AEIS English - 16/04/2009

Date: 16/04/2008

Day: Thursday

Students present: Michael, Henry, William, Noe Noe, Susan

Students absent: NIL

Teacher (main and assistants): Lim Young

Subject: English

Topic: NA

Teaching process

Concepts taught: Summary Techniques. Introduced to the students the 5W1H technique. Students are taught to breakdown an article by using the following prompt questions in the following order.

1. When
2. Where
3. Who
4. What
5. How
6. Why

It is important to note that the sequence of these prompt questions are vital in the logical thinking process during the analysis of the content. Pt 1 to 4 are what I termed as the FACTS prompts. These are things that are definite, such as the location of an incident, the time it happened and the people involved so on and so forth. The HOW question is what I term as the ANALYSIS question. This is where the reader uses the facts obtained earlier on to analyse and deduce how something happen. The WHY question is what I term as the REFLECTION question. This should come as the last as the student is challenged to give his or her own opinion to the article that he or she have just read, based on the analysis and the facts they produced earlier on.

Example questions gone through: NA

Practice questions given: Newspaper cuttings from The Straits Times

Post-teaching

General comments of students: All the students understand the usefulness of this method and they are quite receptive of it. However, they are still not very used to the concept of such systematic breakdown when reading an article.

Improvement points of students: After each student completed their journal entry for the newspaper cuttings, I've always asked them to present to the class what they have done. The last 2 lessons I allowed them to open their book to refer to what they have written but discouraged them from doing so. During this lesson, I forced them to close all their books and many of them find it difficult to present. Many of have yet to instill this analytical system into their brain and thus their presentations were messy and disorganised. By forcing them not to read from the book straight, I am challenging their understanding of their article and opinions. It also allows them to express their thoughts through verbally, giving them the chance to practice speaking English.

After doing this for the past 3 lessons, I find this method very effective for teaching english in class and I see the improvement in them. However, their writing skill and articulation still have much room for improvement.

Homework given (including due date): NA