Learning to Teach Better

Hi Penny and everyone, week 4 live session was also full of useful insights and interesting tips, I learned a lot! Reading aloud Most of my students like this activity. In some of my classes, most of the students are really enthusiastic when it comes to reading aloud, they would ask me if they could read the text for the class no matter whether it’s a new text or one that they had already been familiar with. And I always thought that reading aloud was more student-centered. So, whenever we had a reading lesson, I always asked students to take turns reading the text for the class. After Penny’s 4th session I came to realize that it doesn’t always work that way (student-centered). Asking students to read aloud a new text (doing sight-reading) may not be very helpful as they may make mistakes in pronunciation, intonation, etc, and therefore they may not be able to understand the passage very well and at the same time they may also make it difficult for others who listen to have a good gr...

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, espec...

Hi everyone, I love all the ideas that Penny has shared so far, and for this week 2 discussion, I’d like to focus on one particular idea of using pictures for students to say as many things as they can about them in a given time. Here I want to try to outline a possible modification of the activity: 1. Students are asked to take a picture of an activity they see outside the class using their cellphone or find a picture (of an activity) on the internet and save it on their gadget. 2. Students then edit the photo in such a way that it doesn’t show a full capture of the activity (making it mysterious), but they should still keep the original version of the photo. 3. Students are put in groups(of 3-5 students, ideally) and each member of the group takes turns showing the photo while others try to guess what’s in the picture by using Y/N questions. They can either limit the time or the number of the questions asked. At the end, whether their friends can or cannot guess the activity in the ...

Hi Everyone, it’s been 6 days of lively and insightful discussions! Here are things that struck me from the first live session last week: 1. Not to pre-teach new vocabulary before listening. I have been pre-teaching new vocabulary (with visuals and word definitions, etc) quite often before a listening or reading activity, especially when these words are vital to the comprehension of what is being discussed. Doing this for a listening activity sometimes works (with minimum success) and many times doesn’t (especially with young learners). On the other hand, for a reading activity, that works most of the time. I didn’t really investigate this myself until I learned from Penny that “a single exposure to a vocabulary item won’t normally lead to retention”. This kind of gave me the answer, I think, it means that when students come across an unfamiliar word in a listening activity, the meaning is often not ready yet at their disposal and they don’t have enough time to relate and recall this ...

Hi, everyone! Nice to meet you all here! My name's Septina Nur Iswanti, but just call me Nina 😊 I come from Indonesia and live in Semarang, Central Java. I teach at a private language school here and I've been teaching for 9 years now. I'm so grateful that so far I've been given the opportunity to teach and learn from a great number of students from all sorts of ages and backgrounds. I'm joining this course simply because I want to teach better. And I'm particularly interested in correcting spoken errors and using translation. So excited to learn from Penny again since her last iTDi course with Scott Thornbury, I know this is going to be another fruitful and rewarding experience. And it's really wonderful also to meet and learn from all the participants here. Let's get connected on FB as well if you like 😊 Looking forward to starting this journey!