Pre-Reading and While-Reading Teaching Experience

As a continuation from the set induction activity for the play "Soul Gone Home" by Langston Hughes, I had prepared both pre-reading and while-reading activities for my micro-teaching session today. Originally we were supposed to seperate these two activities but since we are short of time, our tutor had asked us to combine both of these activities in one session.

This time the experience of preparing pre-reading and while-reading activities was much easier if compared with my experience to prepare for these activities last semester for short story class. I had gained some insights from past experience and the process of designing activities was smoother. However, the challenge this time was to teach a "play". Last semester, although we are new to designing appropriate activities, the short story text were easier for us and target students to digest. As for plays, it was quite hard for us to decide on which part of the text we should choose from since plays are more lenghthy than text like short story.

Therefore my resolution for this problem was to choose a shorter text, which was Langston Hughes's "Soul Gone Home" and I'm glad that few people in my class had decided on this. But at the same time I too discovered that most of us are focusing on the same lements to be focused on, which are themes and characters. I was quite shocked at first because I did not want to have the same presentation as others. That would definitely make my students and also my evaluators to be bored till the core. Fortunately our tutor had gave us the advice that although the elements that we've chosen may be the same, we can still use different approaches to teach that particular text to make your lesson more interesting.

Therefore I had decided to focus on the personality traits of one main character instead of a few to make my lesson more content-focused. I had choose to concentrate on the changes that "the mother" in the play used to address "the son" as my pre-reading activities, and let my students infer the characteristics of "the mother" based on that observation.

After the micro-teaching session I had gained a few feedbacks from my friends. Mostly it was my approach of teaching and again, I had problem in my language because I tend to speak fast and give lengthy instructions which confused the others. However the feedback on my activity was positive because my friends mentioned that the connection between my pre-reading and while-reading activities were well-linked as they can see the necessity to refer back to the result of previous activity for the use of next activity.

This session of micro-teaching had let me see that organization of activities in a lesson is very important as we need to let our students see the need of them doing some activites that will contribute to another activity. The matter of designing appropriate activity for students is not just merely giving them a task sheet, finish that activty, put that task sheet away and start another new activity without any connection. I realized it was auspicious for students to "see the link".

Besides, my same old problem of language used in the classroom has yet to be solved. I really need to adjust my language according to my target audience so that my students will not be confused by my speech.

Hence, I would conclude that this micro-teaching experience was a more fruitful one compared to the one that I did for last semester. It was especially useful in helping me to gain more insight in designing suitable activities for students in classroom.