Reflection on School Visit: Fuhsing Private School

The appearance of business building impressed me when I first glance round the Fuhsing Private School. It is a school that extremely focus on English education, starting early at the kindergarten level. Since students learn English so early that their English proficiency are much higher than students at the same age. Its successful English education mainly attributes to the development of the English Research Center founded in 1993. The center was aimed to develop English curriculum covering from kindergarten to junior high school and to design English related activities in order to increase students’ learning motivation. Their success was proved by showing the result of the Basic Competence Test - half of their exam takers got full grades in English. The gorgeous accomplishment on English education made me curious about the real classroom activities in this school.

The classroom activities are summarized as follows.
Warm-up activity – landmark of cities or countries around the world
1. The teacher asked which place they would take their friends to if he/she first came to Taiwan. Some students said their answers like Yaming Mountain or Taipei 101 loudly.
2. After that, the students were required to write down the landmarks of the cities or countries in the sheet provided by their teacher. When the students finished writing, the teacher discussed the answers with them by showing the photographs of those landmarks with PowerPoint.
3. The teacher wanted her students to practice the sentence “I have been to ….” by asking them what country they have been to.

Main activity – sentence pattern practice
4. The teacher showed some sentence pattern with on the PowerPoint. Each slide contained only one sentence pattern with clues. For example, “_______ _______ for ________ me” and
V O Ving
“_______ have _____ _____ on _______”
Pron V-en Pron N
5. The students who were chosen by lot had to make a sentence according to the grammatical rules given on the slide. If students could not make one, the teacher provided more hints, in this case more words shown.
6. After two or three sentences were made for each sentence pattern, the teacher presented the complete sentence that she prepared previously.
7. Informing that those sentences were taken from their textbook, the teacher asked her students to listen to the dialogue twice by playing the CD. At the first time, they just listened, but they were required to fill in the blanks at the second time.
8. As the writing was finished, the students checked their answers from their textbooks.

Sum-up activity – comprehension questions
9. The teacher asked all students some questions related to the dialogue they just listened. The purpose of these questions was to examine if students understood the content of the dialogue.
10. When one question was proposed, each student wrote down her answer on the plastic folder and raised it high. If all answers were correct, next question continued.

Although the procedure of presenting materials were nothing new (bottom-up process), the way she delivered the materials differed from conventionally teacher-oriented instruction. The teacher spent lots of time (around 20 minutes) on extra materials, namely landmarks of other cities or countries, even though the topic of this unit was limited on London only. Using authentic pictures of those landmarks also made learning more meaningful and increased students’ motivation. Moreover, instead of deductively explaining grammatical rules, the teacher asked students to create sentences on their own. This not only raised their awareness of the sentence pattern, but forced them to think to make a grammatical sentence. Finally, the use of plastic folders, rather than papers, as tools for answering comprehension questions was a really intelligent idea. If all teachers followed this idea, we could save a lot of trees in the world.

However, the classroom activities were not flawless. I have some suggestions for this lesson in terms of the form of activity, students’ anxiety, and the use of PowerPoint. I noticed that all activities were individual without any cooperation among students though few students could get help from others, but just in private. To some extent, group work would facilitate better outcome in learning and lower their learning anxiety. The students’ anxiety increased when they stood up to answer questions. One student even stood for a long time just because she could not answer the question. If it was a group work, students could help each other in order to solve the problem. The last point was the unclear writing on the PowerPoint because of the sun shine. When we sat at the back row watching the slides, we hardly recognized the words on the slides, not mention to the students. Therefore, these three points needed to be improved.a

Reflection on the Instruction of ICT

After our discussion about ICT, I started to think differently on the use of technology in the teaching environment. As Alice had mentioned, it is how teachers use technology, rather than the use or not of technology that matter. I remembered Alice took one teacher’s case as an example. The teacher asked her students to type their composition on the computer and then to print them out as their assignments. I believe many teachers did so only because they didn’t want to see the awful handwriting of the students. But, in order to use the technology more efficiently, she could just carry out all these processes online, such as saving the composition and giving feedback and correction. In this way, technology was integrated in the teaching and learning context. This is crucial for us, the future teachers, when involving technology in our teaching, that we should use it more meaningfully and efficiently.

As for the presentation done by group seven, I was quite impressed about their performance on the introduction of ICT. They introduced three famous tools on the internet, namely Yahoo groups, Hot potato, and Iwill. These online tools are helpful and practical in real teaching, facilitating more flexibility of classroom activities. I really enjoyed creating my own Yahoo group that encouraged creativity and individual difference. I can design it with my own style and share with other people. This was a fascinating idea in terms of increasing students’ motivation! In addition, they gave clear (and detailed) instruction on how to use those technological tools and how to integrate them in our teaching process. They first demonstrated us the process and then let us practice it, which was the typical way of teaching in the laboratory. I hardly got confused on their presentation. So I want to praise their efforts for these parts.

Reflection on Teaching Writing

Group six’s presentation reflected some magnificent principles when teaching writing. Students benefit more if the teacher integrates writing tasks with reading activity. Traditionally, the focus of teaching writing was the production from students. The output-oriented process of writing without the input often made students difficult to come up with a great composition. Nowadays as the emphasis on the integration of language skills, writing tasks usually follow the activity of reading messages. Through reading, students retrieve their background knowledge and merge the old information with the new one. Writing is the performance of the combination of these two message based on the students’ daily life experience. Therefore, in group six’s case, they present the dialogue (reading passage) first, the purpose of which was to guide students to write the invitation letter.

Another principle lies in the meaningfulness of writing. Learning activities should be meaningful to the students; otherwise, they will feel bored and unmotivated. Whenever the author writes something, there must be one or more than one reader. Similarly, if students make a composition, it’s more meaningful that there is one (or some) real reader(s) to read their passages. The writing activity in group six’s presentation required students to write an invitation letter to someone they want to invite for a particular event. Apparently, they application of this principles made this writing activity quite successful.

It’s undeniable that they made a lot of time and efforts on the design of the lesson. These included the creative way of grouping students (by using postcards with different cartoon figures), the way they teach dialogues (using Taiwanese or the super model’s tone to translate the dialogue), and writing invitation letters to classmates. Although I had a lot of fun during the presentation, there are some suggestions for group six. The color in the PowerPoint slides needed more consideration because I can’t see the words clearly in the middle row of the classroom. The use of money, even though it’s fake one, as means of increasing learning motivation is not quite appropriate in terms of long term goal of teaching. In general, they did a good job on this topic.

Reflection on Teaching Reading

From Alice’s sharing, I learned that “teaching reading is to teaching students how to understand it.” Although I understand this concept, it is difficult for me to put this notion into practice. But, fortunately, Alice provided us some tips or techniques such as the use of “fish bone” or mapping to teach reading comprehension. When completing the figure of “fish bone,” students can construct the meaning of the story or article by analyzing the content. The top-down process of teaching reading is aimed to develop student as active readers, rather than merely listening to the teacher explaining the reading message. Besides the reading materials given, students can complete the fish bone with their own experience and in the following activity write their own stories. The integration of reading and writing skills facilitates students’ development of English proficiency more quickly.

As for group five’s presentation, I can hardly recall all the details. What I remembered is that each student read out one sentence of the article and after that the teacher explained the content of the article. The disadvantage of this way to teach reading is that students only paid attention to the particular sentence they were participate for. This was not the real purpose of reading. I agreed with Alice’s advice that the teacher could give time for students to read the article silently even though they might face some challenge or difficulty in the process of reading. To solve the problem of reading difficulty to certain students, some training of reading strategies is necessary. For example, the teacher can introduce how to skim and scan, how to look for key words, and how to take notes or highlight. I think students will benefit a lot from using these reading strategies.

Reflection on School Visit: ZSGHS

Zhong Shan Girls High School (ZSGHS), one of the best senior high schools in Taipei city, features the extensive application of technology and the cooperation of teachers as a team. It is the first school in Taiwan that distributed a projector to each classroom and a notebook to each teacher, displaying its emphasis on technological use. The frequency of using technology consequently brings changes on the methods, models, and techniques of teaching in ZSGHS.

The conventional way of instruction used by individual teachers was replaced by team work among teachers by means of sharing teaching materials and cooperating with each other. Therefore, in this school they have so called “the strongest instructional team” which produced innovative and creative teaching materials and methods to increase students’ motivation as well as to meet students’ various needs. This background knowledge mentioned above helps me to understand the rationale of teaching when observing lessons in ZSGHS.

It is my fortune and pleasure to observe the math and science class in this school, which consists of 24 smart students and a nice and humorous teacher, Stephanie. All students were highly motivated on what they were learning and hardly afraid of making mistakes when speaking English. They have great rapport or relationship with their teacher and enjoy the task-based instruction a lot. In the fifty-minute lesson, group presentation occupied most of the class time. Each group presented their materials by using PowerPoint, showing the frequent utilization of technology on learning English in the classroom.

In the task-oriented lesson, the main activity was to present what students had done in their task of selling things. All students were divided into six groups previously. Each group had to sell one thing online on ebay. On the day we observed, each group presented any information related to their product such as the picture of the product, starting bid, end time, shipping costs, item location, and description of the product. After each group finished their presentation, other groups had to evaluate the design of auction done by that group through an evaluation sheet. The criteria of the evaluation included the photograph, the price, the service, first impression of the product, and etc. Each criterion was scored from one to five points. Each group had 1.5 minutes to discuss these details and finally handed in the evaluation sheet to the teacher. As all groups completed their presentation, the teacher continued to start the next lesson whose topic is migration of food. At the same time, two teaching assistance helped count the scores of all groups. The teacher did not jump directly to the topic of the next lesson; rather, she encouraged class discussion by asking lots of questions about food and finally led to the main topic. At the end of the class, the teacher announced the result of the competition. The group which got the highest scores meant most students regarded their online auction as the best one.

After observing the Stephanie’s lesson, I was so surprised about the concentration, motivation, and reaction of those students. They are obviously the so called “good students,” namely those with high motive to learn and great autonomy on learning. They hardly distracted their attention to other things from the activity in the class, not even when other groups were presenting on the stage. All students were engaged in what they were doing and tried their best to express their idea in English. Although some of them did not express very well, they did not look embarrassed at all. It seems that for them learning English is an enjoyable and interesting thing, rather than a horrible and boring work.

Students’ positive reaction and attitude on learning possibly result from the pressure-free environment and the great rapport with their teacher. During the process of learning in the classroom, I hardly notice any error correction on students’ speaking. In stead of grammar, they put great emphasis on the content, namely the information of their selling product. Errors are considered one part of learning; therefore, most students with low anxiety are bold to take risks in the learning process. The teacher builds harmonious relationship with her students, as friendly as their friends but also with professions.

The task-centered lesson is the key of the successful teaching. Most teachers who use task as one part of their lesson may encounter a lot of problems such as the control of time, the design of tasks, the selection of the authentic materials, and the integration of tasks with the lesson. Stephanie’s effective application of the task to her class contributed to her great efforts or the aid of the teaching team. It is undoubted that the use of task encourages students’ learning motivation and the variation of classroom activity, but the prerequisite is to have thorough design of using tasks.

In addition to the application of tasks, I also learned something from Stephanie’s class. When introducing new lesson, she did not directly point out the topic (migration of food), but encourage students to think the changing process of food and its factors by asking questions. This inductive learning process facilitated critical thinking ability of students. In this way, students are not the information receivers, but knowledge acquirers. Moreover, time was controlled excellently in this lesson. When students presented too many materials, namely the PowerPoint slides, she asked them to skip some of them in order to save time for the next few groups. If she did not do so, the task would cost too much class time and might not be as successful as it was.