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They weren’t wrong when they warned us that we’d h…

They weren’t wrong when they warned us that we’d have a lot of work to do this weekend… so far I’ve been working on the profile - that is, the analysis of the language of an individual student, with suggestions for ten hours of remedial teaching. I think the worst moment was late last night when I took in for the first time the sentence saying that we had to analyse our student’s grammatical competence and explain any errors with reference to potential L1 interference. Basically that meant I had one evening to become relatively competent at Italian grammar in order to explain why my student might be making certain mistakes. In the end becoming competent was not necessary - I used an Italian grammar book and the internet, and I hope that my answers are correct!

Yesterday morning I taught a 75-minute, one-to-one lesson to my profile student. This was good fun. It’s very different from teaching an entire class. It’s good because you feel that you can be of a lot more use to the single student, concentrating on his/her needs, going at exactly the right speed for him/her. On the other hand it makes preparation much more difficult. Not only do activities take less time (so you need to think of more of them), but you also need to be really precise, making sure that your lesson is at exactly the right level for the student you’re teaching. Or at least that it’s easily adaptable whilst teaching.

Once I’ve finished the profile, I have to start work on making a communicative game for the advanced class, and planning an entire one and a half hour lesson to go with it! The task is made all the harder by the fact that no topic for the lesson is ascribed to us - we can teach whatever we like. Deciding where to begin can be the most difficult thing!

On the whole, all of this work is quite fun - I just wish that I had more time to do it. But then, it does seem to be the type of work that would expand and expand to fill whatever time was available, so maybe I should be grateful that I only have one weekend. And anyway, it was me that chose to do an intensive course…

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 17th, 2007 at 4:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can leave a response to this entry.

5 Responses to “They weren’t wrong when they warned us that we’d h…”

1. HiLaL HASTAOGLU Says:
   February 18th, 2007 at 11:53 pm

   Hi Kate! I’m surprised you find the time to write entries in a 4 week course!! Mine is 10 weeks long, yet it feels as if I have no time to breathe! I’m very impressed by your time management! Good luck and keep up the energy (and pass me some too! hehe)!!

   Hilal from http://www.eslbase.com/diaries/hilalhastaoglu

2. Kate Says:
   February 22nd, 2007 at 5:51 pm

   I’ve been finding it really helpful writing the blog, actually. Just having ten minutes of doing something else before you go to bed helps to calm my brain down a bit so I can sleep… otherwise I’d be dreaming of flashcards and gap-fill exercises every night!

   Kate

3. qjuxigcym mxlu Says:
   February 11th, 2008 at 4:26 am

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4. Natalie Giulianelli Says:
   February 13th, 2008 at 6:24 pm

   Hi

   I am currently doing my ‘learner profile’ and i am finding it really difficult…any tips?? thanks

5. Kate Says:
   February 13th, 2008 at 9:14 pm

   Hi

   My best tip would be to make sure that you start by getting lots of information from your student. We had to record a spoken interview as well as doing some reading and listening and setting writing tasks for our individual students. That really gives you something to start from because you can do the grammatical analysis and see what it is that they actually need to learn.

   If you can, try to get more material from your learner than you think you need: it really helps to have a lot to analyse. It can be a bit tedious, but I found it really helpful to trawl through and categorise all the mistakes my student was making. It was easy to see then what she needed to practise, and base lesson plans around those things.

   What to look for really depends on the level of English that your learner speaks, but even with quite advanced students I think there are usually plenty of little grammatical mistakes they’ll keep making. You probably wouldn’t notice them in conversation, but once you start the analysis you’ll begin to see the same things over and over again. Things like correct use of articles or formation of plurals, correct formation of different tenses, etc. Or else your student may be good at what he/she does, but you might find that they never use certain tenses or constructions (they might only use the present tense, or never use verbs in the continuous, or never use adjectives or something).

   Hope that helps. Good luck!

   Kate

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