Professional Blog
This week in Teaching English as a Foreign Language classes we engaged in a lot of group work and we had another teacher called Finn taking the classes. He immediately put us at ease and was very friendly and interested to get to know us and hear about our education system. He also directed a lot of questions to Fionnuala, Trisha and I as we are the only native English speakers in the class and he didn’t hesitate to ask us to define words and provide appropriate words to help him to describe things in English.
The lessons were based on discussions through group work; where we discussed approaches to teaching English and whether speaking, listening, reading and writing should be taught exclusively and how we were taught. The Turkish students said they are taught how to write in English, but their teachers don’t speak to them in English and so they are not fluent speakers of English. In our groups we came to conclusions that there needs to be a balance of learning English through speaking, listening, reading and writing activities and they shouldn’t always be taught exclusively.
Furthermore, we learned that the Danish have introduced a new skill for English language learners – communication, which encourages students to apply their English learning with a partner or in groups by having a conversation with each other or writing letters. I think back home we do engage in this, although we have not identified ‘communication’ as one of the language and literacy skills. Also I think after discussing about this in groups it has placed more of an emphasis on how important it is to allow children to apply there learning through real-life contexts e.g. ordering something in a restaurant or having a telephone conversation. This is because members of the group highlighted that they often were given contrived dialogues to practise and they seemed far removed from natural language use.
In our second class this week we were split into groups and each group had to focus on an element of teaching e.g. classroom discipline. My group focused on lesson planning and each of us shared our experiences and what we thought should be considered when lesson planning. The Dutch girl showed me and the Turkish girl a lesson plan template she uses and I found it interesting that there was a space for the teacher’s personal skills; skills they will work on during a lesson e.g. classroom discipline and using your voice appropriately. I also learned that the Dutch trainee teachers engage in teaching experience every week, at least once a week and have seven weeks teaching practice every 2nd semester. I think this is really beneficial as they are regularly engaging in a classroom setting, seeing a qualified teacher and the strategies and resources he/she uses as well as learning more about how children behave and learn. I think I could also benefit from this amount of experience as it would develop my confidence in teaching and the hands-on experience would perhaps help me to retain more knowledge about teaching and learning.
After our group discussion on lesson planning we prepared a PowerPoint and presented it to the rest of our class and Finn was impressed with the included Stranmillis lesson plan template as it considered everything i.e. differentiation, assessment, thinking skills and personal capabilities etc. He asked me to upload a copy onto Sjaelland University’s version of Queen’s Online so that all the students could access it. I feel my confidence in presenting has increased since I have joined these classes as we are encouraged to give presentations quite a lot. I like that they are not assessed because they don’t feel as daunting or stressful, but rather an opportunity to share ideas with people in your class in a non-threatening, positive way. It’s also giving me plenty of practice for future oral presentations.
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