Intensive Course
Time: 2 months, four hours per day, five days a week.
JUSTIFICATION OF METHODS SELECTION:
The methods that we used in this lesson plan were: Multiple Intelligences Method, Whole Language Method and Cooperative language method.
Whole Language Learning:
Whole language teachers know that students generally learn and apply skills best when the skills are taught in the context of what they are trying to accomplish. When students are reading, for example, whole language teachers will help them learn think ahead, to use context along with phonics knowledge to get difficult words, to notice when something they've read doesn't make sense, and to reread to solve the problem. As writers gain more experience and skill, whole language teachers will also teacher grammar in the context of writing—helping students rearrange, expand, or combine sentences, for instance, and helping them learn to edit for standard conventions. Of course various aspects of phonics, spellings, and grammar are also taught in focused lessons, but whole language teachers have found that guiding students to use language skills is often the most effective and efficient way of teaching them.
Cooperative Language Learning:
In cooperative language learning we found that groupal activities are the best for goals achievement. Some principles of CLL are:
1. Heterogeneous Grouping. This principle means that the groups in which students do CL tasks are mixed on one or more of a number of variables including sex, ethnicity, social class, religion, personality, age, language proficiency and diligence. Heterogeneous grouping is believed to have a number of benefits in comparison with homogeneous grouping, such as encouraging peer tutoring, providing a variety of perspectives, helping students come to know and like others different from themselves and fostering appreciation of the value of diversity.
2. Collaborative Skills. Collaborative skills are those needed to work with others. Students may lack these skills, the language involved in using the skills or the inclination to apply the skills during a reading aloud session. Most books and websites on cooperative learning urge that collaborative skills be explicitly taught one at a time. Which collaborative skill to teach will depend on the particular students and the particular task they are undertaking. Just a few of the many skills important to successful collaboration are: checking that others understand, asking for and giving reasons; disagreeing politely and responding politely to disagreement and encouraging others to participate and responding to encouragement to participate. Collaborative skills often overlap with thinking skills, e.g., asking for and giving reasons pushes students to think more deeply, and disagreement when handled properly encourages students to explain what they have said.
3. Group Autonomy. This principle encourages students to look to themselves for resources rather than relying solely on the teacher. When student groups are having difficulty, it is very tempting for teachers to intervene either in a particular group or with the entire class. We may sometimes want to resist this temptation, because as Roger Johnson writes, “Teachers must trust the peer interaction to do many of the things they have felt responsible for themselves”
4. Simultaneous Interaction (Kagan, 1994). In classrooms in which group activities are not used, including in the typical reading aloud by teachers session, the normal interaction pattern is that of sequential interaction, in which one person at a time – usually the teacher – speaks. For example, the teacher stops at some point while reading aloud, asks a question to check students’ comprehension, calls on a student to answer the question and evaluates that student’s response.
In contrast, when group activities are used, one student per group is, hopefully, speaking. In a class of 40 divided into groups of four, ten students are speaking simultaneously, i.e., 40 students divided by 4 students per group = 10 students (1 per group) speaking at the same time. Thus, this CL principal is called simultaneous interaction. If the same class is working in groups of two (pairs are also groups), we may have 20 students speaking simultaneously.
5. Equal Participation (Kagan, 1994). A frequent problem in groups is that one or two group members dominate the group and, for whatever reason, impede the participation of others. CL offers many ways of promoting equal participation in groups. Two of these are the use of rotating roles in a group, such as facilitator, checker (who checks to see that everyone understands what the group is doing/has done), questioner, praiser, encourager and paraphraser, and the use of multiple ability tasks (Cohen, 1994; Gardner, 1999), i.e., tasks that require a range of abilities, such as drawing, singing, acting and categorizing, rather than only language abilities.
6. Individual Accountability. Individual accountability is, in some ways, the flip side of equal participation. When we encourage equal participation in groups, we want everyone to feel they have opportunities to take part in the group. When we try to encourage individual accountability in groups, we hope that no one will attempt to avoid using those opportunities. Techniques for encouraging individual accountability seek to avoid the problem of groups known variously as social loafing, sleeping partners or free riding.
7. Positive Interdependence. This principle lies at the heart of CL. When positive interdependence exists among members of a group, they feel that what helps one member of the group helps the other members and that what hurts one member of the group hurts the other members. It is the “All for one, one for all” feeling that leads group members to want to help each other, to see that they share a common goal.
8. Cooperation as a Value. This principle means that rather than cooperation being only a way to learn, i.e., the how of learning, cooperation also becomes part of the content to be learned, i.e., the what of learning. This flows naturally from the most crucial CL principle, positive interdependence. Cooperation as a value involves taking the feeling of “All for one, one for all” and expanding it beyond the small classroom group to encompass the whole class, the whole school, on and on, bringing in increasingly greater numbers of people and other beings into students’ circle of ones with whom to cooperate.
Multiple Intelligences:
One of the most remarkable features of the theory of multiple intelligences is how it provides eight different potential pathways to learning. If a teacher is having difficulty reaching a student in the more traditional linguistic or logical ways of instruction, the theory of multiple intelligences suggests several other ways in which the material might be presented to facilitate effective learning.
You don’t have to teach or learn something in all eight ways, just see what the possibilities are, and then decide which particular pathways interest you the most, or seem to be the most effective teaching or learning tools. The theory of multiple intelligences is so intriguing because it expands our horizon of available teaching/learning tools beyond the conventional linguistic and logical methods used in most.
STUDENTS' PROFILE:
This lesson is designed for 21-year-old students which have an intermediate English level. They are studying at a private school. There are 20 students in this course.
Objectives:
- The student will be able to identify the different kinds of tenses in a text and provide a synonym of a word.
Goals:
- Students will be able to identify the different kinds of tenses in a text.
Enabling Indicators:
- Students will underline the different kinds of tenses (past, present and future).
- Students will change the underlined word to a suitable synonym.
Assumed knowledge:
Students are supposed to have a brief knowledge about the different kinds of tenses and also they should have a little background about them.
Learners Role:
Learners are expected to be active participants and their own classmate’s colaborators.
Teacher’s Role:
Teachers are expected to be a guide for their students in the process of learning.
Materials and resources:
Why this tools are effective with the methodology chosen for this course:
This tools are effective since they are use in order to motivate and ilustrate in a better way all the WWII issues and also, the will find a sense or a context in which the difference tenses can be used.
Comments (0)
You don't have permission to comment on this page.