Saturday, February 16, 2008
Q & A Routines
The Question and Answer routines involve asking questions in order to get a specific answer. There are ten questions in particular that are useful for eliciting most of the answers in this routine, and they can, and should, be learnt independently of the routines. Since the subject material is set, students may find themselves trying to express ideas they normally would not, or are not yet comfortable with. The benefit in having set answers for these questions is that students can gain confidence responding in a test environment, and then later expand or combine these simple answers into longer, more natural phrases. This process is at the core of English Coaching philosphy at Smith's School of English.
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E.T.
These two pink students had two different onepoints, and so asked them both different questions to elicit their previous learnt phrases. This went smoothly.
Routine
I decided to review routine 1 and see how far we got. They had both gone through routine 1 before, and been reviewed on it, so I was fairly confident that it would be no problems for them to tell me all the different sentences. The things that were forgotten were mostly the order of the routine, and although my miming is quite poor, I could give them some hints, like sitting at the table. Only one phrasal verb had been forgotten, but other than that it was good work by both of them, bringing up their talk time as I needed only use questions they’ve been previously drilled in, such as “what happens next?” and “what do you do after that?” and getting by with some very average miming, of course!
Routine one went so smoothly, and everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves, that I went ahead and went through routine 2 as well. I like this routine, because I can easily mime taking out my railpass, as I keep it always in my pocket. Also the students usually find vocabulary such as “upstairs” “downstairs” and “platform” interesting, and this lesson was no different. To balance the two levels of the students I used stretching for one, while the other was taking notes. I asked him to imagine that I was a station attendant, and how would he ask me where his train left from. This was a spontaneous exercise, but really good because it forced him to formulate the question from his knowledge of questions, and though he struggled with it, he really enjoyed the challenge, and came out with a good question in the end. I asked both of them questions about whether the platforms were upstairs or downstairs at various train stations and subway stations, until they felt confident using the words.
Item
Future
The main part of the lesson was taken up by the routines, but in the second half of the lesson we focused on a dialogue talking about what we were gonna do, and what Jane was gonna do using set phrases and the course book. After a while one of the students asked me what “gonna” meant, and I kicked myself mentally for not explaining it, but when I wrote “going to – gonna” on the board, they remembered as well. Last of all I asked them what they were gonna do tomorrow, and as they both said they were gonna work, I asked them what did they wanna do? In fact they both said they wanna do nothing... which is fair enough, I would usually wanna do something similar... but I just had a lovely nothing long weekend, so what I really wanna do is go to the Osaka Aquarium...
One point
This part of the lesson was particularly and unexpectedly exciting. As we’d been talking about how cold it is outside, I said “It’s cold outside in winter.” Both of my students nodded. “What do you think?” I asked the slightly higher level one. “That’s right!” he said, using a previous one point he’d learnt. I nodded and said “yes... but a different way”. So I wrote “I” on the board. Suddenly the lower level student’s eyes lit up and she aid “I agree!” And I wrote it on the board. She then started talking about a Georgia coffee commercial she had seen, where the girl in it says “I agree!”
Smith's School of English
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