Teach English in Gegou Zhen - Linyi Shi

Imagine yourself sitting in a classroom with nothing but textbooks, a teacher, students, tables and chairs. The entire class time featured only the teacher, and the students held none of the talk time. That classroom experience would be an awful one for many students and most could expect that the learning outcomes might not be positive. In unit 5 “Managing Classes,” the reading suggests that it is essential for teachers to find ways to inspire students in multiple ways so that students can gain confidence gradually. Despite the fact that there are numerous ways for teachers to arrange and organize a classroom, it is paramount for them to discover the most effective settings to manage their classroom as well as their students more sufficiently. Without maintaining discipline or establishing positive rapport with students, teachers who wish to create a comfortable and supportive classroom environment will soon realize their traditional ways of maintaining and managing the classroom are no longer effective. Nevertheless, with the support of equipment and teaching aids, a lesson can run more beneficially and smoothly. Surely, past generations focused heavily on discipling students and forced them to obey rules in school and always listen to the teachers. If students failed to do so, they would face disciplinary actions. As a result, students only attended school because they were told or forced to, but it was never motivating or fun for them to learn. The only enjoyable element for the students would be lunch time and playing sports with their peers, and finally when it’s time for them to graduate. As time will not stop for anyone, new ways of education continues to merge in. In addition to traditional and prestigious schools, numerous private education institutes have been built and the number will continue to rise. The selling point of those private education institutes proposes creative learning due to the fact that new generations tend to respond better to creative learning process. For instance, students who are currently living in these modern days enjoy visual materials as part of their learning. Let’s suppose there was a group of young learners ages from 3 to 6. It could be tremendous difficult to grasp their attention or even introduce lessons of values to them. Nevertheless, if the class teacher deploys visual aids carefully, it would assist the teacher by maintaining the learners’ interests. In example, a teacher hoped to teach his/her students a lesson about sharing, but it could be rather challenging for the teacher to illustrate the idea of sharing by only relying on spoken words. Therefore, supplemental supports as such computer materials along with overhead projector (OHP), videos/audios, a white board and online resources can be extremely helpful in a classroom setting. The teacher can incorporates ideas on the social value of sharing by showing animated stories to young learners. After the video, the teacher may also asks students questions regarding the stories and why should or shouldn’t the characters completed those actions. From this point forward, I would like to share some insights on my personal teaching experience since I am currently working as an English teacher at a local education institute in Hong Kong. Most of my students are aged from 2 to 13 years old and I often begin my lesson with some circle time, which I gather the students in a circle and chat with them about their school life or what they did over the weekend. After that, I show them phonics sound cards to practice phonics with them and they will tell me the sounds. When that’s done, I will move into the next phrase, which is introducing a new sound from the phonics textbook. Some of the iTTT units mention pair works are crucial in students’ learning and I cannot agree more since I also conduct partner/group work in my class. During the phonics session, students will work with each other and complete an activity called “teacher A, teacher B,” which they take turns to read through the sounds and blend different words, and the other students will check if their partners pronounced the sounds correctly. After demonstrating phonics, we move onto the part and complete one or two activities from the student’s book, which students will learn new vocabularies and expressions. Then, I usually use a computer program to play interactive games, show videos and stories, and lead group discussions with students afterwards. Students seem to enjoy the activities most of the time and they have fun while learning. They’re rewarded 10-15 minutes of snack time if they maintained their discipline. After snack time, I have my students to complete some writing activities in their workbooks to reinforce their learning. Before the end of the class, we also complete a worksheet or start a project on critical thinking. When class ends, students who behaved well in class receive a class sticker or even a bonus sticker and they can collect a prize from the admin staffs when they have the entire page of stickers collected. In summary, equipment and teaching aids can assist teachers in their teaching in numerous ways. As modern technologies are constantly improving and evolving, I believe they would also evolve our ways of education and incorporate renovating ideas to educate our coming generations. To reflect on my own teaching, I would like to refer to the reading from unit 17 “Equipment and teaching aids” as it relates to the materials and equipment I use in my classroom as well. The first one on the list is “the board,” which I mainly use a whiteboard along with markers and erasers to show students key vocabularies they will learn for the lesson. Students also play “hangman” on the whiteboard for fun sometimes. For the second item on the list, I do not have an interactive whiteboard in my classroom, but I tried to use one in another classroom before. The third one on the list, overhead project (OHP), is something I use quite frequently as I project book materials, videos and songs from the computer to the whiteboard. As for the fourth item on the list, I use visual aids such as pictures and interactive games from the internet. The rest of the items on the list I do not need to use as frequently, except course books and resource books for extra practice. However, I use some additional materials to support my lesson, such as phonic sound cards, flashcards/worksheets, computer/OHP, and sticker books as well.