skkn tiếng anh five minute activities to activate students schemata in reading

SÁNG KIẾN KINH NGHIỆM Five-minute Activities to Activate Students' Schemata in Reading Người thực hiện: BÙI PHÚ XUÂN Lĩnh vực nghiên cứu: Quản lý giáo dục Phương pháp dạy học bộ môn:

SỞ GIÁO DỤC VÀ ĐÀO TẠO ĐỒNG NAI

Đơn vị : Trường THPT NGÔ QUYỀN

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Mã số: ………

SÁNG KIẾN KINH NGHIỆM

Five-minute Activities to Activate Students'

Schemata in Reading

Người thực hiện: BÙI PHÚ XUÂN

Lĩnh vực nghiên cứu:

Quản lý giáo dục Phương pháp dạy học bộ môn: Tiếng Anh Lĩnh vực khác:

Có đính kèm:

Năm học: 2015-2016

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SƠ LƯỢC LÝ LỊCH KHOA HỌC

I THÔNG TIN CHUNG VỀ CÁ NHÂN

1 Họ và tên: BÙI PHÚ XUÂN

2 Ngày tháng năm sinh : 02 / 09 / 1976

3 Nam/Nữ: Nam

4 Địa chỉ: 103/71 Đường 30/4 Phường Trung Dũng Thành Phố Biên Hòa -

Tỉnh Đồng Nai

5 Điện thoại: Cơ quan: 061.3829029 Nhà riêng: 061.3819495

7 Chức vụ: Thư ký HĐ

8 Nhiệm vụ được giao: Thư ký HĐ, chủ nhiệm lớp, giảng dạy bộ môn tiếng Anh

9 Đơn vị công tác: Trường THPT NGÔ QUYỀN

II TRÌNH ĐỘ ĐÀO TẠO

- Học vị (hoặc trình độ chuyên môn, nghiệp vụ) cao nhất: Thạc Sỹ

- Năm nhận bằng: 2007

- Chuyên ngành đào tạo: Giảng Dạy Tiếng Anh

III KINH NGHIỆM KHOA HỌC:

- Lĩnh vực chuyên môn có kinh nghiệm: Giảng dạy bộ môn Tiếng Anh

- Số năm có kinh nghiệm: 17 năm

- Các sáng kiến kinh nghiệm đã có trong 5 năm gần đây:

+ Pre-Listening activities

+ Strategies for Developing Reading Skills Skimming and Scanning + Arousing Students’ Interest in Reading

+ Using Interactive Tasks to Arouse High School Students’ Interest in Learning Speaking

+ Using Communicative Tasks or Activities to Promote High School Students' Grammatical Competence

TOPIC: Five-minute activities to activate students'

schemata in reading

I INTRODUCTION:

Learning English is considered to be very essential in our modern society

nowadays English is one of the core subjects in all Vietnamese junior and senior high schools, colleges and universities However, classroom teaching is a demanding job and most Vietnamese teachers have to work with a class of forty five students or more and there is usually a wide variety of abilities in each class When teaching reading, the teachers always play the centred roles, the students sit passively and do nothing What they do is to listen to the teacher and then copy everything on the board into their notebooks

At the end of the reading lesson students usually feel tired and bored, they find no pleasure in the act of reading Some of them just struggle with the text (e.g.: unknown words and complicated grammar rules) to find the answers to comprehension questions

As English teachers, we should try our best to give the students as many opportunities as possible to take part in active activities in the classroom It is our own job to make the classroom a lively and communicative place How can we create such a classroom? My experience has taught me that five-minute activities can spark students’ curiosity and promote a comfortable atmosphere

We can use some of the activities or games at the beginning of the class to attract students’ attention and to engage them in the lesson

Five-minute activities are believed to be an essential component to generate positive students’ attitudes toward learning reading They really help to arouse the students’ interest as well as attention in the lessons As a result the students will get more involved in the class and a better learning process will take place

II RATIONALE OF THE STUDY

A The importance of reading:

Reading is one important way to improve your general language skills in English for the following reasons:

 Reading helps you learn to think in English

 Reading can enlarge your English vocabulary

 Reading can help you improve your writing

 Reading is a good way to find out about new ideas, facts, and experiences

 Reading helps you raise your knowledge and general culture

 Reading will also make you travel and use your imagination in ways you never imagined

 Reading is a good way to transport yourself to the other side of the world or to

a fantastic universe full of strange people

As Doff (1988) comments that reading involves looking at sentences and words, recognizing them and understanding them – it is a process of making sense of written language

Warming up activities can foster motivation and this is, in turn, an essential component when planning warming up activities According to Dornyei (2001), teachers need to try and actively generate positive students' attitudes toward learning He also claims that the key issue in generating interest is to widen the

student's appetite; that is, to arouse the students' curiosity and attention and to create

an attractive image for the class so that they will get more involved with it and a better learning process will take place

Allwright (1984) believes that we can design some activities to attract students to attract students' attention, to help them put aside distracting thoughts and to get them ready to focus individually and as groups on whatever activities that follow

B The aim of the innovation:

 Using Five-minute activities to activate students' schemata in reading

C The participants of the study:

 Tenth grade to twelfth grade students in Ngo Quyen High School were chosen to take part in the innovation

D Timing:

 The activities finish in about 5 minutes of lesson time, but some can be even

shorter and others can be lengthened

E Content of the topic:

 This contains some of the activities that teachers can use in class and I use the

Units in “English books 10 & 12” as examples in my activities

III PROCEDURE:

1 Activity 1 : Mind-mapping

 We can use this activity in order to get the students’ attention to the content of the new lesson and at the same time give them a chance to review and enrich their vocabulary

 Before beginning, the teacher takes a key word in the reading passage and asks the students to suggest all the words which associate with it Write each

suggestion on the board with a line joining it to the original word in a circle, so

that you get a “sunray” effect Let’s take Unit 3: PEOPLE’S BACKGOUND

(English 10) as an example:

 Teacher writes down the word FAMOUS SCIENTIST on the board and has

students brainstorm all the words they can think of:

The word SCHOOL may produce something like the sketch below

FAMOUS SCIENTISTS

brilliant

degree

inventions

ambitious

achievements

research

discoveries

education

Nobel Prize

FAMOUS SCIENTISTS

2 Activity 2: Collocation

Let’s take Unit 6: FUTURE JOBS (English 12) as an example:

- Have students work in groups of 4

- Each group is given a set of word cards as follow:

- Prepare another set of cards (see below) and stick the cards one by one on the board

- Get the groups to choose and stick the appropriate cards to the ones on the board

to make meaningful phrases

- Give one point to the first group who gives the correct answer

- The group having the most points wins

- Here are the cards to stick on the board:

Expected answers:

- a nice gesture

- dressing neatly and formally

- a smiling face

- clear and honest answer

- sense of responsibility

FACE

FEELING CLEAR AND HONEST

NEATLY AND FORMALLY

SENSE OF

A NICE

- feeling self-confident

3 Activity 3: Opposites

 We can use this kind of activity to review the vocabularies of the previous

lesson For example, before teaching Unit 4 “Special Education” English 10, the teacher can use this activity to review the vocabularies of Unit 3 “People’s

Background”

 The teacher writes some words on the board, has students work in pairs or groups of four to discuss and note down the opposites Then the teacher checks and supplies any words the students didn’t know

 Examples :

Ambitious  Unambitious Mature  Immature

Possible  Impossible Appropriate  Inappropriate Like  Dislike

Perfectly  Imperfectly Quickly  Slowly

Careful  Careless

 If by the end of the activity all the pairs of opposites have been written on the board, erase the original words you gave and see if the students can recall them from the ones remaining Or we can ask the students to make their own sentences using those words

4 Activity 4: Matching

 We can use this kind of activity to introduce the new lesson as well as draw students’ attention on the theme of the unit

Let’s take Unit 2: CULTURAL DIVERSITY (English 12) as an example:

 The teacher has students work in groups of four, and asks them to match the picture of the weddings with the country it belongs to Each picture is typical of the wedding of a country or culture

1 Indian wedding

2 Thai wedding

3 American wedding

4 Vietnamese wedding

5 Korean wedding

6 Japanese wedding

 The teacher invites some representatives of the groups to give their answers and explain them if possible in front of the class

 Examples :

Picture 3 Picture 4

 Teachers gives students the answers

- Indian wedding  Picture 2

- Thai wedding  Picture 4

- American wedding  Picture 6

- Vietnamese wedding  Picture 1

- Korean wedding  Picture 3

- Japanese wedding  Picture 5

Let’s take Unit 11: BOOKS (English 12) as another example:

- The teacher has students work in groups of four and asks them to match the names

of the authors in column A with their relevant works in column B

- The first group to have correct answers is the winner

A B

1 O Henry

2 J K Rowling

3 Charles Dickens

4 Ernest Hemingway

5 Margaret Mitchell

6 Leo Tolstoy

7 To Hoai

8 Agatha Christie

A War and Peace

B The Old Man and the Sea

C Murder on the Orient Express

D Harry Potter

E The last leaf

F Oliver Twist

G Gone with the Wind

H Diary of a Cricket

KEY:

1 E

2 D

3 F

4 B

5 G

6 A

7 H

8 C

OR: in Unit 14: INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS (English 12)

- Divide the class into two groups A & B

- Stick the symbols/logos of the international organizations to the board

- Distribute the cards of the name of the International Organizations to the students: UNESCO, FIFA, WWF, UN, UNICEF, WHO

- Call out the symbols in any order and the representatives of each group should run to the board and stick the names under the symbols

- The group with more correct answers will be the winner

- Give more information about the organization and introduce the new lesson

1 2

KEY

1 WWF

2 UNESCO

3 UN

4 UNICEF

5 WHO

6 FIFA

5 Activity 5: Surveying

 This activity aims to give the students a chance to interact with each other talking about their tastes before studying the new lesson

 The teacher writes about five or six names of items or topics in the same field

on the board for example colours, songs, films, singers, television programmes or school subjects etc Identify each by a letter : A , B, C, D etc

 Example:

Before teaching Unit 2 “School Talks” English 10, we might give:

A Sports and games

B Entertainment

C Health problems

D Hobbies

E Holidays

F Weather

G Films

H Work and study

 Each student writes down the letters in order of preference: If FILMS is

his/her favourite then he/she will write G at the top of the list Those who

finish early can compare and discuss their choices with their neighbours

 When the students have finished, we can hold a vote to see which choices were the most popular If we have time, discuss different tastes, and see if there is a general consensus on favourites After that we can tell the students the most common topics that students often talk about when they meet their friends

IV FINDINGS:

Questionnaire

The purpose of this survey is to find out about the students’ achievements in reading classes, students’ feelings and attitudes to the reading

Question: How far do you agree with the following statements?

1 strongly disagree

2 disagree

3 neutral

4 agree

5 strongly agree

1 My reading skills improve a lot thanks

to this reading class

77,5% 15% 7,5%

2 My reading class is very enjoyable

and interesting

62,5% 17,5% 12,5% 7,5%

3 3 I feel interested in completing the

tasks with my partners

70% 5% 15% 10%

4 I feel very interested in the lesson 57,5% 27,5% 10% 5%

5 I like reading more if I have free time

after class

62,5% 22,5% 10% 5%

V CONCLUSION:

All the activities mentioned above aim at making students concentrate on their reading lessons as much as possible, helping them have some initial ideas of the lesson they are learning; and the most important thing that I would like to gain from these activities is to make my students hold interest in their lessons In carrying out this research, I strongly believe that students’ interest in the lessons, particularly reading lessons is of great importance in the teaching and learning of English as a foreign language My research project hopefully proves that interesting and meaningful activities at the beginning of a lesson will make a decision on the success of the lesson in which there is a requirement or encouragement of student individual roles in the class The success of the above-mentioned activities also reminds students to take their responsibility for their English learning, their co-operative learning; and they must think that their teacher of English is not a source of knowledge for them to go to school to get that knowledge

NGƯỜI THỰC HIỆN

Bùi Phú Xuân

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REFERENCES

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Allwright, R (1984) The importance of interaction in classroom language learning Applied

Linguistics, 5(2), 156-171

Doff, A 1988 Teach English: A Training Course for Teachers Cambridge University

Press

Dornyei, Z (2001) Motivational strategies in the English classroom Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press

English Book 10 Education Publishing House

English Book 12 Education Publishing House