Oh dear (s)....!

I think this the right title for today's blog. First thing first, Oh dear...(or should I rephrase, "Oh Koala or Oh Kangaroo!") I turned 28th today. Well, I am obviously one year older and, of course, one year "wiser"! They really made me feel special today. One good thing about it here is that people here make you feel like home and included. They try to support each other--as part of their culture of being very expressive. As soon as I walked in the office, I saw my my name was written on the board saying "Tuesday 15--Tuk's Birthday." They do it with everyone in any occasions. I appreciated everything they did for me. A very nice card signed by teachers was given to me on our lunch for "the birthday girl." We had a great time just talking and expressing about our students, classes and other things. Having the sense of support and inclusion, I gained more strength, energy and the love of my career even more. The first present was given to me from Judy and her family. That was very nice. My impression was that the gifts were nice (actually I really loved it, especially the card!), but the thought that meant a great deal to me!

Back to the class, today we started off with homework checking. Then, I took over the class and ran an activity writing a business letter. Since the students were given a homework in writing the letter of application yesterday, I volunteered to check the answers with them in the classroom. However, after all of the observations and teaching assistance I have done in the last 6 weeks, I have adopted the routine of ESA (engage-study-activate). I prepared some activities to help explained the subject matter rather than jumping right to giving out the answers.

I first divided them into a group of 2 and 3 to put the parts of a letter of application that I had cut into little pieces in order. I explained what they had to do very clearly and slowly, so that they would understand and the activity would run smoothly (since I was not satisfied with my last lesson given out to the EAP class). It did not take long for them to finish the task. Then, I asked each group to tell me the order and I wrote them down on the board. Next, I explained each part a bit more, but focused more in the body part with different paragraphs in it. I explained to them of what information each paragraph normally consists. I wrote them down on the board and asked the students to copy down. Later on, with the same group, I asked them to work on the next task which was to identify the given sentences in the correct paragraph in a letter. Finally, I asked them each group to contribute the answers and finished off with the conclusion of the key elements of writing the business letter. I thought I did a.o.k. with the tasks.

Then, the teacher gave the results of their reading test and went over the answers with them. It seemed to me that the test was perhaps too challenging for them, considering the time constraints they had. Oh dear! There, I could see the disappointment on some of the students' faces. They mentioned about not having enough time, so they could not complete the test and was not happy about the results.

After lunch, the teacher ran the classroom differently (having them move around more and working in groups). I could see more interaction among students with the activities they ran--less teacher teaching time, but more on students talking time and students' involvement in the classroom activities. Here, there were two games that I thought was good.
(1) This game was to help fulfil the exercise in the textbook. This activity was the combination of teaching the steps in a career path and the words combination--"you finish studies", "you apply for a job", "you go for an interview", "you get the job", "you go for a training course", and "you get promoted." Here, the students learned all these phrases practically by playing the game.
This is how they did: The teacher gave out each a card in two colors and those cards included different phrases mentioned early on. The students had to find their own group by color and then discussed the phrases on their cards and put them in a correct order in terms of a career path. Finally, we had two groups standing in lines facing each other and each group read their phrases out loud.

(2)The second activity is a writing activity. The teacher had the students worked in pairs and described the photos given to them. How she did it was preparing some blank papers with a photo on each one of them. Then she asked them to write a sentence using Present Perfect with "just." After that, she rotated the photos and had the students created the second sentence using Present Perfect without "just" in the new photo The same was done with the third sentence, except that the sentence had to be in the form of "has not___yet" and the last sentence was using Past Simple. I thought the activity was good and in fact we can even use the same photos with different tenses. The important point with this activity is to make sure that teachers explain the process clearly and effectively or else students would get confused.