Module 1: Course Introduction and Overview

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Module 1: Course Introduction and Overview

I have three main goals which I would like to work towards on this Advanced Methodology course.

My first goal is to make my lessons for receptive skills more engaging for the students.  The reason is because I have identified this as a weak point in my teaching.  Students often feel bored in my lessons, and do not engage with the material.  I plan to try to achieve this goal by trying out new receptive skill activities in the classroom, and reflecting on how they engaged students.  In my current practice, my receptive skill lessons usually just consist of comprehension questions and feedback, but I would like to explore other approaches.  I will also try to observe a receptive skills lesson of a colleague, in order to see how they create engagement.  I would also like to increase my theoretical knowledge of receptive skills lessons by reading material about receptive skills lessons. For example, Teaching Listening Comprehension by Penny Ur is in my school library.  

A second goal I have is to increase the amount of speaking in my classroom.  This is because the students I teach are often reluctant to speak, and I have not yet found any good strategies for increasing their speaking confidence.  I would like to do this by experimenting with different kinds of speaking tasks.  In my usual lessons, I usually give students questions to discuss, but I am aware that discussion questions are only one type of speaking activity, and I would like to become more familiar with other activities.  This is also another goal where I think that I would greatly benefit from observing a speaking lesson by a colleague.   I would like to increase my theoretical knowledge of how to teach speaking by reading Teaching Speaking by Christine Goh and Anne Burns, which has been recommended to me by my manager, and which I have in my apartment now.  

Finally, I would like to try to improve my ability to create clear lesson aims.  This is because I am aware that my lessons are often a series of activities or controlled practices without any clear aim to connect them.  Other times, I just try to work through the textbook pages without thinking about what the lesson objective is.  To do this, I would first of all like to revise my theoretical knowledge on planning lessons by re-reading parts of  Learning Teaching by Jim Scrivener, which is in my apartment.  I would also like to practice constructing clear lesson aims by making an effort to plan my lessons in the future around one clear aim, and then reflecting on how well that aim worked.  Finally, I would like to ask some colleagues if they would let me look at some of their recent lesson plans, and discuss their lesson aims with them.