The Grammar Translation Method

It was formerly known in classical languages teaching as the classical methods ages before. In this time, it is not limited only to classical languages but teaching in foreign language literature for students to be able to indulge appreciation when reading the literature themselves. The study using this methods not only for better understanding in writing and speaking of the target language (language students try to learn) but also influence students to go deeper and familiarize context of grammar of their own native language. It’s a method for improving and polishing students native and target language throughout their learning process. Even though students may not use the target language in their real life situation, it will still gives advantages such as cognitive learning exercises and making students more critical and intellectual in handling language learning.

There are sets of principals followed such as the objective of applying this method which I have explained above. Next the duty of the teacher and students are more into teacher centered classroom because teacher acts as the expert of target language thus obviously they hold the utmost authority while students more into absorbing sponge in the process. The processes of learning are by memorizing and deductive reasoning because students will be taught of some examples of grammar rules and using that knowledge in applying to other examples in language learning.  Moreover, they learn to translate the native language to target language directly such as vocabulary transfer. Students interaction and initiation to speak by nature is limited as more room given to teacher to students interaction. Here, the target language portray as more superior in comparison to spoken language, while culture influences reflecting the mirror of fine arts and consisting literature. In this method, it is by far for better for teaching vocabulary and grammar along with the primary skills of reading and writing.

 In assessing students learning and comprehension, evaluation will be done by writing tests and questioning of grammar and culture of the target language. Errors in language need to be remand quickly by guiding students to the correct answers or giving it to them directly. All this is to avoid consumptions of misunderstanding. Based on my experiences, learning languages such as Japanese, Korean and Mandarin using this approach matches well with my learning styles. I tend to learn better by memorizing and direct translation from one language to another maybe because that is how I have been trained to learn. I recall Asians people traditionally molded to learn using these kinds of learning styles and perhaps that is also part of the reason why this method fits in the learning of the target language. However, with due respects I believe that communication with the teacher and peers plays huge roles in facilitating one’s learning better in not only understand by in applying to the real life context.

In reality, you can maximize your language learning by daily practice in conversation you’re your friends because then you becomes more curious and motivated to really understand the cultural and knowledge aspects of the language itself. In learning language, what is the use of only able to cognitively understand the language without effectively using it in real life purposes of communication? Therefore, I am curiously questions, why do you have the need to study other language if you are not applying it to your real life? Is it just because of the requirement, why people did not consider of applying the languages they learn into practical use? Thank you J.

The Direct Method

The Direct Method

The direct method objective is to make students know how to make use of target language in communication by using instructions only. Even based on the name, it is a method of teaching using only the target language without any translation of native language allowed. Instead, to make students understand key concepts will requires a lot of teaching aid and demonstrations because it is believed to increase the effectiveness in using the target language by students in communication area. The method have been structured this way because to make students critically think in the target language. The roles of teacher and students are to communicate with each other like a partners compared in grammar translation method of teacher centre in learning process. Other than that, its students to student’s interaction as teacher directed the teaching.

In direct method students need to relate the meaning of the target language directly and in helping the process of learning, the use of realia, pictures or even pantomime brings great deal in teaching because we try to make the situations real. For example, grammar rules itself need to be discovered inductively and by generalization as an explicit grammar rule is not given. Students often use complete sentence in learning new vocabulary. As the language use in communication rather than writing, students daily speech include factors of understanding history, geography and culture about the target language when they practice interactions or conversations with the language. The type of assessment for this method is pretty direct as well as it only assessing the use of language and not the knowledge of the language. For instance, interview and oral speaking will be used as tests for student’s demonstration of understanding. Self corrected is applied whenever necessary.

Besides that, other techniques in teaching would be reading aloud, question and answer exercises, conversation practice, fill-in-the-blanks, dictation (listening to the conversation), map drawing and  paragraph writing. Upon my own experiences, I concern that this method can only be apply to students who have average and high proficiency language learning in order to learn the target language because at least they can associate better the meaning or examples the teacher trying to deliver with. Students with low level of understanding or experience would not benefits much from this approach as they did not have the enough comprehension of the meaning of the target language even if the teacher use modeling. It will be quite difficult for them to follow up later because inside language learning, the topics of grammar and sentence construction are connected to one another. It is like without background knowledge of information, would you yourself understand about what other people try to teach you about new concepts using the target language, except if you apply common sense in the situation. Would you?

Even though the method best fits students with high and average level, that does not mean that each of the techniques are not applicable. Look at the conversation practice example; I think it is very good teaching and learning skills for students with low achievement as it also gave them a sense of confidents to try to converse using the language. It makes learning more meaningful when you can apply it for real life situation too. It’s a technique that I believe people would like to adopt in learning and teaching especially to teachers who planning to teach language.

Spatial Intelligence

Spatial Intelligence

Spatial intelligence is where the domain of accurately perceive the visual world lies. Example can be drawn here is the late Steve Job, the creator of Apple. He started by imagining the I-phone in 3D before make it into reality. Students who learn concept by visual it first lies in this domain. In lessons, teacher could teach concepts using 3D pictures or by drawing in the white board to get the message clearer to the learners. Teaching materials such as You Tube, hands on materials such as realia would improve students with spatial intelligences to think and picture it in their brain. Not only that, they can remember it better with the sense of touch, hear, smell and taste of the thing that you want them to know provided using the materials that confirms the senses. They learn by seeing things so listening activities alone without other teaching materials is not an activity that will attract their intention much because to them if there is nothing to see might as they cannot perceive the information accurately.

That is why in teaching, teacher are advised to use as much as necessary teaching materials to enhance not only students learning but teaching skills as well. Activities or assessment that is good to corporate here will be drawing of concept maps with pictures; designing arts (as students can imagine the figurine in their mind well), creating creative products and others. Instead of having usual paper based examination or test, this could be may interesting to try out by asking the students to design poster and presents it though some educationist might challenge the broad ideas of this because of the assessment rubrics of how to assess the test (I need to say more research need to be done in this area and it is not my specialize to say this as well without much grounded information to back on, but nevertheless it could be one of the hypotheses that leads to this).

This could be factors intervene on to why teachers avoid using this concepts to teach. But, yes it will helps students to be more motivated in learning that need they to use their ability. There are some tips to help students with spatial intelligence to maximize their learning for example while taking notes instead of writing the whole sentences, what they can do is just write the key points of the sentence and draw the key points to helps to remind them of the important concepts.

 Moreover, try watching YouTube or any videos that demonstrate the concepts that you find difficulty to understand. Cooperate that with hands on exercises such as create the model of the chemistry and name tag it and put it in your study room. The reason behind this are firstly you imagine how the concept is then you lay down the foundation by making or create the model of the concept yourself and putting it in the place where you often look will increase your memory power more (as they say, the more you look, the more you can remember). For those who has started to searched what they want to do with their future, perhaps the ambitions that spatial intelligence may concern with are detective work (visual look of crime scene and evidence lies), painter (painting the visual look of scenery), actor (since imitation usually learned by watching how the action conducted), art craft (vase or statue that portrays the imagination) and others.

Music Smart

Music Smart

Singers are categories under musical intelligence domain as it is a domain where people with music smart where they appreciate and notice differences in musical tones, pitch and melody. Students who can use musical instruments well enjoy some music in their learning. When planning lesson plans for this group of students, it will be good to create classroom activities that can be associate with music and this applied to all subjects taught in school. Parts of classroom activities can be role play, create poem and songs that reflects learning concepts learned. Not only does it makes learning more interesting but allowing students to get engaged and motivated in taking part in their own learning process.

Music has been proved to be good influenced to students learning process as it simulates their brain to process the information. Especially in language literacy classroom, students can get involved mentally and emotionally learning poems with the aid of video of the poems or literacy. Music smart people can justify themselves in the learning environment with the music on since they learned best with music as well. Not only that, they can be really sensitive to different kind of music note, rhyme and rhythm that other people doesn’t pay attention much too. With this kind of sensitivity, people with music smart capable of tuning, playing the instruments the right way to get the right sounds and make born of new music or simply refine songs that they heard off. People born with this talent usually maximize their learning and go further to become someone who influence with music environment such as music coordinator, singer, pianist, guitarist, violinist, drummer and all the ambitions you can think off. They find most of their enjoyment with music and thus if you take a look around you, new music keep coming from the musicians as the inspiration is infinity without borders. That doesn’t necessarily means people with less music smart cannot appreciate music, they can thought like singing in karaoke or read books about music to improve one selves.

Music can inspire a lot of people with new dreams and imagination. Without music, life wouldn’t be so much adventurous and interesting because music being creates to add the colors in life. Can you imagine watching televisions or any media without sound or music in it; it would certainly be boring, dull and tiring. Music adds or pumps the energy of happiness, sadness, adventurous, challenge and anything you could think off by your experience. That is why people with music smart should be proud of themselves because by using their ability a lot of people can benefits from it. The way to enhance music smart learners are by making them more in love with the music and taught how to make the full use of their special ability. Teachers who found this skill in their learners should make efforts to bring forts activities that use music and make students aware of their own strength.

This way, not all of our students will only look at one perspective of must achieving the same dreams as others as being conceptualize by norms. What it means here are such all students nowadays to focusing on becoming doctors or lawyers instead of ambitions that required arts specialization. Students need to be more open-minded and think of other possibilities of becoming someone who is master in music if they know they have music smart in them. Our society should create this kind of environment so the young will not be limited by what are norms.

Interpersonal Intelligence

Interpersonal Intelligence

Interpersonal Intelligence tells us about a person who knows and understands why other people behave in certain ways like our counseling teacher and politician. Students with this intelligence have good social relationship among friends, teacher and community. Group work is always good advantage as they can manipulate it by interaction with their group members. Teacher can include activities such as problem solving or information manipulation to learners with this ability. It will be good to make student solve something events that happens and why it happens, more into discovery of learning as they will find it enjoyable to do so. Interpersonal students love group work and always participate in an event that requires working with other people. They can be good leader as well because they able to understand each of the member and build trust in them.

Moreover, they can accommodate and associate each other experience that explains to the group why certain things happens and what kind of strategy needed in order to solve a problem. But more importantly, how the teacher gives instruction on how to do the group work because unconsciously maybe the students goes to different direction as what the teacher intend by being a strong domain in controlling the group. That is why the more reason to give proper construction, it is no easy job though because of several factors to think of that might affects the entire group work from the learning objective designs. The example of the group work need to corporate with time management, materials needed and the rationale of each steps (this is especially for teacher’s to note down). As for students part, they need to be conscious of their own ability and how to maximize it without bring negative affluence intended, proper guidance is needed so they students need to asks their teachers and people around them. There is nothing to be afraid off because this skill is good when it put into good use. People with interpersonal intelligences will always reflects after the day has end and makes sure what they can do to fix or improve on the next day. Reflective activities such as writing a diaries and refection blogs help to regenerate their thinking skills better. Perhaps what teacher can do is modify their learning process for this group of people by make an assessment in a way they need to work in groups even for simple activities such as mind map because the process itself allows students to think creatively.

For future students, perhaps types of ambitions they can do or learn could be become a designer, fashion stylist and coordinator for those who like some creativity thinking in their life because they need to know what people in this era likes and what they concern with. If not, like what mention earlier, they can choose to be counselor or politician because to become one you need to know what people are thinking and it goes deeper into finding the relationship of the cause and effects of things that occurred. Anyway, the options can be find more, try Google it to help you find more ways to incorporate your life learning to the fullest. Sometimes, it is what you think that is matters than what other people judge you so make sure not to take account of people thoughts that you are abandoning your own need especially for interpersonal people because they tends to think and do too much for other people.

Special Needs School Visit in Rawang ~ :)

Special Needs School “Ideas Autism Centre” Visit

Learning education course takes you to variety types of school to widen your thinking ~ by me

Last Monday, 10/11/2014.  I had been given a chance to tour one of the special need school organized by Ideas organization. It was the centre for educating children with Autism. Autism is where a child having mental condition that challenges them in having proper communication problem, forming relationship with people and understanding abstract concepts. The chances for boy to have this condition are 4 times greater than a girl.

During the trip to the schools, it really amazed me on how some of a few special need educators will go as far as needed just to help the students to learn since I knew how great is the efforts and pressure it takes to stand on this positions. Move on, the school is actually a bungalow house rather than a school situated deep in Rawang where you can feel the authentic green scenery of a forest everywhere. The reason it is home school environment is to provide home based stimulation to the students. Here, the teacher sees the students need more practically in being able to take care of themselves using home environment to familiarise and ease the student’s anxiety. The greenery environment too is parts of the variables to help students learn without too much disturbance. During the interview with the principal, we came upon the reason why this home school here. Firstly, their mission is too trained and educates the children so that they will be able to go for the mainstream school either in normal class or special need class. Of course their syllabus won’t be the same as the stated in the national syllabus. For instance, they will only learn Bahasa Malaysia, English language and Mathematics where the standard have been lowered to the level of each of the children. But, they will have addition of art, sensory, domestic skills and water play sessions to cover up for their other need.

What unique about children with autism is although they may look physically as 5 years old kid, they may not be able to say any words and think properly since they have issues in mental development in these areas. That is why lowering the learning standards will helps lessen the burden of learning otherwise it will just overload their cognitive process. You may give instruction such as “Please give me the pencil back and sit down into your chair”, children with autism can only process the first part of the instruction which is giving back the pencil to you but they cannot remember the next steps which are too sit down because their storage memory is very low. Upon coming to this subject, the school prepared various teaching materials which specialized in helping students to remember the steps they need to do such as “picture lane”. This “picture lane” enables children to stick a card consists of picture with the word of an action in a sequence. This scaffolds thinking process of the children of what they need to do next. This remarkable invention helps a lot with mental processing and benefits the process of learning better. Examples of “Picture of Lane”:

The school will select students that come from middle and low income family by accessing household income divided by number of family, and if it’s below 1,000 for a person they will accepted the children.

Calculation:

Income (RM 6000) divided by number of family members (6) = 1,000

Though the children and parents need to undergo various procedures such as interview before the learning takes place to inform the school management of what the children is capable of. For instance, writing and recognising alphabets. The facilities provided are very good considering the size of the students (28 students). They have 1 principal, 6 full time facilitators (teachers), 1 occupational therapy and 1 general worker for cleaning and cooking. By next month, they aim for a full time speech therapy. The students have outdoor trips, swimming session (hydro therapy), horse riding, gardening, pet caring (cats and rabbits mainly) and cooking activities aside from their syllabus. All this activities are sponsored by Ideas organization except for swimming session where parents need to pay RM10 for their children. All the coach chosen are specialized and qualified in helping the students. Based from the observation, the students are really close with the principal and the facilitators, maybe because the treatment and family kind of relationship that the school gives them.

When we visit the classroom, most of the teacher was having 1 to 1 session with students for reading session and the types of books they use is simple story books, accompanied by toys to keep it interesting. Only few students were reading because majority of the students were standing and need to go to the toilet with the teacher assistance. Interestingly, they put the table and line up a chair on the wall side to keep the students on place to avoid any unwelcome escape when the learning session is on. Believe me, when they escape, they will run and go to other places other than the table and chair. The class were stratified into 3 groups of autism ( mild, moderate and severe).What I couldn’t really agree with is the fact the price of one individual real-based situation toys to stimulates students learning is way too expensive than it looks. It really doesn’t make any sense because the toy price should be between RM 20 but the seller sells it at RM 60. I know they need to make profits but this is too much considering it is toys to helps students with disabilities to learn.

This is what I thought…In a nutshell, having the visits make me compare and contrast the way lessons were taught in mainstream class and home based class, view the principal have in minds and teaching aids required to achieve goals set by the school. Thank you  J. 

Materials for Language Teaching ~ Part 2

By: SITI SARAH BINTI MANSOR.

PART 2 [Topic: My Secondary School Life]

*This is a personal reflection on teaching materials for project based English Language Communication about “My Secondary School Life” in Tamil based school. Care to be note that the targets are Year 6 students after UPSR exams. Majority of them will be going into government school where Bahasa Melayu and English language as a base of communication.

3 important aspects we will look upon are:

·        Process of design

·        Teaching and evaluation of teaching materials.

There will be only 2 design of teaching focused here J

Let’s continue the journey, shall we…

1)      Teaching Material: Grammar and Vocabulary Lesson (Materials needed: grammar task sheets and pencils)

      First of all, before starting with the next main activity of “Construction of Mega Scrapbook”, teachers facilitate student’s language skills by teaching simple grammar such as present, past and future tense. Reasons for doing this are to see general understanding of students regarding the aspect of grammar above and to know students background of knowledge in using sentences with proper grammar usage. Students were asked how to construct sentences in present, past and future tense by groups to make teaching more easily and give opportunities to all of the students. Majority of the students are able to follow with the lesson though through observation some students appear to be bored and unable to fully concentrate. Thus, frequently I need to ask students to concentrate during the lesson. Perhaps the students feel the learning is quite a repetition because they have learned it in their normal class and maybe not so much of hands on activity going on during this period compare to Part 1.

      Soon afterwards, we move into vocabulary lesson. It is for pre-teach vocabulary that will be associated and use for mega scrapbook because they need to do writing in each part of the scrapbook. There are only 10 vocabularies as not to make the lesson overload. Examples of the words are “remember, enjoy and think back”. It is to ensure students know the meaning and applied them later.  This activity give student’s opportunity to speak as teacher throws out questions about the meaning and sentence construction of each vocab. So far, the learning takes pace very well and students enjoyed doing this activity and we did not forget making them to correlate this lesson with our theme last lesson which is “My Secondary School Life”. For practical assessment we present students with task sheet about grammar and the new vocabularies that they learned. Here, more depth assessment and evaluation of students level of understanding being assessed when teachers observe how students answer their questions. For some students it is very difficult for them to answer the questions because unable to differentiate the meaning of enjoyed and looking forward. The teacher scaffold students by giving variety of examples to make it simpler for them to understand and differentiate each vocabulary (Eggen and Kauchak, 2013). Other than that everything went well and we had classroom discussion for assessing answers. Perhaps for recommendation to improve this activity more is that giving opportunities for students to work individually or in groups so that students can ask without shy with their friends anything that they do not understand. In addition, the answer line should be longer since it is quite small for students hand writing.

This is how the task sheet looks like:

Worksheet 1 - Circle the correct answer.

1.      We (go/went/going) to Penang last year.

2.      I will (miss/missed/missing) my friends when I go to secondary school next year.

3.      Last week, Siti (teaching/taught/teach) us how to play BINGO.

4.      Anjali (wanted/wants/wanting) to be a teacher.

5.      We will (visiting/visited/visit) a university next week.

6.      I (took/take/taking) the bus to school every day.

7.      I (studied/studying/study) very hard for my UPSR.

8.      I will (make/made/making) many new friends in secondary school.

9.      I will (worked/working/work) hard in secondary school.

10.  I will (enjoying/enjoyed/enjoy) my secondary school life.

Worksheet 2 -  Fill in the blanks with the correct words.

expect                                  lonely                                   remember                                           ideal                                      subjects                    looking forward                                               enjoyed difficult  leaving                             ambition

I feel a little sad that I am _______my primary school. I really _______ my life here. I will always ________ my friends and teachers. I will not forget them. However, I am actually ______________ to going to a new school. I ______ it to be very fun and meaningful. Although my brother told me that the ________ in secondary school will be more _________ than primary school, I am not scared. I will study hard so that I can go to my _____ university and achieve my ________ . I also love making friends so that I am sure I will not be ______ in my new school.

2)      Construction of Mega Scrapbook (Materials needed: 6 pieces of big cardboard, color papers, pictures, previous activities materials and stationeries)

      This is the last stage of this project and what students are required to do is to compile what they have learned from the first lesson activities and what they learned just now. There are three groups and each is given portion of titles they need to do in this mega scrapbook. There are three titles to be covered which are Memory Lane, Fears and My Future. In Memory lane, students are given pictures that we teachers took in our first lesson for them to remember their primary school and for them to write what they are doing based on the pictures. Secondly, Fears section involves students writing their fears shifting into secondary school using the materials in Fears in the Hat activity in the first lesson. Meanwhile, the My Future relates to My Dreams and Ideal activity last lesson where here students need to write, draw creatively what their dreams occupations before. Since I am only supervise the My Future group, I can only generate what is happening generally with the other two groups. Generally all groups began with planning stage where the teacher acts as the leader in the group since the work is unable to progress according to the time because prolonged discussion between students who are unable to decide and make action to start the work(Eggen and Kauchak, 2013). Then each student must contribute efforts in the parts of scrapbook whether designing, writing, cutting color papers and anything that is related. This activity prolonged for more than two hours compared from our original plan of 1 hour slot time for this session. From my observation among students in my group in particular, there is one boy who are doing almost nothing unless you instruct him to do simple work such as cutting the papers. At first, I make a hypothesis that the boy is not interested in taking part in the activity but after more observation, I can see that my first hypothesis is not right at all. The boy wants to participate well during the discussion and activity but due to language and instruction barriers he couldn’t do so. It seems that the students do not understand English language as well as his friends even though this is majority above average English language level of proficiency classroom. Then, I came into understanding that more scaffolding in terms of translation was needed in his case (Eggen and Kauchak, 2013). Along the time, his work began to show some consistency of taking part in the group work.

        In comparison, the rest of the group members are more than enthusiastic in pouring their creativity into this scrapbook project. Some of the groups are very noisy that we should have a person that control the voice of the classroom since it is so disturbing to do our own group works when you cannot hear anything due to the noisiness. I think the way we design the content of the scrapbook allows freedoms in students to explore their creative side of learning because it prove how students design the patterns  and outline of My Future. We basically tell the students to write and draw something for the scrapbook but they did more than what we suggested and it is a really good effort that they put and it is a good signal of positive reinforcement (Eggen and Kauchak, 2013). The only scar of this activity is there is not enough time to practice speaking of what they design properly and that will really affects how they are going to presents their projects in our campus later. Other than that, there not much defaults going on. Basically that what is what happen during the teaching for Part 2.

Reference: Eggen, P. & Kauchak, D. (2013).Educational Psychology : Windows on classroom. 9^th edition. USA: Pearson.