Week 6: Reflections

Hello friends,

This has been a very engaging week in the course. All the readings are very useful.

Large classes are a reality in India. Government run colleges are more crowded than private colleges because of lower fees, and because Government colleges are located in the interior areas also where no private colleges are available. The insights that I gained from the readings of the week on Managing Large Classes are going to make my task  a lot easier. Though I cannot use many technical tools, I can surely go for group activities and engagement triggers to keep my students interested and motivated.

Interactive PowerPoint is something entirely new for me. I have tried my hands at making one, but I know that there are many flaws in the lesson plan. I promise to improve with a little bit of practice.

As for the Project Task: Implement the Change, I am not teaching right now. The issue that I prepared myself to work on is improving grammar of the class chosen. The students that I will be dealing with have passed their high school examination in English grammar. So we can be sure that they are aware of the basic rules of grammar. Still their performance is not up to the mark, and the reason can be assigned to one very important factor – their lack of exposure to real life use of their knowledge of grammatical structures.

Since I will be meeting my students only twice a week, I’ll need to think of some activities that they will be able to perform after the class. I wish I could use blogs or JiTT as my after-the-class-assignments. But alas! For want of good infrastructure. I plan to use dialogue journals instead. This will give the Ss an opportunity of writing for a purpose. I plan to make the Ss write according to the topic that I will cover in the class. For example, if I discuss active and passive voice in the class, they will be required to write the major part of their journals using that structure.

Besides, I will use different simulation tasks where they will be required to talk, read, listen, or write in the targeted language. I discussed using mobile phones in my Nicenet discussion thread. These simulation tasks might be about bargaining with the shopkeeper, discussing some college issues with the principal, discussing some domestic problem with a friend, writing letter to the municipal authorities regarding some problem of the city etc., watching a film and telling about it to a friend, spot the difference activities, information gaps, crossword puzzles etc. The activity to be chosen will be such that will facilitate the use of  the topic being dealt with in the class.

As I will meet my Ss only twice a week, I plan to devote the first period to explaining and discussing the chosen topic using interactive power point. The second period will focus on the tasks to be performed on the basis of the knowledge gained during the previous lesson. Some after-the-class task will also be given to keep the students engaged for the week.

Assessment will also depend on the type of task being carried out. For group tasks checklist will be appropriate, while for individual tasks, rubrics will be more useful.

This is a broad idea of what I plan to do with my students under the project.

This week we are celebrating the festival of lights in India called Diwali or Deepawali. I wish all my virtual friends a very Happy and Prosperous Life on this special Occasion!

Regards,

Vinita