I have a second interview tomorrow at a teaching school in Prague, and they are notoriously tough to get hired at. I need to impress my interviewer with an original lesson planned for 45 minutes, which I will act out with a "student."
The scenario is: an intermediate student who has a lot of experience with English, but needs mostly practice with what she already knows. She will be working for an American boss, at a bank.
This is a first lesson. My task is to create a lesson that is as student-oriented as possible, and encourages the student to talk and think about the language as much as possible. It should be fun and entertaining, and give me chances to correct the student's language.
I will need a theme for the lesson as well, and that's what is troubling me the most. Since no needs are specifically given for the lesson- I will have to hit on an appropriate first-lesson topic and follow it, wrapping up at the end. I need to have a warmer for the student as well, and ways to get the student to talk with as little prompting as possible?
Any suggestions?
My first impulse is to start with "two truths and a lie," where you write down two things about you, and one lie, and the other person has to guess what the lie is.
Then I thought a magazine article of some kind would frame the rest of the lesson. First the student can read it, ask any questions she may have, and then I can ask her about the content of the article, and deal with related vocabulary or tense problems... Gah, I'm just nervous about judging the level of the lesson and making a good impression.
Posted by Dagonee (Member # 5818) on :
The immediate suggestion I have is that you state that you will use this first lesson to assess what areas future lessons should focus on. Hence, you will go for breadth more than depth. I don't know if that's enough for a theme. But it lets you come up with a unifying element for almost any topic you can think of.
If you go the magazine article route , I would also ask them to tell you (in the role as the boss) about an article from the local Czech newspaper. If you can find an English translation of the article before-hand, that would be good, but I don't think it's necessary. You can ask either for a summary or a live translation - both are common tasks, I imagine.
The benefit of that is that you can be testing in English-only situations and in a translation situation, which you could say potentially exposes different areas that need attention.
Posted by Orincoro (Member # 8854) on :
That's an interesting suggestion. I don't have any experience with that kind of lesson (translation), and so I'm not sure if it would go well or not. The other issue is that I will need to justify the points in my lesson with outcomes in mind- so I can't just say I'm testing the student's ability to translate, it has to have some hoped-for if not achieved outcome where the student learns some language.
For instance, in a "read for gist," assignment, or in this case, a gist-translation assignment, the step-goal of the task would not be accurate translation, but probably the appropriate tenses to use when dealing with written material. In a newspaper article, we use the past simple most often, but when talking about a news article, we often refer to the article itself, in the present simple or perfect. So, an article that says: "four gunmen robbed a bank tuesday," would be read for gist as: "four gunmen have robbed a bank," or "the article is about a robbery that happened on Tuesday." Often Czechs substitute past perfect for past simple in situations like this, so they say: "In the article, four men have robbed bank." My problem is that this is a very minute point to teach, and there's no guarantee the student or the interviewer in this case will even make the mistake I am expecting.
[ November 23, 2008, 08:51 PM: Message edited by: Orincoro ]
Posted by Orincoro (Member # 8854) on :
Well I just got back from the interview. It was frankly unnerving, where my initial interview had been quite comfortable, and I was left with the impression that my future at the school is solidly on the fence. If they need people, I probably get hired- and if not, I can go suck eggs probably.
Posted by BandoCommando (Member # 7746) on :
Best of luck!
Posted by Orincoro (Member # 8854) on :
quote:Originally posted by BandoCommando: Best of luck!
Maybe I should offer my services teaching composition to children... there's got to be some rich family with a little 7 year old Mozart out there for me to discover.