English for Specific Purposes/Taking Notes/Journals/Reading/Listening

Today, as always, we spent the first hour practising conversational English. The students get into two lines and ask each other questions, for example, what kind of music do you like to listen to?
The students are trying to adopt a conversational style of taking the question and making it into a platform to launch into anything related to music, especially highlighting music in Japan and comparing it to music in New Zealand.

Later on when the students have become proficient at this conversational style they will be given cards with just a topic on them, for example, music. This means that the student should voluntarily talk about music in a conversational style. This is quite a difficult task to achieve, but with practise the students will reach this level.

Today, we also did some homestay conversational topics that the students chose themselves. These conversational topics included talking about; TV, the weather, chess, food, etc.

We also made a start on English for Specific Purposes (ESP). The students are being introduced to many terms associated with engineering vocabulary. For example, motion, movement, force, mass, volume, etc. The ESP classes start on the 18th of May and the students will be studying until about 4pm.

TAKING NOTES

From experience I tend to know that a lot of the students I have taught on this programme don't really know how to use their notes. The students write down a lot of things from the board, but don't really engage with the material that they have copied down. I always try to say "cover/check" in order to get the students to use their notes. Today, I got them to give their notebooks to their partners and then the students had to tell their partners what was written on that page. Of course, this was quite difficult to remember, but it did emphasise that the students need to know what they have written down. I then said, "well, do you really need to know this?" This is when the students started to highlight what they wanted to remember and erase what they didn't need. I think that now the students know that their notes are important.

JOURNALS

I encourage the students to write in their journals every day, or as they want to. They can write about anything. I check their writing and always encourage them to do their corrections - sometimes, like today, I focused on some common mistakes that many of the students made.

LISTENING

All of the students borrowed a book from the library with an audio tape of the story. The students took it in turns to listen on a tape deck in the classroom about their story. The students also borrowed another book of their choice.

S.R.A. (Scientific Reading Associates) READING

This is a reading box that has twelve cards in each colour level. The colour levels start at red and go to the most difficult level: purple. The cards have a story and then comprehension questions. The students then take another card and check their answers. (You may remember this tool box in your own class at school - this is a revised edition). I have heard from the students that they enjoy doing this kind of reading because they are in complete control of their own learning. They also like competing with others in the class to see who can get to the highest level.

All of the activities in today's blog are focusing on giving the students the strategies to take control of their own learning, so that they can learn in the class, or at home independently of a teacher. My job now is to encourage the students to practise these strategies to the best of their abilities and furthermore, show them new ideas for learning.