Last week, I attended a couple of lectures under the title of "teaching grammar" with Mr. Joe. These lectures included a lot of topics and activities inside the class like: adjective clausses, and passive voice. These topics were taught almost inductively where Joe introduces the topic and gives examples before starting the rules of the topic. For me, I like this approach because it is a meaningful as well as a memorable lesson and allows the students to engage and discover themselves via participating actively in the lesson without recognizing the rules. Another thing is that the students are motivated spontanuosly since the lesson is a student-centerd rather than a teache-centered class. So by following this approach, the teacher will make use of students' eliciting knowledge instead of explaining a given concept by being presented by the teacher to show how the concept is used by the students. This approach will surely develop the students' ability to think and encourage them to investigate the topic without already knowing the rules. But this way of delivering the lecture could sometimes be frustrating because some students prefer to be told the rules of the lesson before starting. Thus, by applying this approach, students my not have precise grammatical rules about what they are studying inside the class. Another thing that I would like to mention is that this apparoach is a time consuming.
On Monday, July, 29, and Wednesday, July, 31, I had lectures about teaching pronunciation with Christina. The lectures were about the importance of pronunciation for the students and how to pronounce the stressed words. The importance of teaching pronunciation to our students is that our students will improve their listening comprehension skill because it will be easier for them to distinguish vocabularies via their pronunciation. Another important thing, in my opinion, is that pronunciation is very significant for the students to improve their reading skill because reading is the pronunciation of words and English language consists of many words that look the same but pronounced differently and have different meanings. Word stress is also another important topic in pronunciation. It is usually useful, engaging, and fun to teach. Thus, what was included in Christina's lecture is stressed w...
Hmmm... I challenge you to rethink some statements you wrote. Firstly, is it that "prefer to be told the rules of the lesson before starting"? Honestly, if we stop and think, it is probably more safe to say that students were traditionally taught that way so they are, often times, used to that way. But, that is by no means saying that they prefer it.
ReplyDeleteSecondly, you mention, " this approach is a time consuming". Is it any more time consuming to use an activity initially so that students are able to use the grammar and (usually) more easily identify it and its rules on their own (or with their group) rather than the teacher giving them rules and having to explain it more so that students really get it. After all that, they still practice, so is it really time we are saving by drilling rules into them first?
Food for thought...