The 1st lesson-design and test-run experience
(1) Lesson-design
During the course, each group got 20 minutes to design a lesson and 25 minutes to teach the other group. To be honest, the time given was so short that we were required to do the project in a rush. It was indeed a challenge! We imagined our students would be beginning English learners so the topic shouldn’t be too complicated. Thus, we chose ‘color’ as our teaching topic. First, we listed colors of the rainbow, including red, blue, yellow and so on. To enhance variety, we also added brown, pink, gold, silver which are also familiar. Next, we started to arrange the progress which was mainly constructed by 3 parts.
Part one, we needed to let students to be familiar with those colors, so we created a PPT, with different colors as backgrounds. With visual aids, it might be easier for them to remember those vocabulary. However, we were reminded by the professor that we had better remove Chinese translation on PPT. With translation on PPT, students would involuntarily focus on Chinese instead of the English vocabulary they should learn! During part one, we would keep repeating the colors and the sentences. The sentences consisted of a question and an answer, ‘What color it is?’ and ‘It is___.’.
Second, the lecturers would point out the surrounding objects randomly and asked learners to reply. By doing so, it could let instructor get to know how much content students had absorbed. If responded well, then instructors could continue to next part. But if the performance seemed to be poor, then the instructors should return to part one and strengthen some parts which students are still not familiar with.
Finally, it was time for games in Part three. This part might be the most interesting one throughout the lectures. No one would feel boring of playing games! Also, during games, there definitely would exist competition and increased students’ motivation to learn since they would want to win the games. The games was called, ‘支援前線’ in Chinese. The rules were that the instructor would show one of slides (with no words on it, only colors shown) and students should find an object as soon as possible and say the colors out loud to get points.
(2) Test-run reflection
During our teaching, those students were so smart that we finished the three parts in 15 minutes. This was much faster than we had expected. Of course, this was because that the content was too easy for them. It was imaginable that if we were facing students of first-grade or even younger, there would indeed be lots of problems. It might need up to half an hour to complete the course as a previous example of the course led by Miss Coffee. In test-run, we only taught students the color one time, simply just went through it. However, in real teaching, this was impossible. Imagined if I were learning a new language such as Dutch or Japanese, although the instructors only gave simple examples like numbers or colors, I still needed much time to remember it and applied it in the games.
As for the games, we did see the effectiveness. Our students were so excited that it was obviously that they tried their best to search for the objects with the colors asked. Besides, we were also aware of the points students got. We would attempt to balance the score of the two teams. Since if one team with high scores while the other only got one or two points, then the one with lower scores might lose confidence and lacked of interest to learn. By the way, in the test-run, some groups were so excited and so loud which seemed to be out of control. Thus, the professor also mentioned that while teaching, the instructors should be careful about the boundary and make sure everything was under control. Another thing that the professor reminded was that as the instructors, we had better not to whisper on the stage although we were not teaching. By doing so, students might consider that the teacher hadn’t prepare well or not professional. This was the point that we should be aware of in the Big teaching.
To sum up, although this experience was far from the actual situation, we still learned a lot from it. The experience would help us during Big teaching. I believe during the project it would be much closer to the real situation since the language that we are going to teach are not English, but French, Korean and so on.
