2007年5月20日日曜日

Two Approache's strength and weakness

Today we learned about two approaches for teaching vocabulary: the Teach and Learn Approach and the Learning through Input Approach. You can see a PowerPoint presentation of the approaches here.

I would tell you about the Present and Learn approach.
The strenght of this is easy to understand what teacher said because students gets some vocabulary at first that they study today. Then they can understand meaning of their teacher indicating.
The weakness is the Present and Learn lesson is become monotonous. Students will need not to say other words without todays' vocabulary. And their stance is passive. It makes them only to pronouce the words.
I think that this activity is effective for a English beginner like the age of 2~5. Children get to understand a noun in this age.

Next, about the Learning through Input Approach.
Intuition tell students what each words indicates their meaning is strength. They can get the faculity of comprehend the meaning from a pictures or sentences.
The weakness is when there is the something which they do not understand meaning of words judging from their eyes, it is hard to understand it. So we should choose an appropriate materials.
This activity is good for elementary or junior high school student. They can suppose a complicated input.

2007年5月15日火曜日

Communicative Activities.

Today, I am going to review two of the "typical Japanese junior high school"communicative activities presented in ETM3 . The activities I am going to revieware Interview and Find someone. You can view them here.

In interview, we could infirm concretly that what did we do yesterday and what we will do next, I think. "What were you ~ing?" question we usually talk in daily life. The student who was asked should tell his/her partner what he did correctly. This is the training that make a beginning of conversation and get somebody's infomation wihtout a personal matter. But in this way, each questions can become a dull. Before start conversation, you need to prepare some variation not to unilateral activity. If you succeed in interview, you could expand the simple questions into spontaneous conversation.

In Find someone, this activity will good for students because they can move around and ask their friend of different kinds. In the last class's paper, the question was "what are you going to do in this summer vacation?". You can change this question more daily style. For example, "what your club?" and "what your hobby?" and so on. Andmore it will better to make a voluntary question by themselves. I show the example of the voluntary question following.

A : Hello Mr.B. What your club?
B : I'm belong to baseball club. ( Usually this is end.)
A : What your position? ( Voluntary question)
B : I am a pitcher.
A : Wow, cool. Thank you.

It looks very friendly talking. A made question which have relation to baseball. Of course they cannot talk like this from beginning. We should teach a sample of conversation for them or stimulate to ask what rerated thing you questioned at first.

2007年5月6日日曜日

What important to me.

My important thing is that act in good faith every time.
If you want your friend to do something, you order his/her it about arrogantly?
You never to do so. It is too much example. But I think that we should attend to people very politely.
For example, in case you get sick, you want some help to someone. Then you ask "please water", "get me ○○" etc. Nevertheless, the man who you asked would not do that with troublesome. How do you feel this? I feel sad for his/her attitude. You should get angry and irritated. The opposite of this example is of course.
There are a lot of oppotunities to meet a person. We speak to them with smile. You feel happy when they talked with a smile and kindness, aren't you? I really happy when the other did so for me. He/She hears what I spoak properly, I think so and feel relieved. I just feel this joy, so I certainly bear the good faith in my mind usually. I hope that you never forget the good faith. Good faith will help you surely.