My Demo Lesson我的公开课
Today I had a demonstration lesson, which was observed by nearly 10 teachers. Not a big hit but something to write home about. In a nutshell, it was a reading class, aiming at cultivate the students’reading ability.
As all we know, grammatical questions are only fractional while listening,reading and writing account for 90% of the full marks.More emphases are being given to test students’ablities in using the language instead of the so-called knowledge, which has become a consensus. However, it’s not unusual that many schools are still walking on the old path, turning around the grammar. The result is: all efforts come to little. A falure as this method has long proved to be, it is still in fashion in the school where I am working. No wonder why students scored so low in all the previous examinations.
The text learnt today is titled "LIFE ON THE GO",talking about the increasing popularity of cellphones among teenagers. I didn’t follow the suit, exploiting the text like a mine and delve the "precious"new words and sentence structures. Such teaching approach can’t be boring enough. Without special preparations, I just read the text carefully and keep in my mind that every second of the 40-minute-class shouldn’t be wasted. On the warming-up stage, I use my mobilephone to elicit a brain-storm. The students’ responses were not so hot but satisfing.They were relatively introverted after all. Having activated the background knowledge, we just found it easier to understand the text. When focusing the attention on the informational words rather than grammar, the students got the meaning of the 1000-strong-word article without difficulty.As for the new words, they have learnt which to skip and which to guess from the clues, thus saving a lot of time.That finished, I asked them to make up some T/F questions to test their take on the passages. Sure enough, most problems were solved by themselves.
Believe these kids and don’t take care ofeverything for them, leaving them enough time.It’s not only crucial to student’s independent thought but also respectful to their personality. Some activities were also taken into consideration throughtout the class. For example, we arranged a debate on the effects of mobilephones and organized an interview to the guest teachers over their mobilephones. It should have succeeded had the kids not been too nervous.While the students were reading, I played a very soft light music to build a relaxing atmosphere.Their enthusiasm showed they had benefited a lot from the class.
