Materials for Language Teaching ~Reflection Part 1~

Good morning to all of my honorable guests,

It is me once more :)
The Writer :) : SITI SARAH BINTI MANSOR.
Below are my reflection of teaching experience ~ hehe~

Instruction:

Write 2 reflections on the process of design, teaching and evaluation of your teaching materials for the English Language Communication Project (not a lesson plan).

*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. The student in our group majority has above an average English Language Proficiency. The targeted language skills in this project are writing, reading, listening and communication. Here, there will be only 2 main activities covered as in Part 1 reflection that really focused on the learning objective and the theme of: My Secondary School Life compared to others.

 3 important aspects we will look again upon are:

·        The process of teaching materials design,

·        Teaching and evaluation of teaching materials.

Thus, let’s begin digging out the experience shall we…

1)      Teaching Material: Fear in the Hat (Materials needed: A hat, strips of A4 papers, pen/pencil)

       The first part of teaching and learning activities involved teachers in bringing awareness to students about the new environment that they are going to experience for secondary school. Here, we represent the idea through the game called “Fear in the Hat”. It is a game where students will write their worries in shifting from primary to secondary school in a one strip of paper and all the papers will be jumble up in the hat. (*By the way, the materials design for this activity is easy to achieve and it is very simple to make. Besides, it is not overwhelming for the students as in this stage we only wanted to clarify their fears as with ways to overcome it together. Moreover, it is a good way to observe silently students listening skills (understanding of instructions) and writing skills as well-[killing two birds with one stone]). Since at the beginning one of our group members knows how to play the game, it makes the planned to conduct it much easier without any modification made since it is good enough from our point of views.

How the activity goes:

       The teacher will randomly pick one of the papers in the hat and have discussion session with the students what and why they think and feel that way. Furthermore, we as a teacher scaffold students by giving encouragement and advice on how to tackle the issues together. This gave broad idea to students that this problem can be taken care of and they are not alone in their learning journey. In addition, it acts as foundation for students to prepare for their upcoming secondary school life. It is essential for teacher to always question students to know more about what they think but do remember in giving students opportunity to questions and answers us back because this is after all “Questions and Answers Session” for them. After each issues being discusses, teachers need to make students reflect back whether the problem is actually a problem or just a trick of mind and not to forget of injecting some positive reinforcement of motivational talk. At the end, all the papers will be kept by the teachers for the Part 2 lesson. This activity relate to mostly Vygotsky’s theory of interaction with more knowledgeable other (Schütz, 2004). Teachers act as facilitator and provide their school experiences for the students to learn something from it.

Example of the sequence of the game:

·        The teacher picks up the paper in the hat and it says “Communication Problem”.

·        The teacher asks students what they mean by “Communication Problem”. For instance, is it the urge need of English language usage in secondary school in comparison to their primary school? *As a reminder, do remind our self that the majority of the students are prone in using Tamil language as medium of communication in their primary school and their usage of English language is neither high, average or low. So, shifting in language is a huge concern for those who did not practice English language for communication in early years of their primary school life.

·        Then, the teacher will asks who else feels and think the same way. These encourage the students a bit because they know they are not alone in having this type of concern.

·        What we can do next is the teachers will share their experience of the same issues towards the students so they can learn and take note from it.

·        We can provide advice and find rationale and sensible ways to overcome those obstacles. It is important that we state the reality towards the students so that they will be really prepared because providing unnecessary fantasies such as “You can do it and tackle it because it is like peas” will make students think and treat important matter lightly.

       Although we prepared the activity well from the beginning, it shows that it give little impact that we looked for. I mean the purpose for this activity is for students to share lots of viewpoints of fears going to secondary school but there is issue during the filtering of fears from the hat. Almost all of the students wrote the same kind of fears which is afraid of leaving their best friends and teachers. Due to that, we can only discussed about that one topic only and since we did not really anticipate that, the time allocated for the session became really short compare to time schedule in our group lesson plan. From my point of view, it is a good game but as a planner we need to take more precaution with factors that we never thought off that might affect the activity. For instance: All the students write the same problem (We thought that this will never happen BUT it DOES!!!). More than that, it can cause misleading information to students too if we can only discussed only one fears with them since we told them that we will try to discussed as many as possible too. Not much interaction happens between the teachers and the students and it became a dilemma because we cannot achieve maximum communication language skill that we targeted at. That’s why the lecturers always told us that backup plan is necessary. Note to one self. This reminds me to other module “Portray of a Teacher” because as a teacher we should be fully prepared for all of the consequences when it comes into teaching, seems that is very true for this case. Haha J….let see…For teaching material improvement maybe we should provide different categories of fears so students have more options in giving us their opinions instead of just focusing on shifting to secondary school alone but in some ways it kind of also defeat the purpose of the study. Hmm…so a lot of consideration and factors need to think off in improve the design of this activity…I will say depends on the context of what you are trying to teach first…

The following activity is….

2)      Teaching Material: Dreams and Ideals (Materials needed: A4 papers, pen/pencils)

        After knowing our students fears, we would like to know more about their dreams such of occupation, subjects they think they need to acquire to realize their dreams, their ideals secondary school and their future life. That is why we planned of implementing the ideas we create from previous visit from St Paul school but we did not include the part which include the strength and weaknesses because of the time variable. We paid attention to the part where we think can bring students to voluntarily speak, write, read and listen while having fun at the same time. I think we have covered section of strengths and weaknesses in the “Fear in the Hat” activity instead.

How the activity goes:

      The A4 paper will be folded into half and another half till we can see four separate section each. Each section contains the titles mention above. It is very interesting during the process of explaining the instructions on how to do each part because the students can understand the instruction very well and cooperate for each section as it makes teachers duty easier. It is heartwarming seeing all the students openly discussed and elaborated about their dreams with us teacher, even the quietest students give a good respond though we need to help them to talk more.

      They display different intelligences as regard to Howard Gardner Multiple Intelligences (Gardner, 1985). For example, one of my students has a well bodily kinesthetic ability as he can draw well to convert his message to become a photographer in a good picture of camera man model taking picture with the camera. I was so astonished seeing another students portray excellent writing linguistic intelligence write by the words she choose to write. However, there is something that noticed by me and all the teachers is that majority of the students are very ambitious regarding their dreams…err..our students are very materialistic type of person….all of them love diamonds, gold and all top rate cars…thought I am the same…but this somehow bring concern  about how students now a day’s perspective  about life. I personally think that it is good to be materialistic but BUT NOT too much until you have forgotten the morale value that life has to offer. Teachers need to make students realize about this aspect of life too. Never the less, it is a good activity because we are able to identify students level of creativity and English language four main skills as above.

      Majority of the students have above average English language skills in terms of reading, writing, listening and even communication which really bring surprised to me. Well, this is because the last time when I teach in Tamil school project, the student’s English language skills especially are below average as they face difficulty in all of the aspects stated above. Hmm…it could also be that before the class that I taught was mixed ability class but now is the same ability class. It is a beneficial experience to be able to learn from the perspective teaching in mixed ability and same ability class. If you need activity that take approximately one hour, this could be your answer but that depends on the topic you are going to teach too. What makes this interesting is that variety of adaptation can be made just by changing the topics but use the same framework of this “Dreams and Ideals” activityJ. This also enhances student’s communication skills as they present their ideas on each part of the activity and the teachers scaffold them by elaborate their ideas or paraphrase it to make it easier for all students to comprehend.  What I would like to do in the future that perhaps thinking about the materials reusability after conducting the activity and the durability of the materials since we only use paper here, maybe the paper can be replace with online teaching if the school and students have all the necessary equipment and skills to carry it out.

Below shows how “Dreams and Ideals” looks like visually:

Occupation	Subjects need to learn to realize occupation
Ideal Secondary School	My Ideal Future

That’s all for Part 1 reflection, Part 2 is coming next… J         

Reference:

Schütz, R. (2004). Vygotsky & language acquisition. English Made in Brazil.

Gardner, H. (1985). Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. Basic books.