bit hard time answering for some of the tricky questions even though they have their own answer in their mind. They just didn’t know how to elaborate it nicely. Thus, I thought maybe I need to make the warm up task more easily or simply so students can answer in word or phrasal level to lower the affective filter and help them get smoothly engaged in the next activity. The competition-based activity began from the second task, which worked quite well to establish an active atmosphere for students to join in the activity. I thought competitive activity worked especially well for the reluctant or shy students. It was a simple and fun activity but it could be better if three features were clearly categorized (for example, describing skin, hair, body figure, clothes etc.) so that students had definite idea what to describe even though the pointer was not clear about exactly what was pointed.
I learned how important modeling is through the Back to Back activity. It was a short cut to explain how it should be done. Myself tried hard to win the game as well! And I actually learned many things through the lesson too! ^^ After the break, students started to get involved in fashion hunting. I also realized how activity can be dynamic and intriguing when it made students move around regardless of its simplicity and ease in terms of its content level. However, I thought students must have used more target descriptive words or phrases if the activity focused more on the description. For instance, students have to describe a particular person whose name is given and the other students go to the other room to find out who the person is among many so they can look at the whole picture of person including body shape, hair style, and clothes. Because I saw one of my little siblings just gave a big hint such as ‘no face!’ (one woman’s face was covered with white veil) not trying to describe other details. We had lots of fun through last activity, cutting and pasting. Meanwhile, they really seemed to try to find pictures that show the day’s expressions but also they had a hard time to find out how to connect the sentences. It could have been much easier for them if they were given a model or sample format for the presentation.
One last suggestion, instead of just asking “Do you understand?” to the whole class, comprehension check to students would be easier either for a teacher or students to know how much they understand about the task. Overall, it was very interesting and dynamic themed class!!
Reply
Leave a Reply.
Author
Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview.
RSS Feed