The Visit of Li-shan Junior High School April 27, 2007

     After the visit of Li-shan Senior High School last time, we went to its sister school, Li-shan Junior High School this time.  We group A are arranged to attend English Gifted Resources Class (EGRC), which is conducted by Ms. Hsu.  First, I found it is a tiny class that there are only six students (three girls and three boys) in a classroom.  Flash cards and posters are surrounded and posted on the wall, and they are all about learning.  Some sentences on those flash cards are famous proverbs; for example, they are “Practice makes perfect.”, “Beauty is only skin deep.”, and so on.  When we just entered the classroom, the teacher and students welcomed us politely and were ready to start the lesson.

     In the beginning of the class, Ms. Hsu used pictures on the blackboard to ask students questions about the characters of the story like Cindy, Stella, and Anna.  Because of few students, Ms. Hsu can interact with each student often and every student has enough opportunities to make performance or express opinions.  Second, play the CD and students repeated it after each sentence with good pronunciation and intonation.  The teacher wrote down key points on the blackboard such as “besideds=in addition”, “nothing=not anything”, and so forth.  All of the students were well-behaved and took notes hardly.  Third, Ms. Hsu started to teach vocabulary like garbage, trash, rubbish, paint, roof, nothing, etc.  She added other part of speech and compared different usages between British English and American English.  Interestingly, Ms. Hsu will give small homework at any moment to students like how to spell 青藏高原 (Qinghai-Xizang Plateau).  Fourth, it is a listening activity.  After the listening, Ms. Hsu also asked students many questions about home shopping network and costumes.  Several students not only answered the questions but also shared their related experiences with everybody.  At the same time, here comes the assignment which is to write the ending of the story.  Fifth, they returned to the textbook.  The teacher guided students to read the article, Cindy is watching TV, and reminded them to underline the grammar focus and circle the key words.  Then, she requested them to role play and they did a great job, too.  Sixth, it is an exercise of true or false.  Students showed how clever they are and finished it correctly.  The seventh teaching activity is Listening & Check.  Students have to write down the statement about the picture.  And, in the end of the class, Ms. Hsu gave a lot of assignments to students.  They need to read Unit 5 on page 67 to 69 and finish page 70, write correct sentences in Unit 4, and practice their role play at noon break.  Wow! As hearing about those homework, I felt so heavy as if I bear lots of rocks on my shoulders.  Hope them can complete the tasks cheerfully and God bless them.

     Ms. Hsu has a good sense of time control but also of giving exercises.  She displayed fluent English at an appropriate speed and gave clear instructions in every activity.  Moreover, I saw she had constant interactions with students by asking questions.  I do think these teaching techniques will help me a lot in the future.