Fri Feb 20

Objectives for today:

Language awareness: Revision of quantifiers

Reading comprehension - strategies the sts use for reading faster, making summaries, guessing meaning from context

The topic for today's journal writing was on the book they are reading for English (or going to read). If they are reading one - what's it about? Are you enjoying it? If you don't have one, what book would you like to read?

(In hindsight, I could have altered this a little, as most of them still don't have a book, and were a little at a loss as to what to write.)

At the end of the class I gave them some ideas about where to look for English novels, and what type to look for.

We did some work in p. 56 of the Workbook, in order to revise quantifiers. The activity was a little hard, particularly the second column, which says "this ice cream is full of flavour and should satisfy any of the chocolate lovers among our readers." It seemed a little strange, but nothing else fit.

I then went around the room and asked each person, "how fast can you read in Spanish?" most said that they considered themselves quite fast readers. But the next question, "how fast can you read in English?" made them admit that (except for Elvia), they were much slower readers in English. They discussed in groups what things they personally read in English, what strategies they use to read better, and what the difficulties are of reading in English. They reported back and I wrote their answers on the board. Some said they hardly read in English at all. Others said they read a lot while playing Play Station. Most said that their difficulty was in vocabulary and in understanding "lexical chunks". I showed them a sentence which, if translated directly to Spanish, makes no sense whatsoever, but that dividing the sentence up into lexical chunks, makes more sense.

Sts read p. 82, "improving your reading speed". Then they practiced reading a text on p. 139 in 60 seconds, following the advice of the tips, and writing down the main points of the text. Everyone was able to finish within 60 seconds and give an accurate summary of what the text was about. We then turned back to p. 78. I called on specific people to participate as I felt I wasn't getting enough participation out of certain sts. The sts read the article, section by section, having one minute to read each one, and summarize the main points. They were all able to read the text in the given time. They then worked with vocabulary and chose the correct meaning from the context. Other vocab not mentioned in the exercise that they had trouble with was stall, port wine, wasabi.

By the end of this activity many sts commented that they were reading faster, and were proud of that.

We still haven't managed to do awkward social situations, although this has been on the lesson plan for about three classes now!

I gave the sts information about the blog (erroneously called 612cele) and asked them to write and share in it, use it as a class diary, and give feedback on the classes given. It's an opportunity for them to not only practice writing, but also for me to improve my teaching. The sts present gave me their emails for me to invite them. They seemed enthusiastic about the idea of a blog.