Wonderful Life

This category is about trobles of teenagers like the students in my class.The troubles in textbook is limited. So I suggested more realistic problems, solutuons,and a great case of Linz Murray that students can take her for a role model to overcome teeb troubles.


 Authentic materials for students' real daily life and make students expand their schemata.
There are whole 5 reading materials in this category. I will explai how to use them below.

1.

◎ Purpose:

    This category is for extensive reading of the topic of  "chapter 6, Detective stories". Students usually like mysterious and detective or horrible stories. According to the students' those tastes, I choose 4 stories about  detective stories. The story is short and the overall vocabulary or sentence structures are understandable for advanced level students. They can read these matierials for fun. In addition, students can improve their "inferring" reading skills to find the suspects of the stories with logical reading process. This will be for in-class activity.


◎ Difficulty Levels:

- The Case of the Snack Shack          : ★★★☆☆

- The Case of the Broken Window    : ★★☆☆☆

- The Case of the Defaced Sidewalk : ★★☆☆☆

- The Case of the Surprise Visitor     : ★★★☆☆


◎ Procedure:

 1) Pre-reading:
   
  Students will choose freely the case of detective stories according to their tastes and reading proficiency level.

2) While-reading:
 
   Students will read for about 15minutes in the reading class in the computer-equipped classroom. They can read freely. If they want to read more stories, then they can read another one.

3)After-reading:

   In each story, there is a question that asking which one is a suspect of the incident. Students will think carefully to find the suspect and then check their answers by clicking 'continue' link. Students can gather together who read the same story and then discuss about the reasons why they think someone as a suspect.

☆ Highlight anything that you have learned through this course and discuss why this is meaningful for your learning and instruction?


      I have learned many meaningful strategies and background knowledge of teaching reading. At first I had felt that the amount of text are too hard to cover. But now I feel that if I didn't cover the whole book, it would be impossible and might take so much time to read the book by myself. Among those meaningful things, I can choose 3 things as follow.

      First, I learned exactly about  knowledge of teaching second language reading. I had already known some skills and background knowldege of it through many courses for last few years. But, through this class I learned more deelply and exactly. For example, I didn't know exactly about the difference between cognitive skills and metacognitive skills. But now I know that the main difference is consciousness and intention.

     Second, the presentations from classmates are worth learning because they are creative as well as useful in real teaching. They were great opportunities to apply the concepts of teaching reading in the textbook to the real situation. And other classmates creative lesson plan or materials are also helpful to think about the teaching procedure and results. For instance, I showed pictures that are related with the words in reading text in the textbook, and made students to guess the word meaning and spelling. In that way, I noticed that students felt more comfortable and active towards word learning.

     Third,  I could apply many reading skills in my teaching practice in April. It was hard for me to teach reading text with various activities  to middle school students. But, I remembered the reading skills that I had learned in this course, and tried to apply them. For example, I tried to provide students with many materials before I started the class. I showed video clips which showed the topic-related interesting videos and made students think about the words in them. And I also tried to ask questions before I taught the reading text and tried to have students infer the meaning of text by themselves in advanced classes. After the teaching practice and came back to the course in May, I realized that I had missed many meaningful skills even though I tried hard at that time. That is, I learned more teaching reading skills in this course from May. I could realize that there were missing points in my teaching practice. For example, I forgot providing more reading materials for extensive reading. And I noticed that I focused more on the intensive reading to move quickly to the next steps. And I also noticed that I have to learn and practice more to make my class and teaching skills more natural and meaningful. That is more natural and logical flow is needed by using appropriate skills that I learned in this class.

    The advantage of this class is that the contents of this course are overlapped with other courses. In fact, I can understand better the contents of 'Teaching Young learners' 'Teaching Listening' because some contents are overlapped or similar. So it was very helpful for me to establish schemata related with Teachers' Exam.  In addition, I will put them in practice when I become an English teacher.

< Difficulty Level: ★★★☆☆ >


< Topic >
 The topic of this supplement reading is group hobbies that make funny scenes in public to make the world more joyful place. In short, students can understand this hobbies as a form of flashmob.


< Purpose >
1. Students are very familiar with the video cips of showing flash mobs. They usually watch those video clips through their SNS, such as Twitter, Facebook, etc. These are very popular among students. And some of them even have taken part in the activity. So, it can draw students' attention, and motivate students.

2. This is for extensive reading. There are lots of missions and scenes and behind stories of the flashmob activities in the website. It is very interesting so that students read for fun, which means extensive reading. So students can select freely among them. Even though the texts are long, the contents are easy to understand because there are lots of pictures and video clips for understanding each paragraph better.


< Procedure >

1) Pre-reading (in-class 1 period) :
  Teacher will  show studetns an interesting video clips of flashmob.
After watching this, students will guess what kind of hobby it is. And discuss about it with teacher and classmates. Teacher will show some  necessary parts: interesting scences, reasons why people decided to do this as a hobby,etc.

Video USL: http://www.ted.com/talks/charlie_todd_the_shared_experience_of_absurdity.html

2) While-reading (out-class, individually) :

 Students can select more than one of the missions in the categories in the website.
They can read freely and extensively according to personal interests. But, they have to know the brief contents of each story.

 web USL: http://improveverywhere.com/

- Frozen Grand Central Improvement :
http://improveverywhere.com/2008/01/31/frozen-grand-central/

- High Five Escalator:
http://improveverywhere.com/2009/02/09/high-five-escalator/

-Best Buy
http://improveverywhere.com/2006/04/23/best-buy/

< Difficulty Level : ★★☆☆☆ >

< Purpose >

1. This reading material is for  vocabulary learning. There are about 60-70 hobby words in the reading material. The words are not far from our daily lives, rather it is very practical for our daily conversation. Some words are even naturally used like korean. So, the hobby list will be useful and somewhat authentic for students, although this can be intensive reading in terms of vocabulary learning.

2. This activity will be done before the chater 3 class. (out-class)
 By doing this activity, students can build extensive knowledge about the kinds of hobbies.

3. The reason why this is relatively low level material in advanced level class is for making students comfortable and confident about the following chapter class. If they know about many kinds of hobbies, they will be hardly afraid of learning new topic in the textbook.


< Procedure >

1) Pre-reading:
 Students will write down all the hobby words list that they know.
 Teacher  will give worksheet of hobby list that has blanks for the meaning of words.

2) While-reading:

 URL: http://www.squidoo.com/the-world-s-biggest-list-of-hobbies#module159053940

Students will read the words and highlight the important and interesting words that they like to try as a hobby. And then they will underlie the unknown hobby words. 

3) Post-reading:
 
After reading the hobby list, students will look up the unknown words in the dictionary and fill in the blanks with Korean meaning in worksheet.
And they will select 3 items for their frequent hobbies, and 5 items for their future hobbies that they want to try someday, adding simple reasons.

< Difficulty Level : ★★★☆☆ >


< Purpose >
1.This is written by a teenager. So, it could be the perspective of students. Students can agree or disagree with the writer's own thoughts.
2. Students can compare their problems with the writer's ones.
3. This is for bottom-up reading (to find the specific information for answering questions-intensive reading)  as well as top-down reading process (to react to the writer's opinion).

< Procedure >

1) Pre-reading: Students will do brainstorming about problems that teenagers have, which is they have learned in the chapter or based on their background knowledge and experience.


2) While-reading:
 
  Students will read the text by skipping and scanning for find the right answer for quesitons. The reading material is suggested in the form of sides. So students can easily read the text paragraph by paragraph.

URL: http://www.slideshare.net/TeacherIam/the-problems-of-teenagers

 

3) Post-reading:
    Students will answer the teacher's question. The form of questions will be multiple choice, T/F questions.
     And they will also react to the writer's opinion according to their own experience. They can agree or disagree to it. But, they have to say proper reasons.