Friday, September 21, 2012

The second week of teaching; week 38

I had a busy week, I can honestly say that! First of all, it takes a certain amount of time and effort to plan my own lessons for different groups, but also other aspects of my work have kept me busy this week. I was busy organizing new groups for courses that were overcrowded or full, and also had to cancel some groups or courses. It is Friday now, and I feel a bit more restful since a lot of the issues have been settled during this week.
 
The people in my starter -groups are so wonderfully enthusiastic! We have been practising words, numbers and pronunciation in general. Mouths, lips and tongues have been twisted in different positions as we have been trying to pronounce voiced and voiceless th-, s- and other sounds correctly. I admire the people for their passion for practising new things.
 
Also the discussion groups met for the second time during this week. It seems that people in the groups are starting to get to know each other, and also me, and the discussions this week already started to be more natural and people were able to relax and talk more freely. It is nice, and we have been able to have interesting conversations during our lessons.

The topic in our discussions this week was just simply travelling, and we talked about the places people have already been to, or places they would like to visit in the future. We also did some excercises that had to do with asking and giving directions, and we also had an exercise about asking and telling about the weather in different places. Next time we will continue with this topic a bit more before moving on to other areas of interest.

Monday, September 17, 2012

Conversation groups; first meetings

Our autumn semester began, and I met my new English groups for the first time. All in all, last week was exciting and interesting. I met a lot of new people and I'm trying to learn loads of new names and faces! The people in my groups seem nice, and I think we are going to have nice semesters together!

The main topic in our first sessions was, quite logically, introductions. The main focus was to get the students to talk in English again, because some people have had a long pause since they've used the English language. Another aim was to to get to know and learn new things about each other. That was done with the help of picture cards. There were different activities with the cards, such as picking a card that reminded the students of themselves, or picking a card of something they liked or disliked. We had interesting conversations, and really did learn a lot about each other. Someone is afraid of cats and somebody else loves them, somebody hates football, someone thinks he or she is like Donald Duck or a rhino, and there are some of us who just cannot stand winter and slippery roads!

The topic in our next lessons will be travelling.