Reflections on Week 6

Part One

Engaging Students in the Classroom

I am going to write my reflections on how I engage my students and promote their interaction in my class. After that, I will reflect on the readings assigned.

Being in the field of learning/teaching English for a considerable amount of time (33 years) and in different settings (Yemen, Egypt, the United States of America, Britain, France, India and Oman), I have been exposed to different methods and techniques of teaching. Nevertheless,  I belief that there is no single superior method or technique that works all the time for all students. I always tell me students that a teacher is like a bee in that it goes from one flower to another and the outcome is “honey”. Therefore, we should be eclectic and choose the most suitable technique for our current situation. Furthermore, in order to grow we should keep our eyes open to incorporate whatever is new and possible in the field of technology.

In my class, I turn any task into a game. Students have fun with that and learn more. Games come first in motivating  students to work hard and take their boredom away. Besides, my students’ interaction is very high during games and they may learn from each other about the topic of the game more than they learn from me. While many teachers use games to fill a gap or to warm up their students, I use games to reinforce a learning point and I use them to deliver the content of my course. Therefore, I have developed my own activities (games) for the teaching of content areas such as Linguistics, Transformational Generative Grammar, The History of English, Theories of Language Learning, Methods of Teaching ..etc.

I have taught in different settings and situations and whenever technology is available in my class, I do not let that chance go without integrating it into my teaching.  Some time ago, I had the chance to use the Electronic (Smart) Board for my research presentation. It helped me bring life into my presentation by highlighting, underlining, changing colors, easily bringing multimedia pieces such as sounds, pictures, maps, document, etc. I wish I had that chance to use the Interactive Board to teach my students.

I would like to finish this reflection by commenting on an article that I read in “Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning” website. The topic, “Texting in Class”, got my attention. It reports the results of a recent study that was conducted in the USA. The study has reported that 90% of students admit to using their devices for non class activities during class time. Only less than 8% said that they never do so. I find such results very strange and alarming. I think they happen only when the students are bored or not engaged.  As a teacher trainer, I advice my student teachers  to find ways of engaging their students in the class. Whenever, the students are not  busy doing any task in class, they either use their mobiles or they start talking with each other and they lose attention. The best solution for such situations is to get them busy and involved in the lesson by using the elicitation technique. I always elicit things instead of saying them myself.  I also encourage students’ questions and I encourage them to answer their classmates’ questions. The second solution is using games to kill boredom and the students get busy competing against each other. The third solution is to set rules at the beginning of the semester and to firmly apply them. If a student needs urgently to use his or her mobile, he or she must go outside the class and come back quickly.

Teaching in Large Classes

The best article that I read this week is entitled: “Beating the Numbers Game: Effective Teaching in Large Classes” which is written by Richard Felder of the North Carolina State University. He suggests some techniques to make large classes almost as effective as their smaller counterparts. He recommends  a technique called” the in Class Exercise” and “the out of Class Assignment”. I really do agree with all his ideas to improve the classroom and make the students learn by doing and not by listening to passive lectures. In my classes, I usually involve my students through games and through in class activities that promote their interaction.  My normal classes are between 40 to 50 students. Sometimes as large as 120 students and some other times as small as 10 students. I divide the class into 2 groups whatever is the number of the students and they compete against each other. I prepare cards on which I write the tasks they will do in class. One student  comes to the front,  selects a card and reads it. One member from each group comes to the board and does the task while the whole group support and help if necessary. My role as a teacher is a facilitator. I get them vote for the best task and the winner gets a point. The following are some tasks that we do in class:

Draw and label the vocal tract.

Write down 3 examples of the following structure: S + V + BO + DO

Classify the English consonants into voiced and voiceless.

Draw a chart of the Arabic consonant

Draw a chart of the voiceless sounds

Write down the inflectional morphemes

Write down A-Z and then for each letter come up with one language that starts with the letter, e.g., A = Arabic, Z= Zulu.

Write down the types of prefixes in English, ….etc.

These in class activities make the students concentrate on the task and it kills boredom. The students subconsciously compete against the other group and they learn better when they do the task collectively. It creates a lot of interaction among them. When we finish the cards that I prepared at home. I ask each group to create another two cards and write similar tasks that the other group will do. In this case I make the class student- centered and a lot of interaction takes place. What is more important is that they learn by doing and not by listening and watching. Therefore, the principal aim of such activities is to get students reflect and do, the two ways that facilitate learning.  Those types of activities also suit the three types of learner styles that we mentioned two weeks ago when we wrote our lesson plans integrating technology, namely: the Visual learner, the Auditory and the ones who like to move (Kinesthetic).

Our Webskills course is a good example of a student-centered program. Our instructor is only a facilitator. He directs and helps when necessary, but we learn by searching for information and we learn by doing. It is indeed less teaching and more learning.

The second article that got my attention in “Tomorrow’s Professor Mailing List” website is titled : “How to Create Memorable Lectures”. It reports the results of a recent study which has reported that students capture only 20-40 % of a lecture's main ideas in their notes. It adds that without reviewing the lecture material, students remember less than 10 %  after three weeks. These figures are alarming and they call on us to evaluate our own ways of teaching and think of new ways to involve our students in our classes in order to make them understand and remember what we say in class.

What  I like most is their quick and easy ideas for better lectures. I totally agree with the 13 golden points they make at the end of the article. They are good strategies for involving the students in the lecture and they guarantee that the students become active learners instead of passive ones. They are really useful strategies to make any classroom student-centered and they can be applied in any teaching setting.

Creating an Interactive Power Point:

As required, I created an interactive power point slide show that includes about 30 slides. Creating Power Points is not new to me . Some time ago, I started learning and creating PPs and Prezi to present shows in class, but the absence of technology tools in my classrooms de-motivated me to continue Prezi or even PPs. What is really new to me is making my PP interactive. I liked the idea of making the PP interactive, so I started reading the article entitled:”How to Create and Use an Interactive Power Point Quiz Game”. I also read another article entitled: “ Creating Interactive PowerPoint Presentations for Teachers and Students” by  Drs. Terry and Cathy Cavanaugh of the Florida Center of Instructional Technology. The two articles are very useful and explain step by step how to create a PP presentation. The second article provides some examples of concept testing, but unfortunately, all the examples are from science disciplines, such as Biology, Geology, Earth sciences, and others. I could not find a single example in Linguistics. Furthermore, I watched many videos on YouTube that explain step by step how to create a PP and how to add flavors and spices to it (making it interactive and adding pictures, sounds, etc.). I found that the videos are really more helpful because we listen and watch the buttons and how they function.

After that, I started creating a General Quiz in Linguistics that I can use with my students as a general review of the five subfields of linguistic studies, namely: Phonetics, Phonology, Morphology, Syntax and Semantics. I spent some time in trying to sequence the questions in such a way that suits the number of points given to each question (10 – 50).

I am planning to create other PPs for each subfield of linguistics as well as the other subjects that I normally teach.  In my classes, I usually turn any task into a game that we do in class using cards. Here, I am trying to integrate technology into my classes.