เรียน ผู้ปกครองนักเรียนEP เรื่อง จดหมายถึงผู้ปกครอง ของครู WILLARD Dear parents, I look forward to teaching in the English Program and will do my best to help your students develop their English abilities in this new semester. Since I am joining the program in the second semester of this school year, I will continue with the same texts and basic plans for the Grammar, Reading and Listening courses. However, after some analysis of these plans, I have a few things I will add to the Reading and Listening courses that I think will better engage your students and develop their English usage. READING In addition to the textbook and the simple novels that were part of the last semester, I will include “Timed Readings” - - reading exercises where the students have a set time to read a brief nonfiction article and answer questions about it. I hope to do this as a weekly Reading class activity. The article will always be the same length, same difficulty, and have the same number of questions, but gradually the amount of time the students have to complete the exercise will be reduced. The aim is to encourage the students to increase their reading speed; to read and find information from articles more quickly. This will help them later when they have to take an English exam with limited time. It will also help them in their future studies, when they will have a great volume of material to read. Then, for homework, the students will have a similarly brief short story to read. The story will be related to the Timed Reading article that they completed in class. The questions for the story will develop additional Reading skills, such as inferring, using context to understand a new word, distinguishing fact from opinion, recognizing how a story is organized, and understanding the main idea. Overall, since the articles and stories are themed on academic subjects (such as history, basic sciences, nature, etc.), the students will also gain experience reading academic texts. In addition to these new activities, I will ask each student to record his or her voice as they read a few sentences, a paragraph or a short article, and then send to me their recording file (MP3, WMA, etc.) via an online web page. Listening to their recordings should help me to gain insight into how each student is processing the English they read. You, as their parents, will be able to access the webpage too, should you like to get an idea how this project is going. Finally, if we have time in the course, I want to introduce the students to some very basic “reading for research” concepts. This may be too ambitious a goal, but if I can find a way to include it the course, I will give it a try this semester. Listening In addition to the exercises in the textbook, I will add a new method to the Listening Class that is designed to engage the students much more effectively. In order for a student to learn a new language, it is important that he or she is exposed to a large volume of authentic language as it is spoken by native speakers. Another key to development is that the student is engaged by the content of the language. If the student isn’t engaged, he “tunes out” the language and doesn’t learn from it. Listening textbooks tend to provide very limited and unauthentic language input for the students, and usually aren’t very engaging. The new Listening method I will try in this semester is part of the Focal Skills approach to teaching languages. I will use age-appropriate American television shows to expose the students to a large volume of spoken English. I have selected shows which I think the students will find engaging. The students won’t simply watch the shows; I will be teaching by explaining what is happening, paraphrasing difficult language to make it understandable for them, and pointing out useful vocabulary and expressions spoken by the actors. The aim of this Focal Skills method is to provide the students with a high volume of comprehensible input, from both the show and the teacher. Language acquisition theory suggests that such high volume, authentic and comprehensible input of spoken language is vital to a student’s development in a second language. Grammar Unlike Reading and Listening, Grammar is not a language skill; it is knowledge. Grammar knowledge helps students shape their spoken and written English, to recognize when they make errors and self-correct themselves, and to better understand what they read and hear in English. Since it is a knowledge course, Grammar is a topic that is taught explicitly, much as math or physics are, with the teacher helping the students understand its rules, concepts and uses. Grammar is my forte; I enjoy teaching grammar and am adept at making difficult grammar understandable. We will continue with the textbook, but I will supplement it with my own instruction and scans from other grammar books I find useful. If time permits, I will include in the course some practice with test-style questions. I am reviewing the O-NET, AFS and some Thai university entrance exams so that I can see the types of grammar questions the students will encounter when they take one or more of these exams. I think we can take at least a cursory look at these in this semester. Grammar can be a “boring” topic for young students. Recognizing that today’s students are more “visual oriented” than past generations, I try to make grammar lessons a bit more enjoyable by using images, video and songs, when possible, that demonstrate the grammar being used authentically. I’m excited about the new semester at Bunyawat Witthayalai School and dedicated to doing my most for the students in this semester to prepare them for success in their lives through English knowledge and skills. Sincerely, Ajarn Willard M. Ed (TESOL)
Posted on: Mon, 21 Oct 2013 10:24:50 +0000
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