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Monday, June 20, 2005
I've changed the course compared to last year...I remember last year thinking that I'd kind of overburdened students with summary of the Japanese article, and their own opininion, and wishing that more students had shown uptake of the new vocabulary to label company structure we had learned during the class, so I modeled a sample intro and summary myself and put it in the final exam.
This year students have been asked to read the Japanese article and do the gapfill vocab sensitizing summary, so that I'm hoping they see the correlation of how the vocab and topic applies to real life before they begin to discuss company structure issues in class. One student emailed me that they felt the homework was not demanding enough compared to previous tasks, which in a sense is true, if you take it as a case of just reading Japanese and bunging in words in a text, rather than trying to formulate it yourself in English.
I have been reading over last year's best work, and decided incorporate it to move into the "so, what do you think?" as in, saying ok, i provided you with an intro and a summary, which is highly relevant as a model of an intro and a summary for your summer assignment. Ok, but there's something missing in this homework piece of gapfill you've done, what is it? right, it's a personal opinion, let's see what last year's students thought and discuss in small groups what you think before moving into a more detailed exploration of company structure.
I'm not sure which is better, working over a pairwork sheet with me wandering round prompting and supporting, and then trying to apply the new terminology and ideas to a real life example, reading and commenting on each other's work plus finally researching a company over three days (2004), or starting with the familiar real life example in Japanese, and then latching onto correlated meanings of vocab in English, and then beginning to try and apply those in discussion in small groups in class to expand the concept, and then move into a personal research homework to apply it again more freely, with written commenting on the second homework as it is explained to peers....perhaps a less demanding approach, but then do I need to be less demanding?
Renata 2:45 pm
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