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 Saturday June 23 2007

English Communication

I previously mentioned that I am teaching a summer course that will be somewhat focused on the Internet & blogging. I’ve essentially finished my macro planning and now have to work on the micro planning. It’s good to have a plan for the whole semester ready as it will help me to work on the daily plans especially once I get to the point where I am planning for the class the night before.

Currently I have the first two and a half days completely planned and several other classes partially planned either on paper or in my head. I would like to have this class complete focused on the internet but it is already titled English communication and students will be expecting it to be a “conversation” class. With this in mind I’ve scheduled some discussion topics, music videos, and movies.


The discussion topics will come from Breaking News English (BNE) and students will be give a selection of topics to choose from a couple of days before that class. Music videos will be focused on 1-2 videos by an artist with discussion activities and vocabulary building based around the song and/or topic. The third hour of videos is undecided as I will let students choose an artist they would like to listen to and then develop the lesson around that.

I’ve also got Prison Break or Smallville scheduled. The plan here is to not just watch the episode but spend some time talking about how to actively engage video with English subtitles in a principled manner to aid in language acquisition. There will also be vocabulary and discussion exercises based on the episode covered. Long term readers may be familiar with my previous smallville lessons (here and here). I will not be using those, but rather developing new material which is why I am leaning towards Prison Break even though I really enjoy Smallville. Additionally Prison Break is immensely popular with my students and by using it will hopefully activate their intrinsic motivation to continue with the series using English subtitles rather than Korean.

We will also be doing one movie which the students will get to choose from the following three: Stand by Me, Almost Famous, An Inconvenient Truth. All three movies have a 90% or higher fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes and are unlikely to have been previously viewed by students. I have material ready for the first two, but if students choose the third one I will have to prepare discussion/vocabulary activities for that.

click on the image above for a full size semster plan. Further ideas or suggestions are welcome.


Sean. inscribed these words of wisdom on Saturday Jun 23, 2007 at 05:52 PM
Teaching | teaching_application |
Picture of Marco Polo

Marco Polo wrote 24 words  on  Friday Jun 29, 2007  at  08:19 PM Japan

All three movies have a 90% or higher fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes
Can you explain what this is and why it is important?

Sean.

Sean. wrote 54 words  on  Friday Jun 29, 2007  at  08:27 PM Korea (South)

The 90% rating that it gets from rotten tomatoes is based on reviews published in newspapers and internet sites. These are then calibrated +/- to give a cross sectional view of various reviewers. 90% is pretty high and I thought choosing movies with a high rating would ensure that most students would enjoy them.

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