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.