Hi everyone, sorry for being so late, been really tied up these recent weeks.

Hi everyone, sorry for being so late, been really tied up these recent weeks.
Anyway, week 3 live session was super! there are lots of takeaway points for me. Things that I’d been trying to find the answer and my doubts in making inappropriate decisions in teaching were addressed, explained and justified by Penny in the live session.

Error Correction

I like it when Penny elaborated on the aspects on how our teaching judgement should be taken into account when correcting students’ mistakes during fluent speech communication. I’ve been told, and also many people say, to never correct students’ mistakes during fluent-speech communication because that can disrupt the flow and the momentum of the ‘activity’ as well as discourage students and destroy their confidence.
And I don’t always agree with this opinion. In some cases, I correct students’ mistakes during their fluent-speech. My biggest concern to this is I don’t feel like it’s right to let students get away with those mistakes, especially when it’s a major slip, because they may think they don’t make mistakes at all and thus those may be reinforced. However, I also take the students’ personality into account, so what I usually do when students are about to perform is I ask them if they want to be corrected at the end or during the activity as they go along.
Nevertheless, at the same time I also remind them that making mistakes is part of learning and it’s normal and I encourage them to be brave to speak out and make mistakes, more mistakes means more learning.

Using L1 in the English Classroom

Again Penny Ur I found this to be really useful for me, as all the message I’ve been hearing all this time at my workplace is that we should never use L1 in class at all cost. They also say that parents also expect the teachers to use 100% English in class.
However, sometimes there’s a situation in class in which I feel the need to use L1 to save time or to clarify meaning and give reassurance to students. And at times there’s also few grammatical concepts that can be more easily understood by comparing and contrasting the language features in students’ mother tongue with their equivalents and appropriate use in L2.
Sometimes students would use L1 too to help others understand what the teacher is saying. So, in some of my classes I create and use this rule “No Unnecessary Bahasa”. Students understand that they have to use English as much as possible and only resort to using Bahasa only when it’s necessary like helping their friends with the meaning of a difficult word.
So, your clarifications on how we can use L1 in English classrooms help me back up my opinion, and they also help with my guilty feelings.

Back in 2015, I also learned some activities from Philip Kerr on how to use L1 effectively to help with students’ L2. Here are some of the activities I like:

1. Reverse (back) translation – writing: the teacher gives students an English text to study, then they translate it in their own language, teacher takes back the English text, then from students’ own language translation they try to translate it back into English. Finally, students compare their English translation to the original English text.

2. Reverse (back) translation – speaking: this works basically the same as the whispering game, only this time the teacher will whisper a sentence in English, then the first student should translate it to their L1 and whisper it to the next student, and this student translates from L1 to English to the next student, and they keep going like that. At the end, they will compare the original English sentence from the teacher to the students’ sentence production (after the sentence has been translated back and forth – L2-L1-L2-L1-L2..).

3. Videos-Subtitle-Dubbing: the teacher selects a short video clip in L1 (could be comedy, horror, or drama) and asks students individually or in groups to create the subtitle in English. Or teacher can ask students in groups to dub the characters’ speeches in the video into English. The videos are played in class, then teacher and students can discuss particular areas for improvement.