Joyce's reaction paper (93951015)

I. Tongue Twisters

I teach in a vocational high school in the countryside. Many students show little interest for English due to overwhelming difficulties they have encountered at their first contact with English. A sense of failure in the early period pulled them back from learning. Pronunciation is a main problem for many students. Since they cannot sound out the words, the letters become abstract in the spelling order. Without the aid of sound, students have to memorize the letters one by one. It is difficult for them to internalize the forms of vocabulary into their long-term memory. They learn new words and quickly forget.
In my school, the material for freshmen before the first midterm examination is KK phonetic symbols. By the introduction of KK phonetic symbols, students are expected to understand the individual sound in the language and how the sounds blend together in a syllable. When I teach low achievers, I would combine phonics instructions and KK phonetic symbols. Students will have a better picture of the relation of sounds and letters. Therefore, students’ awareness of phonemes and morphemes will be enhanced under these two methods.
Tongue twisters often combine words of minimal pairs. By giving examples of minimal pairs, I can give explicit explanation of letter-sound correspondence. Therefore, I would like to use them in my class to help students develop phonemic awareness easier and faster.
For example:
Dig the jig in the dim gym.
The cat in the hatch will match the hat on the patch by the mat.
Giggle gaggle google goggle.
After students master these basic sounds, I would add more interesting sentences that might twist their tongues in order to be more fun.

Procedure: A game of tongue twisters relay race.
1. 6 rows of students are in a competition.
2. The teacher tells the first student of each row a tongue twister outside of the classroom without being heard by other students. For example: He threw three balls.
3. Each of the first students goes back to his/her row and whispers the sentence to the second student, and on and on.
4. The last student in each row has to come up to the front and write the sentence on the black board he/she has heard during the game.
5. The group who has the correct sentence is the winner.

II. Interactive drama
Interactive drama is too difficult for my students. However, I like the idea of interactive drama that it elicits spontaneous language from students. The communicative competence is highly emphasized in the recent teaching trends. However, what we have in Taiwan is an ESL situation. Students have little contact with English environment in their daily life. Therefore, in the classroom teachers have to provide more opportunities for students to speak out and use the language. I will adopt ID in my classroom and make it much easier for students who are in beginning levels. Actually, I will change it to guided role play. Limited by students’ low English proficiency, the guided role play may not be as interactive and dynamic as ID. The purpose is to give students chances to apply what they have learned in order to accomplish a given task.
Procedure:
1. The teacher provides students with some useful structures and patterns. Students feel less anxious when they have basic skills to accomplish a task.
2. By drills and repetition, students need to remember these useful expressions. Examples of several conversations are given to students so that they can be more familiar with the use of patterns and the formulaic sentences.
3. Pair up the students and include a student of higher level in each group.
4. Give students a task. The task contains information gap between the two partners so there will be interaction in the conversation.
For example: You meet a new friend in the school. You want to make friends with him/her. You introduce your name and ask questions about him/her.

Student A: 1. You smile and say “hi” to the girl next to you.
2. Introduce your name to her and ask what her name is.
3. You exchange information with her.
Information:
Your name is Daniel.
You live in Touliu. You graduated from Touliu junior high school.
You go to school by bus every day.
You have one younger brother and two sisters.
Your hobby is playing computer games.
You like jazz.
Your favorite subject is PE because you like sports.

Student B: 1. The boy next to you says hi and asks your name.
2. In order to be friendly, you exchange information with him.
Information:
Your name is Jane.
You are from Huwei. You graduated from Huwei junior high school.
You walk to school every day.
You are an only child.
Your hobbies are watching movies and dancing.
You like popular music most.
You like English most because you think your English teacher is very pretty.

5. Teacher observes while the groups are performing and then gives some comments.


III. Stories for Discussion - true, false, don't know

I will adopt this activity when I help students review a lesson. There are only two hours of English classes in one week at my school. Activities should be well-prepared in terms of time controlling and classroom management. Stories for Discussion will help students to review the whole text and be more familiar with the content and expressions. The teacher prepares 10 to 15 comprehension questions and gives students before the discussion. Students can prepare answers in advance and use the vocabulary and phrases they have learned in this lesson. The reasons why students in my school can not learn English well are that they merely recite the vocabulary and test items for tests. In the activity, they have to “use” English to talk about the answers or persuade others to change their mind.
Procedure:
The class is divided into 5 groups with 6 persons in each one. The members of each group are heterogeneous. The student with better English proficiency is assigned as a leader who is in charge of keeping the discussion going on. Other members will need to do the note-taking, and be responsible of discipline problems in the process. Therefore, everyone in a group shares some responsibility. Students will go over all the comprehension questions and provide answer such as true, false or don’t know and give comments.

IV.Conclusion

Teaching is a combination of art and science. Teaching methods and materials should be changed when applying to different students. In Dr. Phillips’ courses in summer, he demonstrated a variety of activities and methods. I found many of them are valuable in applying to my students. I can’t wait to apply these to my classes and hope to add some new and fresh elements in my teaching.

Joyce almost persuaded by the charity ad

commercial website http://www.wvi.org/wvi/child_sponsorship/child_sponsorship.htm After reading the child sponsorship section on World Vision, I almost have an impulse to donate money right at the moment.

Under the title “child sponsorship,” there are sub-categories entitled as “What is Child Sponsorship,” “ How a community benefit,” “Why your help is need,” “How it all begin,” and “sponsor now.” The words are so persuasive and we can take a look at the strategies employed and examine how they conform to the Motivation Sequence developed by Alan Monroe and Douglass Ehninger.

First, it provides a story of an India poor girl named Sanja which causes the immediate attention from the audience. The girl lives in extreme hardship with no food to eat, no clean water to drink and safe shelter to live in. This story arouses sympathy from audience.

The second strategy is called Need step. Different levels of needs are shown. On one hand, the section “Why your help is need” gives detailed description on the disadvantaged situations children suffer, which suggests that Physiological needs and Security needs of children are threatened. On the other hand, the organization tells its audience that they can build a special relationship with your sponsored child. This connection enhances mutual trust between a donor and a child and therefore satisfies social needs. Moreover, the action of donation suggests a meaningful and fulfilling life which makes us feel better of our self-esteem.

Later, by providing the information how the communities benefit from sponsorship, the audience understand how the organization work to solve problems. This is called Visualization Step.

The last step, action step, provides you with links for you to make a donation for World Vision office in your home country as you can see in “Sponsor now.”

This website really provides good reasons for people to do charity. Even when encouraging people to do something meaningful and fulfilling, principles of how to persuade people are still quite important. I think these principles might be useful in application to persuade lazy students work harder.