Lesson 2 Basic English

Being a teacher requires a lot of preparation work and because this lesson is everyday English and all dependent on what the student wants to learn, the original teacher did not have a scheme of work...I have no idea what she has taught these students but what I do know is the students all started the course at different times.  This means that their learning is different to each other as there are a couple of students who has studied English for 15 weeks, another student for over 1 year and some for a few weeks.  The students are only committed for 10 weeks each time with the option of extending the course for a further 10 weeks each time.

At the start of the lesson, I taught them self introduction - 
My name is....
I come from....
I live in....
I am....

and I taught them how to ask people questions - 
What is your name? 
Where do you come from?  
Where do you live?  
What do you do?

I recall the feedback that the students gave me in the first lesson and decided to continue to teach them from the family worksheet.  This time my focus is on sentences as I didn't want the students to just learn the vocab with no idea of how to put it in a sentence.  I taught them how to tell people that they have a sister or brother etc using 'I have'.  Leading on to this is using 'had' instead of have which is the past tense and shows that you don't have something anymore but you once did.  The worksheet I used to explain 'had' is the accessories worksheet as telling people you once had somebody as a member of your family might conjure up negative feelings for the students.

I have been thinking from the first lesson whether I should teach them how a sentence is constructed- pronouns, noun, verb, adverb etc but decided against it as the students in the class only wanted to learn how to communicate and due to the majority of these students being seniors, they would have difficulty understanding it.  Luckily there is no exams for this course so these lessons give me a chance to teach them slowly and the students an opportunity to communicate.

From this lesson, I noticed that these students have different learning styles.  They all have a common goal which is to learn to speak English for everyday usage but their method to remember is different.  There are 2 students who prefer to write everything down (every single nitty gritty detail) and the other students who prefer to just listen and try and remember.

This lesson I started using the whiteboard and at first I felt very awkward as teaching IT doesn't require the whiteboard at all but it wasn't as hard as I thought.  I thought that my writing wouldn't be legible and would be all over the place but it wasn't! 

I was debating whether to give out homework- I had 2 issues in mind:

1. They are mainly seniors so would they want to do homework?
2. We learnt a lot in the lesson already so isn't it better to recap our learning at home with the notes that they have written and the worksheets that we have used in class?

As this is only the second lesson, I decided to leave it and see if any student requests for homework.  After finding out more about the students, I already know that the students don't want homework as they all have family commitments if not a job to go to which means that homework would be the last thing on their minds.