Natalie Giulianelli » 2007 » October

Well,  i am quite enjoying the Mandarin lessons now.  I didn’t remember much at all from the first lesson but after this second lesson some words/sentences are still in my head!!

I managed to have a quick chat with some of the other people in the group as some have already started their teaching practice…they said it went ok and that their group of students were very nice!!  I am starting to panic about my teaching now!! I don’t understand how i will be able to plan a 1 hour lesson as i have no idea how long tasks will take or how long i will need to explain things for?!?!?

I am quite enjoying the online grammar course i am currently taking.  It is quite simple but i feel that there isn’t enough explanation for me, however, the short video clips of a teacher teaching are excellant!!!  I am about half way through this course so i will keep you posted on how i get along with it.

This week it is half term so no lesson!!!!  Don’t know if it is a good thing that i am really looking forward to spending Monday night at home!?!?  I still need to type up my homework, which is the diary of how the Mandarin lesson went and i will also be reading more and more grammar books and visiting the libary to get a few recommended books. 

I have just ordered a book called ‘A Concise Grammar for English Language Teachers’ i read somewhere that it was a good book, i haven’t received it yet so i will let you know.

Well i think that is all for now…please post any questions or comments.�

Ok…so tonight was the third lesson and we spent the first hour learning Mandarin!!  How exhausting but very interesting to see how it would be for us as teachers!!  Not a bad evening, in fact it was quite fun but really can’t remember anything apart from three numbers!!

The second half of the lesson was looking at teaching practice.  We watched a short video and had to comment on the teaching practice, the objectives of the lesson and the stages of the lesson.  This was very intersting but made me feel a little scared as i start my teaching practise the first week in November!!! oh my god!!

Homework this week was to write in our Unknown Language Journal and to write up our observation of the video teaching.

I have enrolled on an online grammar course as i really feel my grammar is not up to scratch so i will let you know if this benefits me.

If anyone has any questions or comment feel free to add them.

I started the Trintiy College CertTESOL course on 29 September.  It is a one year course running one evening a week for input session and teaching practice for me will be on a Wednesday afternoon.

I have been wanting to do this course for some time and a local College advertised the course in August so perfect timing!!!

I do not have a degree and my grammar is not great so i hope i wil be able to cope…so far so good though…i managed to get through the pre-interview task!

I have been to 2 evening input sessions and on the first evening we got to know each other and had a tour of the college facilities.  There are 14 students on the course, various ages and careers, everyone seems really nice and friendly which is very important as i will be working closely with one other person when we do our teaching together.

On the second evening we went through some ‘homework’ we were given.  We have to learn a new alphabet!!! Phoneme Alphabet….basically symbols which are used to represent the prinicpal sounds of English.  We were also given sentences and had to explain the difference between them e.g.

1a What do you do at the weekend?

1b What are you doing at the weekend?

 We were also given other sentences and had to find the adverbs or adjectives etc.

1 She’s a GOOD player

Is GOOD an adverb or adjective

I must say i did find this quite difficult as i had to use a book to check if i was correct in my answers….some people seemed to know them easily whereas for me i think i need to think more!!

Next week we will be starting to learn a new language and we need to keep a diary of how we feel whilst learning and how we think the teachers teaching techniques work.

Well this is all for now…..i will try and write a little each week.