Ryan – CO#1 – Grammar Lv2
I went to my first classroom observation to watch Level 2 students practice grammar. When at first asked to explain the simple present tense, a student responded, “Action is start and end in past.” The instructor, instead of correcting him, asked him leadingly to say that again. “No,” he said, “Starts now.”
Throughout a lesson that covered the uses of the present tense, asking questions, talking about morning routines, proverbs and “idiomatic words”, students were consistently able to come up with the right answers. It wasn’t always immediate or the first guess, but I really liked how the teacher coaxed them into trying again. Her demonstrated faith that the students can get to the right sentence constructions and answers on their own seemed to do a lot to encourage each student to keep trying as they answered questions. ‘“Can you say that ooooone more time for me?”’ quickly puts a student on alert to fix their sentence and focus on getting it right. It lets them identify structural problems on their own, and practice fixing them. I thought it was much nicer, and more importantly, effective, than pointing out grammatical mistakes outright. I’ll definitely use this method of reinforcement and correction in my tutoring sessions.
One thing I found charming was the utterly pained look on a student’s phase as he repeated a phrase, strongly informing the instructor that this is not right in his language. She assured him it was correct and they moved on with the lesson, but I thought it was a quite telling moment to see where his skill level was. Clearly he has learned English grammatical patterns enough to contrast them with his native patterns, and to actively feel awkward about “breaking the rules” his brain had in place. It just does more to prove that I need to encourage my CPs and TPs talk as much as possible, and just let them keep hearing themselves (and me!) speak in unfamiliar patterns until it just starts to sound right to their ears.
So yeah! A lot of this class reinforced a lot of what we’ve been learning in class about how to teach grammar. By encouraging talking, and using a teaching method that allowed students to correct themselves, students were given the chance to learn inductively long after being initially taught a skill deductively. Group assignments, conversation pairings, and group sentence editing all did a lot to lower affective barriers.
I think many people have blogged about this too, and we learned it in class Tuesday—but I just have to say the “Beautiful Mistakes” work really well to let everyone work on mistakes with a smile on their faces.
Ryan
I went to my first classroom observation to watch Level 2 students practice grammar. When at first asked to explain the simple present tense, a student responded, “Action is start and end in past.” The instructor, instead of correcting him, asked him leadingly to say that again. “No,” he said, “Starts now.”
Throughout a lesson that covered the uses of the present tense, asking questions, talking about morning routines, proverbs and “idiomatic words”, students were consistently able to come up with the right answers. It wasn’t always immediate or the first guess, but I really liked how the teacher coaxed them into trying again. Her demonstrated faith that the students can get to the right sentence constructions and answers on their own seemed to do a lot to encourage each student to keep trying as they answered questions. ‘“Can you say that ooooone more time for me?”’ quickly puts a student on alert to fix their sentence and focus on getting it right. It lets them identify structural problems on their own, and practice fixing them. I thought it was much nicer, and more importantly, effective, than pointing out grammatical mistakes outright. I’ll definitely use this method of reinforcement and correction in my tutoring sessions.
One thing I found charming was the utterly pained look on a student’s phase as he repeated a phrase, strongly informing the instructor that this is not right in his language. She assured him it was correct and they moved on with the lesson, but I thought it was a quite telling moment to see where his skill level was. Clearly he has learned English grammatical patterns enough to contrast them with his native patterns, and to actively feel awkward about “breaking the rules” his brain had in place. It just does more to prove that I need to encourage my CPs and TPs talk as much as possible, and just let them keep hearing themselves (and me!) speak in unfamiliar patterns until it just starts to sound right to their ears.
So yeah! A lot of this class reinforced a lot of what we’ve been learning in class about how to teach grammar. By encouraging talking, and using a teaching method that allowed students to correct themselves, students were given the chance to learn inductively long after being initially taught a skill deductively. Group assignments, conversation pairings, and group sentence editing all did a lot to lower affective barriers.
I think many people have blogged about this too, and we learned it in class Tuesday—but I just have to say the “Beautiful Mistakes” work really well to let everyone work on mistakes with a smile on their faces.
Ryan
Thanks for sharing your experience. It is very helpful to me.
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