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Lesson planning…

This morning we got to meet some real students, and observed two classes. One was lower intermediate, the other upper intermediate. One thing I’m a bit baffled by at the moment is how to know what kind of work is appropriate for which level, and how to guess whether your students will already know certain grammatical forms or vocabulary items. This is a particularly pressing point, as today we were introduced to the students we’ll be teaching one-to-one and writing individual profiles for. The first session is an interview designed to help us assess the student’s language-learning needs, but it also has to include two each of reading, writing and listening exercises so we can assess all four skills (speaking, listening, reading and writing). I don’t want to give my student something too easy, because I won’t find out what she finds difficult - but I don’t want to give her something too hard in case she gets completely lost and discouraged, and I end up with nothing to analyse. Quite hard to work out what’s going to be appropriate before the analysis stage!

Our grammar lesson this afternoon contained disappointingly little grammar and was more like an exercise in lesson planning. In fact, most of our classes are basically exercises in lesson planning… which makes complete sense, as that’s precisely what they’re trying to teach us!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 31st, 2007 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response to this entry.

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