COMMENT ON MY OWN RECORDING

Firstly i can say that normally my students are different. They are not silent as much as in the video, because of the recording, they seem more ‘innocent’ lets say J however, it affects them in a bad way too, because they are more participative in classroom activities actually but in the class time that i recorded, they were not so participative, most probably because of the reason that they didn’t feel comfortable.  Anyway, when come to the activities, the focus was the reading skill. We dealt with reading passage about The Ig Nobel prizes. To see what they know about it and to take their attention to the topic, I prepared a quiz in which there were some sentences about these prizes and students were to decide whether they are true or false. Then I asked students to scan the text to check their answers.  I think this activity worked well. Another thing that I liked was the vocabulary part. In their books, the words are written in an isolated form, and students have to find the meanings. I thought it would be better to give them the definitions and asked them to match the words with the definitions instead of just looking up the dictionary. Therefore, I prepared a matching exercise and they could get the meaning of words with the help of definitions. During all activities, I often asked students whether they know the meaning of a word (which I think they might not know) to be sure that they know it. I often expected them to give me the meaning of the word in Turkish. Since they are intermediate (B.1.2) students, I am not sure whether it is good or not. But anyway, I think it is good to check their understanding. Another thing that I liked was that I asked further questions such as ‘why, where did you get it?’ which is a good technique in my opinion. It makes students think and speak more.  One thing that I didn’t like with my lesson was that I had the more control and most of the time I gave the right answer, I just showed them the true answer. Maybe I should have given them more time to think, or peer helping could be work, instead of just giving the right answer. I need to be more patient I guess. Another thing that I didn’t liked was the classroom atmosphere. Okey, it was a kind of stress free environment, but mostly same students participated the class and others seemed demotivated. Therefore, I could have prepared other activities to make everyone participate in activities. Especially, when I asked them to read loudly one by one, they get bored most of the time as it takes some time. The reason behind this technique is to see their pronunciation and to be sure that they read and comprehend the text, because when I ask them to read silently, most students just pretend as if they are reading.  I can clearly say that I am just at the beginning of the teaching process, and there are so many things to learn not only from my colleagues but also from my students.