Once entered the Computer Lab, Pn.Foziah has distributed the whole class with the book entitle “Teaching English in the Primary Classroom” by Susan Halliwell. At the beginning, I thought that the particular book is going to be another material to be kept in my “mini museum” at home. This is because, most of the books which have been given to us in the college for the past 4 years were not use at all and they were just kept as display materials. However, my prediction was not right for this book. After distributed the book, Pn.Foziah asked us to open chapter 1 which is “Working with Young Language Learners”. Since the chapter has 6 subtopics, thus she divided us into 6 smaller groups. Each group is given a subtopic to be discussed between the members and was also asked to prepare power point slides which are to be presented at the end of the lesson.
My topic was “The Instinct for Interaction and Talk”. We in a group of 6 discussed together and collected some important points regarding the topic. Since the details given in the book for the topic were insufficient; thus we also served internet to get more details on it. Within the time limit, we managed to prepare the power point slides which consist of “Why interaction is important?”, “The types of interactions”,” The roles of teacher in encouraging students to interact” and “Activities which encourage interaction in classroom”.
The first group who presented their slides was Chin’s group which was on “Children’s Capacity for Indirect Learning”. In the particular topic they have presented about “The general idea of indirect learning (what is indirect learning?)”, Example of indirect learning activities” and “Why indirect learning is important?” After listening to the presentation, I personally feel that it is effective if the teacher provides a room for their students’ indirect learning. Conducting activities like “Guessing games”, “Puzzle”, “Hangman” and “Charade” are some examples of language activities which lead to the indirect learning of the students. This is because; in such games the mind is engaged with the task and is not focusing on the language. It means that, students do not consciously set out to learn it; meanwhile they acquire it through continuous exposure and use. Thus, it would be effective for a student to learn the language easily in a fun way.
Then, the presentation continued with my group which was on “The Instinct for Interaction and Talk”. The definition part was explained by Dahchini and later was continued with Ashraf who explained about “Why interaction is important?”. He explained very well about it as he gave a lot of details and examples related to it. Then I proceed with the “Types of interactions and The roles of teacher in encouraging interaction”. I actually tried my level best to explain about the topic by giving some additional points regarding it. Hope everyone understand better with my explanation on the particular part. Lastly, “The examples of activities which encourage interaction” were explained by Mahalinggam. He also talked about how to conduct the activities in the ESL classroom. Thus, now I understand that interaction between teacher and students is important as it will lead the students to have a good interpersonal relationship between one another which lower students’ affective filter in learning as well as improve their oral skills (fluent) of the language in the future. Overall, we are happy with our presentation and glad to receive good comment from Pn. Foziah who said that the overall presentation was quite informative.
Since the time was up, we had to stop the lesson with group 2 presentation. Hope we will finish the next 4 groups’ presentation by next week. Overall, I gained something new on “Indirect Learning” and “Instinct for Interaction and Talk”.
HI Visva. I believe that all the presentations will be able to help us to gain more knowledge on how to teach children, together with the different resources. Let's just wait and explore more..
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