Venice Castrogiovanni

Teaching principals and methodologies:

Creating, Doing, reflecting and adapting

Essay: Design approach with a personal explanation why it would be the most beneficial for your students.

Chosen Activity – Vocabulary:

Idioms and expressions

While looking up at some interesting, used expressions I realized that idioms enhance and express way better the emotions of a person while speaking or writing. In addition these expressions enable us to speak or write differently, because we can be more creative in a way as we are using our “sense of humor”. Once you allow students to get familiar with this expressions they will automatically use them in different scenarios, furthermore this will enable them to enhance their vocabulary and think differently. The structure of how the activity was created mostly focused on understanding the meaning of the expressions mentioned. Reading them and having time to practice these expressions and where they can be used.

Present: Personalized presentations. My aim is to present in context the topic, and this can be beneficial for the learner, students will be listening to the teacher rather than through a reading approach. (The reading approach will still be given further in the activity).

As an approach to the activity I would start by using different communicative skills so that the students will release their pressure and feel more comfortable around me (teacher). The constructivism method will be beneficial for when I need to explain the meaning of the expressions used in the context. Some words which will be listed in the sentences may be similar to their 1st language, so with the current knowledge of either languages or just the 1st language the student will understand the text faster and construct new ideas based upon the current once. The activity will be constructed as followed: Presentation of expressions and idioms, while also explaining where and why we use them. I will communicate and present the activity to my students using the direct methodology. The purpose of selecting this method is that: the target language will be used as soon as the lesson starts, so the student can listen and focus immediately on the 2nd language. This section also includes some visuals next to the sentences, I think this will allow the learner to interact way better with the topic. The concept of organizing the activity with visuals is for giving the learner a simpler method of understanding the text in relation to the images. This kind of method can be satisfactory because the approach will be faster and one can have more time to conduct other important and different activities. The direct method also focuses on expressing everyday thoughts, in addition to this idioms and expressions are enhancing and building up their communicational skills in regards to real life situations.

Practice: The second part of the activity focuses on the practicing skills of the learner, in this section I think the most effective method is the silent way. I will be using this method because this will allow the learner to practice and produce as much as language as possible. In addition to this the student will have more time to practice and it gives the learner more time to build up his/her confidence by practicing in class (STT). So apart of using the silent way method the approach of the teaching focuses also on TTT structure, (teacher talking time). It is a helpful approach of teaching as this will give more opportunities to the learners to speak and learn from their own mistakes. 

Produce: The last part of the activity focuses on real life situations, this idea complements the communicative method. Students are given different scenarios and they will try to apply the taught topic (vocabulary) in real life circumstances. In this manner the teacher will analyse better if the learners are actually understanding the new material which was delivered during the class. I think that this type of method can be effective for both small and large classes, because the activity is constructed accordingly so that each learner has to practice.

In conclusion to this I belief that these are the methods which will work best according the activity, also one has to consider that most of these methods works fine with different type of levels. I think that the other methods such as for example: the Callan method was not included because expressions and idioms are often based on life situations. In fact the Callan method focuses more on listening and speaking skills in kind of a memorial way of learning. So when applying some methods I think one has to consider the activity, even though sometimes most of the methods and models can be applied in different areas.

The prepared activity was modeled as P.P.P (present, practice produce) but in my opinion it can be also altered to E.S.A (engage, stimulate and activate). Using the P.P.P model as to present some words in their vocabulary which they might not know, furthermore practicing the new material in context with the teacher (myself) assisting them. The produce to allow the students to create their own context in regards to the taught material. I think both models are suitable and one can alter this according to the student preference of learning. In addition to this the aim of the activity is to accomplish the objectives of the activities and interact with the learner. I think most important factor to accomplish this is to motivate the students and complement them, as this will contribute more towards their learning process. For this reason I will plan on observing and assessing individually each students giving them an ongoing feedback. I want to use this type of assessment (formative), because in my opinion it helps the learner to identity their strengths and weakness along their process. Furthermore one can also target areas that they need to work more on, to establish this during the classes I will plan on asking them to represent their understanding of the topic taught and give their own examples. In this manner students will enhance more their performance during class and I can have a crucial information about what students understand and what they don’t.

Eveluation:

After conducting the activity which I have disccused earlier in this document, the objective of the activity was to allow students to get familiar, and understand the meaning of (TL), expressions and idioms. Firstly I started the lesson with some open questions to get to know a little bit the students, further to this I continued asking them questions about emotional thoughts and expressions. The sudents were interested in the topic itself, so I carried on and showed them differet example and used expressions in English. During the explanation the students were asking questions and trying to read outloud the text. It was interesting to see that some students understood imediatley the context while others were a bit confused, so I took this as an advantage and asked one student to explain to the others what he had understood. While looking at these expressions me and the students also discussed about expressions used in their native language and if they have something in common with the TL.

The second ecxercise focused more on getting the students to practice what they were taught previously in the lesson. I asked them to try and idenify each question and what idiom or expressions can be used according to the context. Most of the students were really into it and they engaged easily with the idea of practicing this together. A particular student found these expressions really difficult, so I choose another student which he was familiar with these idioms and explained to the other student everything. The methods used for this acitivity worked well with the topic itself and some other methods were included such as the silent way. The silent way enabled me to choose another students which in this case was knowledgable about the subject and he could explain to the other student. They were really interested in the topic and ahlotugh some students did not have a good level of language they understood everything. This was approved because I asked students to give me different scenarios using these expressions. In my opinion most succseful thing were the mages and explanation in the activity and how the activity was structured. The present practice and produce model allowed me to explain in detail anything and assisted the students to understand in detail anything which was difficult for them. Furthermore I could anaylze better if the student understood the class.