beginning of third week og Master Ttainer's Workshop

Workshop began with inauguration by Commissioner College Education Shri Goyal with the aim of inculcating integrating techniques with emphasis on communicative teaching of language and literature texts prescribed in the syllabi of our respective universities. On Day first we worked on teaching some asprect of General English and today we are working on teacning poetry to the students in the learner centred environment. This is the first time that we are beginning this training session with George who has gone to U.S for treatment but resource person of this training week Madam Rajni Badlani is also sound scholar and she knows how to get us to work on our objectives.

musings

Third week of the Master Training Programme also proved to be quite interesting as I learnt a few more things related to technology like using pendrives,making google groups and also seeing the photographs of training at Bikaner on the monitor. Most of the time we were practising things taught by George at Bikaner. Experience of interviewing media and print personalities and visit to radio station was particularly quite interesting.

Opinions

Teaching Speaking

Today's assignment was teaching speaking to graduate and postgraduate level students. I began the class with ice breaking and introduction session by dividing the class into groups of two and asked one member of the group to interview the other member and then present the report and the vice versa. Then I gave them an exercise of decision making by dividing the class into different groups. The exercise given was of a Naval Ship stranded and the students were asked to discuss the priorities of evacuation among the group and report. In the end key was given enabling students to evaluate their performance. It enabled the students to arrive at a decision by reaching at some unanimous opinion through discussion

Teaching Listening-K.S.Kang

Today's assignment was teaching listening to a group of students who were graduates with literature background. I began the ice breaking session by playing a game of passing the message so that students were able to appreciate the significance of attentive listening. One student wasa asked to read a sentence and speak it into the ear of the next boy and the second boy to speak into the ear of third boy and the like. The last boy was asked to write the message received by him on the board. After it an audio clipping was given to the students with the help of voice recorder of the mobile phone. Students were asked to listen to it and reproduce the sentences. The next step was that they were asked to answer a few questions based on the reading of the text given to them. As a result of which students appreciated the value of attentive listening and other factors influencing the comprehension of listening like concentration, speed of reading, etc. Later as a follow up activity students were asked to identify vowels and consonant sounds in the answers they have given from the handout given to them containing the list of phonemes. Here also I felt that as in teacing of reading time allotted proved to be less as assignments were difficult to be completed in given time.

Teaching Writing

Task given was teaching to a group of students who were postgraduate. The problem that cam was that time allotted for teaching writing proved to be much less than the time allotted for teaching reading. Perhpaps it was due to the fact that the students were not attuned to complete a given task in the provided time limit. Still students were able to appreciate between the isolated sentences which they constructed using the given words and the formal organised text. They were also given task of fingind the antonyms of the given words, as much as possible, and to construct their own story using the antonyms of the given words.This made students appreciate the fact that how one text can inspire another text. As this was my first attempt in collaborative teaching as I was teaching it in collaboration with Ms. Keerti Shekhawat and Ms. Rekha Ranawat so it gave me a new experience of teaching in a collaborative manner which can be much more effective than an individual class, as students gets benefit of several experts on different aspects of a lesson.

Reflection

Topic of my lesson plan was Teaching Reading and looking to the level of students and time constrain of 30 minutes I selected a short poetry piece by Robert Browning. Objectives of the lesson were that students should be able to comprehend the meaning of reading and the importance of key words in order to elicit information not only about poetry about but poet as well.Keeping time constraint in mind I could use only the question-answer method but this strategy worked well inthe class as it ensured maximum student participation in the class. However I feel that I could have used some other techniques also to make my teaching effective. But however I was able to realise the objective of my class to some extent as students appreciated the significance of key words in a text to get at the larger set of information regarduing the theme of the poem as well as the attitude and ideology of the poet.

Gratitude

I am gratefuf to George and Madame Alka Kumar for helping me increating my g-mail account and my own blog today