Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Teaching for dummies!!

Yeah!  that's the heading , the dummy is me!!!  Just thought I'd better record how today went and what we covered.  Class no 1 was a group of 9 students studying handicrafts.  Some of them want to be teachers, some don't.  I thought I would introduce the determiners "either/or, neither/nor,  too"because  when I talked to the physics group the previous week, they told me " I don't want to be teacher too"... so my ear picked up right away, that there was a problem with the determiner and the article.   I thought I would have this physics group today, but guess that will be next week.
Well, back to the first  class today who are studying handcrafts.  Their English level is on the low side.  So first off, we just talked about what they were studying, and  a little about themselves.  By listening to them I picked up verb conjugation problems. Problems with the words " don't have, haven't and didn't".  They sometimes said things like " I haven't go there", meaning " I didn't go there.".  also the lack of using the infinitive verb.  They would say " I want be teacher"  or 'I like read books, I like play games, I like dance".
Pronunciation: we worked on the "th"sound, and a little on the ending sounds .."s" at the end of plurals, and " ed" at the end of verbs.  Interesting group.  They were receptive to corrections, and seemed eager to want to speak English.. some were a little more shy than others.  I did a few sentences of verb agreement with them, but discovered it was too advanced for them, without first having gone over verb tenses with them. Then I showed them a picture of a woman with her leopard, which I took from a Reader's Digest article.  I asked the students to tell me what they saw, and got them to make sentences that way, then we read a short story about her. Each student took turns reading parts of the story...we worked on pronunciation of problem words, like " thorny bush" and went over words they didn't know.

The second group is a group of Irena's students.  There were 7 of them.  They are studying physical education I think.  They all said they want to be teachers.  I also did the same lesson with them.  They looked at the picture of the woman and her leopard made a description of what they saw. We, then, read the story together and worked on the "th"  pronunciation.  I also noticed the "v/ w" pronunciation problem as well, but we didn't work on that today.  I didn't do any verb agreement sentences today with this group.  With both groups I also noticed the article problem. Forgetting to use "a" or using "a" when "an" should have been used. well. guess that's for today.

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