Some more cases and tips for you!

Nuances of teaching by Edward Vyshatytskiy

GROUP WORK NUANCES

On the 3rd course I have had a 7^th grade class that was quite accustomed to a group work. I coud divide them whenever I pleased.

However, at the very beginning of my 4^th course internship I faced a class, again 7^th grade, that is not adapted to that type of work. They simply do not know how to cooperate and prepare something together. They have ruined a project I gave them (to draw mind maps at home in groups and present it on lesson).

Solution may be as follows: At the beginning of internship it is perhaps better to give the students individual tasks. It is worth to check their readiness to work in groups. If they are not accustomed to it, you should step by step show and teach them how to work this way.

(Of course you can neglect the group type of learning at all, but it is so continent. From my experience, it facilitates 1. assessment matters (one simply evaluate all the members equally), 2. it saves time (some learners are too slow, it can destroy the whole planned lesson procedure), 3. it creates a friendly atmosphere.)

PRONUNCIATION NUANCES

Students are usually Bad at pronunciation. Some are even worse.

I asked a boy to read a passage aloud and he read the majority of words wrong. As a solution I made the whole class to repeat these words aloud.

There is a problem in students’ attitude toward pronunciation. They like to mispronounce words. It seems to them funny to read words in unauthentic way or even with too much pathos. So, when I hear some student “joking”, pronouncing a word wrong, I make him or her to repeat it several times. The point is to make him or her bored and thus correct the words.

By the way, there was no tape recorder or any ICT tools in the classroom. Students simply have not had an opportunity to train their pronunciation. That is a great problem. If you face it – improvise…

GRAMMAR TESTS AND GOING OVER TEST RESULTS

My 7^th grade students were given a test on knowledge of 1^st conditional. They wrote it comparatively faulty (6 of 16 student got mark 3 and 1 student – 1). Obviously, there was a need of correction work so as to explain grammar to those with harsh mistakes.

I took a false step in distributing the checked test with marks not on a next lesson, but the same very day. It resulted in a problematic situation: according to my lesson plan students should have revised the mistakes in their tests and get to know the grammar better. However, students did not bring the tests with them at all.

The whole lesson went pear-shaped. I started to explain the mistakes on my own in front of the children. It was performed without any preparation and I had a great difficulty in putting ideas into words. At the end I felt that no one had understood the explanations.

To avoid such situation a trainee should always be prepared. When it comes to a grammar test, this test should be distributed on the next lesson (not in advance). Additionally, you need some materials like sample training sentences for correction work.

Cases and tips by Yelizaveta Zolotukhina

I would like to share some of my own tips from my own experience based on my internship period:

• Think a bit about your appearance in the classroom.

Question: Are you talking about the clothes?

Answer: Not only clothes. Your first lesson is really important because your students get the understanding of the manner and tempo of your speech and how should they react on you the next time. It means that it is necessary to prepare your own teacher’s style and your own teacher’s rules in the classroom. Your first appearance will influence on their behavior.

• Discipline in the classroom is important.

Question: How can we gain the point of silence in the classroom?

Answer: It depends on the group that would be given to you and also the school in which you will have your internship. My own experience is based on a really noisy 7^th form where “discipline” is just a word not an action or form of behavior. I really appreciate the advice from my previous year English teacher: more additional materials and exercises for the students. If the student is really busy with complicated but understandable and appropriate exercises the noise will not happen.

• Conflict or even fighting during the lesson – what should you do?

Question: How should I react on fighting students? Shout or telling to the principal?

Answer: The students immediately should change their places without a chance to communicate, argue and fight. Then you should tell them a short speech why it is important to them to stop just for one time. “Downplay”, as my this internship English teacher said. No talking about this anymore.

If the conflict begins and is going to become a fight – stop the students and ask them individually what was the reason (it is important to see the both sides of the medal) and then react calmly. Try to be justified for both students.

A story to share from Gulmira Batyrkhanova (7^th grade students)

Almost everyone has a smartphone nowadays and, as we know, utilization of smartphones can be a huge distraction from important matters. Everyone knows how to use Internet nowadays and of course almost every single teenager has a profile on various social media platforms. And when I was a teacher at the 7^th grade at a local gymnasium it was a bit of a struggle to ask some of my students to put their phones down and concentrate on the learning process.

At my first class there I kindly asked my 7^th graders to always switch their phones to silent mode and to also not even think about using them during our lessons. However, there was Alinur, a very smiley boy, who would love to use his Iphone 5 whether it be for playing games or simply scrolling down instagram. He would put his book up and build up a kind of a wall as if he was reading something, pretending he was listening. But whenever I would come up to him I would find out he was using his smartphone. The first time I gave him the first warning; the second time I took it away and put it on my desk so he could not use it. After that class I decided to talk to him and once again kindly ask to concentrate on the lesson, I would say things like “You know you are smart, please do not do things that are not smart - like playing games when you are supposed to study”, which are actually true. By the way, he would actively participate in all of the teamwork activities; that is to say, he would use his smartphone only when I would give them individual written/reading tasks. Later on, when I would take his smartphone away at the beginning of the class, he would sometimes put out his Ipod/Ipad instead. And then I had lost my patience and I decided to ask their English teacher to let me talk to his parents. It is, though, crucial to mention that I never allowed myself to yell at Alinur (I mean, how can you when he would smile at you and make those puppy-eyes?:)). Anyway, what I noticed later on was that their actual English teacher would always yell at them – keeping the discipline that way, huh? Well, I do not prefer to raise my voice and create any kind of negativity in the learning atmosphere.

After I talked to the English teacher, she had yelled at him threating to do stuff and he seemed to be sincerely sorry and all. She’d told his parents about the whole situation and he never used the device again. The meaning of this above-described case study would be that sometimes students do not want to play “kind”, sometimes the only “influence” might actually be the students’ parents.