Comments on Shenyang Reading Seminar

深圳中英公學國際高中執行校長 張四海

　　5月30日，由明師國際教育研究院主辦，沈陽龍圖文化有限公司承辦，遼寧省教育學會中小學外語教學專業委員會學術支持的“英閱薈”英語閱讀教學工作坊在沈陽市實驗學校順利召開。會議之后，不少老師表示此次會議上收獲良多。下文為深圳中英公學國際高中執行校長張四海老師在聽課后寫的觀摩評價。請大家共同感受此次研討會帶給老師們的親身體驗。

　　It was a great honor and privilege to be invited to attend the English Language Teaching Seminar held by Elite Teachers International Education in Shenyang.

　　There were certainly a lot of outstanding features in their demo classes which stood out as I looked back and pondered on it.

　　1. They quickly built rapport with the learners by ice-breaker activities of getting to know each other or engaging them with the topic. This helped make the learners comfortable and ease their tension.

　　2. They exhibited a change of teachers’ ideas and beliefs about teaching and learning, a change of teachers’ methods and practices and a change of the roles of the teacher from ‘lecturer’ to facilitator of learning, from ‘sage on the stage ‘ to ‘guide on the side’.

　　3. They tried to put teaching and learning in a meaningful context, which is the core of Communicative Language Teaching.

　　4. The practicing teachers were equipped with extensive knowledge and awareness of the different components and dimensions of teaching and adopted English as the main classroom language.

　　5. They presented well planned lessons and appropriate materials and excellent teaching aids. They designed some tasks that were stimulating and challenging and kept the students involved.

　　6. The teachers demonstrated the ability to organizeand control the class in a fun and least offensive way. They showed their confidence, patience and encouragement and did smiling teaching all the time.

　　7. They were being encouraging, patient and supportive in the process.

　　8. The overall learning atmosphere was happy and engaging, the students enjoyed it a lot, with some dreary episodes.

　　9. They paid attention to the learner differences and praised and rewarded students who immediately practiced the“target language”.

　　10. The language input was moderately enough for that particular lesson. They tried to cover vocabulary, sentence structure,and situational dialogueall in one lesson.

　　11. They demonstrated the effort to maximize opportunities for learners to practice their oral and written skills.

　　12. Their lessons had a natural transition and smooth flow of activities. You can’t see their elaboration on teaching, yet learning happened as planned.

　　13. They carefully found out what the learners already knew and their levels floated to the learners’ language abilities and built teaching on that.

　　14. They created a warm, open, accepting and relaxed classroom atmosphere and students showed the eagerness to learn,the ability to respond well and perform the tasks. They were keenly aware of helping learners develop their learning strategies.

　　15. They provided intensive practice opportunities for students to experiment with the target language.

　　16. They set clear objectives for the students and by the end of the lesson they were able to reach those goals.

　　17. While and after the lesson, teachers’ Wechat offered positive feedbacks: the novel design, the introduction of mind-mapping, the interactive mode, the extension beyond text, the total English instruction, the audio and video aids, the interesting lead-in, the amount of language input, the communicative capability of students, the training of reading strategies.

　　18. They led them step by step to reach goals. They demonstrated enthusiasm for teaching and learning. They interacted with the learners with ease. Their presentation was planned and well-organized.

　　At the same time, there were some minor aspects that, personally I thought, could be improved.

　　19. It would be better to strike a balance between TTT(Teacher talk time) and STT(Students talk time). Reduce teacher talk so that students have more time to do the speaking.

　　20. Go a little beyond the text and unleash students’ capacity and creativity to express English in their individual and personalized way.

　　21. Relate learning and teaching to their real life. Design mechanical drills and then move to meaningful and open-ended questions so they can apply what they learn to real life use.

　　22. Focus more on how to teach than what to teach. If a learner can read and do the comprehension exercises and check the answers by himself at home, what’s the point of sitting in a reading lesson? It’s the process of finding their reading strategies and the interaction between and among the teachers and the learners that really matters.

　　23. Experience is a double-blade sword. It can be our treasure of expertise, and it can also make us reluctant to change.

　　24. Some activities were far beyond the student’ reach, maybe the theme was too abstract, too personal, or they didn’t have the language capacity to complete the tasks. Students would find it difficult to understand and this would discourage learning.

　　25. The students didn’t take initiative to practice; maybe because they were timid to speak in public or they would rather follow the teacher and be a listener, or they didn’t know what was expected of them, or they didn’t know how to start practice in pairs or groups, or they lacked the language proficiency to do the task.

　　26. The output stage was supposed to show what the learners had learnt in the lesson, it could either be oral presentation or written work, yet little was evident to show what the learners had learned and retained.

　　27. Teachers need to offer more guidance and support to help learners develop their learning strategies. In an information age, this is crucial. As the old saying goes, “Give him a fish, and you feed him for a day; Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime”.

　　28. They didn’t take advantage of big class and welcome the learners’ differences and the contributions they could bring to class. Smart learners can, of course, quickly respond to teacher’s most challenging questions, what about the slow learners? They are the indicator of the effectiveness of a lesson.

　　Generally speaking, they were very successful lessons, they sparked new ideas for teachers and we learned a lot from it. There were practical, workable and adaptable techniques that, I was sure, the observing teachers would like to bring back and try out in their own classrooms. Wouldn’t that be great? Thanks very much again for bringing us these wonderful demo classes and we look forward to the next seminar.

　　作者簡介：

　　張四海 深圳中英公學國際高中執行校長

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