Category: - Bayon English Academy

Bayon English Academy

Teacher Training Highlights: How to Teach Listening

26/11/2014

In addition to learning how to teach speaking lessons, the BEA trainees also learned how to teach listening. This is particularly challenging in most Cambodian settings since teachers usually don't have access to audio equipment. Most schools are lucky to have a whiteboard and a few markers. Before the trainees learned how to adapt listening to different types of learning environments, they had to illustrate the "shape" of a listening lesson and then explain the reasoning for this lesson shape. As you can see, one trainee drew a diagram of Angkor Wat to represent listening lesson structure!

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides English language education, leadership, and job skills programs to underprivileged youth from well-trained teachers in a safe, clean and professional environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Teacher Training Highlights: Lesson Planning

25/11/2014

As part of BEA's teacher training program, there was plenty of time spent on how to plan a variety of different lessons, such as speaking, listening, vocabulary and review lessons. In these sessions, the trainees learned that each part of a lesson has a purpose with different types of interactions between teachers and students. After our lesson planning sessions, the trainees were shocked to learn the amount of time and effort that goes into planning a good lesson. They had thought that our school's teachers just walked into their classrooms and taught from off the top of their head!

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides English language education, leadership, and job skills programs to underprivileged youth from well-trained teachers in a safe, clean and professional environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Lesson Planning at BEA

8/9/2013

Hi everyone!

One of the most time-consuming jobs that we have at BEA is lesson planning especially since that there are almost no localized textbooks and materials for Cambodian learners here in Siem Reap. Nevertheless, part of BEA's mission is to help other Cambodian teachers (and any other ESL/EFL teachers) with their own lessons through sharing the lesson plans and materials that we design specifically for Cambodian learners. However, many of our lessons can be adapted for other types of learners and cultures, too.

As a teacher-trainer, one of the biggest challenges I've noticed that novice language teachers face is how to plan their lessons. Model lesson plans and materials are often a good stepping stone in helping new teachers develop their own lesson planning strategies and personal teaching style. This is especially essential in Cambodian where many teachers don't have access to training opportunities and even the time to plan lessons since many have to work two jobs to support themselves whether they are public school English teachers or those at non-government organizations (NGOs). In addition, many of the available resources here in Cambodia are outdated and culturally inappropriate.

Unfortunately, we can only offer our teacher-training program once a year to our own BEA kids because we simply don't have the funding to offer it to more interested teachers. In the meantime, however, we can still help Cambodian teachers through offering our localized lessons and materials online through the BEA website.

For our first lesson, we have a Basic level lesson for teachers with students who are completely new to the English language. By this, we mean students who have both minimal speaking and writing skills. In most cases, students can only respond to "What's your name?" and "How are you?" Many teachers might be overwhelmed at how to teach basic level students only in English and without resorting to their native language, but it can be done. We do it at BEA every year and with great success! Our basic-level BEA kids become competent speakers in less than a year, and even have enough communicative ability to start looking for work in the tourist industry here in Siem Reap. Our first lesson is a "get to know you" lesson than can be used during the first week of classes with your new students.

Good luck and have fun!

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an accredited NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education with professional teachers in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

"Getting to Know You" Lesson Plan and Materials
File Size:	219 kb
File Type:	pdf

Valentine's Day 2012

15/2/2012

Hi everyone!

Happy Valentine's Day from the BEA kids and staff! It was another busy day at BEA today, especially since it was Valentine's Day and the start of student conferences.

Valentine's Day Activities:
This year, I spent a lot more time planning our holiday lessons, which took almost 6 hours this morning! The planning itself wasn't that challenging, it was all the color printing of flashcards that took forever. Regardless of the holiday, I always find these types of lesson to be the most challenging because of the culture content. Many of the activities I found online was mostly reading or worksheet-type activities that don't give students a lot of speaking time. I love working with flashcards, and the students like playing card-type games, so I decided to make a Valentine's vocabulary lesson.

In the first part of our lesson, the kids had to write their names down on paper hearts for a chocolate raffle at the end of the class. I told them that there were only two chocolate hearts for each class, so they had to enter a raffle for them, but of course, I got chocolate for all of them. We then moved onto some vocabulary drill with flashcards focusing on Valentine's Day related terms. The Basic and Pre-Intermediate courses learned noun-verb expressions, such as give a box of chocolates, write a Valentine, and get a red roses. The vocabulary for the Intermediate course was idiomatic, such as I'm in love, She's love struck and We're crazy in love. Students then got to practice their new vocabulary in a game of concentration. Rather than having the kids just turn the cards over, they had to say the word for the picture on the card and then a make a sentence for it. If students didn't use the word correctly (even if they had a pair), they had to turn the cards back over. For the Pre-Intermediate and Intermediate courses, we also had a Valentine's Rhyming Game. Students worked in groups and completed a worksheet. They had to read a series of clues and then find a Valentine's Day word that rhymed with the clue. This was quite an effective activity because it helped students with their pronunciation. Cambodian students have a tendency to drop the final consonants on words, so this really helped them to pay more attention to those final consonants.For the last part of class, all the BEA kids got their chocolate and wished my a Happy Valentine's Day! I even got a few hand-made paper roses from some of the students. If any of you are interested, the Valentine's Day Rhyming activity is in an embedded document at the end of today's blog entry.

Student Conferences:
Shally was also very busy today as well with student conferences. He managed to talk with almost half of the students in each of our courses. The purpose of these conferences is to give students their first semester grades, and to give them advice on how to improve their English language skills. This also gives the kids a chance to ask Shally questions about their studies, as well as other issues in their lives. In most cases, Shally is often the only person in their lives that they can confide in about personal issues.

Spring Break 2012:
Tomorrow is the last day of our first semester, so the BEA kids will be on their spring break for three weeks. However, we'll be back to classes on March 12. Although the kids will have break, Shally and I will be busy as usual. We'll be preparing for our CamTESOL presentation on Sunday, February 26 and revising the curriculum for the second semester.

Back to the books ...

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

First Week of Teaching 2011-12

15/9/2011

Hi everyone,

It's been an incredibly busy week for both Shally and I since it's our first week of teaching of the 2011-12 school year. All the continuing and new students have settled in after our week orientation, so it's down to some serious teaching and learning for the rest of the semester.

Textbooks
Our textbooks finally arrived yesterday. There was a three-day delay because of the flooding of the Siem Reap River over the weekend. Our printing place was submerged in water, so they didn't have any power over the weekend, which put them behind all of their orders. Regardless, they arrived and we were able to hand them out to our students.

Once again, we're using the Side by Side series. The main reason we decided to use this series was because there is much less cultural content than other EFL textbooks. We do include part of this cultural content in our lessons, but we have localized every single lesson so that the BEA kids can talk about themselves and their own cultures. On average, we use the textbook for about three lessons in each course each week, and the other two lessons are supplemented with other teaching materials. In this way, students don't get bored with the same teaching method, and it keeps them motivated and interested in learning.

Shally will have a bit of an "easier" time teaching this year since we have kept all of our lessons from our courses last year. His main job this year will be revising his lessons from the Basic and Pre-Intermediate courses. Our new Intermediate course will take up most of his planning time this year.

When I head back to Japan this weekend, I'll have a suitcase full of all of Shally's lessons plans and supplementary materials from last year. One of BEA's long-term goals is to eventually design a textbook book and teacher's book specifically for Cambodian teachers and students to use. One of my big tasks over the next year is to start going through all of Shally's lesson plans and putting together a first draft of these books. It just seems there is no end to paperwork...

Library Program
The library program is now up and running. Students from the Pre-Intermediate and Intermediate courses have already started borrowing graded readers from the library. Srey Net, our librarian, was able to process another 30 books yesterday, which now brings our graded reader total to 265 - a humble, but good start to our library collection. In our lessons yesterday, Shally pointed out the "Graded Reader Progress Chart" in the textbooks. BEA students are required to read two graded readers each semester before the "Book Report Workshop" at the end of January. For this workshop, students will participate in discussions about one of their books, give a short presentation and write a book report. Throughout the semester, Shally will be checking these progress charts to make sure students are keeping up with their reading.

Teacher Training
I'll write more about Shally's teacher training program in more detail in a later because there's too much to write about for just one single posting. For the first week of classes, we've been able to get in some team teaching with a few feedback sessions. We usually spend more time on teacher training in February when we have a bit more time between the first and second semesters. However, I've been completely impressed with the progress he has made over the past year, especially in his elicitation and monitoring skills. It really seems that he's been teaching much longer than just five years!

As usual, I'll be assisting him with lesson planning once I'm back in Japan. Last year, I planned the majority of his reading and listening lessons, as well as the more challenging speaking lessons. After he had read through the plan, he would skype me to discuss any questions. Finally, after he taught the lesson, we had a short skype feedback session to discuss what worked well and what needed to be improved. For this year, I'll be focusing most of my lesson planning on the Intermediate speaking lessons so that Shally can learn new practice and use activities.

Staff Dinner
I finished up my last teaching day at BEA yesterday so that I can have a day to finish up last-minute administrative matters before I head back to Japan. We were finally to have our staff dinner at a suki soup restaurant. This is a type of dish where you can order different types of meats and vegetables, and then they are boiled in a big pot at your table. It was a great way to end the day, and to give a big thanks to the staff for al their hard work.

Back to paperwork...

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

First Day of the 2011-12 BEA School Year

6/9/2011

Hi everyone,

It was a long, hard day yesterday, but so rewarding to welcome our continuing and new students to the 2011-12 school year. The day was incredibly busy, especially for Shally since he had to defend his university thesis in morning! He passed it with flying colors, but there was no time for celebration since we both had to rush off to take care of last minute errands before our first class at 3 o’clock. As usual, I was never able to get everything completed on my never-ending list. There are times when I can have just one single thing on my list, but I can’t even get that done!

In addition to attending Shally’s thesis defense, most of my morning was spent with my printer. I got an early start to get most of our curriculum and daily lesson schedules printed before 8 o’clock – just in case the power was cut. It has a tendency to be cut around 8 o’clock in my neighborhood. However, luck was on my side, and I managed to get all the curriculum manuals printed, as well as the Library Program manual. I also made up our “Getting to Know You” introductions activity for the first-day of class.

Library Program
I went into BEA about an hour before our first class at 3 o’clock to finish labeling the bookshelves with 15 different genre labels. In most cases, we can get the majority of BEA’s supplies in Siem Reap, but things like those labels on bookshelves in libraries cannot be found anywhere here. As usual, I improvised with key rings. I simply cut of the metal key ring and was left with the plastic “label” that had a paper insert. It was actually the perfect fit for the library shelves. We’ve processed all of our books and have them entered in a database now, and students will be able to start borrowing books from this week. Srey Net, BEA’s librarian, will go through just a bit more training later on today on how to sign-out books to students and how to deal with problems, such as lost or damaged books.

First Day of Classes: Getting to Know You
Once 3:00pm rolled around, it was non-stop for both Shally and I until our last class finished at 7:00pm. We now have four courses this year, Basic, two Pre-Intermediate, and Intermediate. For the first part of each lesson, I ran a “Getting to Know You” activity while Shally took over the last half, which he spent explaining BEA’s policy and course guidelines.

For the “Getting to Know You” activity, it was a straightforward introductions activity. Each student received a handout with six blocks. For each one of these blocks, students had to complete the missing information through interviewing six other students. It was a perfect activity because it could be used for different levels. Basic students could complete it because of the simple question-answer format while pre-intermediate and intermediate could expand the activity by asking their own questions. Once students had completed their interviews, Shally called on volunteers to introduce a student they had talked to during the activity. This activity was especially useful for our Basic course since ALL of the students are new to BEA. They got the chance to experience our teaching methods, such as group work and volunteer feedback sessions.

For those interested teachers, the “Getting to Know You” activity has been uploaded at the end of today’s blog comment. It’s a Word document, so you can change it to suit your own students.

First day of Classes: Course Guidelines
For the last half of each lesson, Shally spent the time going through BEA’s policies and the course guidelines. This is one of the most important parts of our orientation week, especially for our new students. This was done in Khmer to make sure that students had no misunderstandings about BEA’s policies and their course. For many new students, BEA’s policies may seem strict, but as the semester goes on, they realize why we have them. In order for students to improve quickly, they have to attend lessons every day from Monday to Friday, and lateness is not tolerated. When students are late, it has a big effect on the learning of our other students. The late student interrupts them in the middle of an activity, and the group has to stop to help them catch up with what they’ve missed during the lesson. Shally and I promise to always be on time, so we have our students make the same promise.

Most students are very surprised at our building since it is similar to what you would find in a developed country, but of course, minus the dust and geckos. We installed an air conditioner in our classroom last March, and such a classroom is a first for all of our students. One of the reasons why students are able to improve is because they are in a comfortable environment. We no longer have to try to keep them awake in 40C heat!

In addition, students are shocked that all of their textbooks, notebooks and writing supplies are free. Similar to last year, students asked Shally during question time…”well, what do you want from us?” At BEA, the answer is quite simple…”just your hard work”.

For those of you who are interested in our course guidelines, I’ve uploaded the guidelines for this year’s Intermediate course at the end of today’s blog posting.

The Rest of the Week
We had a great start to the new school year on our first day of classes. The students will be kept quite busy for the rest of the week with different orientation activities. On Tuesday, we’ll introduce our Library Graded Reader Program to our students. Graded readers are books of various genres that are specially written for learners of English as a foreign language. They have simplified vocabulary and grammar so that language learners can easily understand the story.

On Wednesday and Thursday, we’ll have the students complete a “Library Profile Poster”. They will design a small poster with their photos that will be put in the library. In this way, students feel that they are a part of BEA and it is also an easy way for guests to “meet” our students.

In Friday’s class for the Intermediate and Pre-Intermediate courses, we’ll go through the guidelines for their Cambodian-Japanese Letter Writing Exchange Program. For this program, BEA students will be paired with 53 of my Japanese students at Aoyama Gakuin University, and they’ll exchange 3-4 themed-letters during the semester. More about this program in Friday’s blog…

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Intermediate Course Guidelines
File Size:	450 kb
File Type:	pdf

Getting to Know You
File Size:	81 kb
File Type:	doc

Review and Sample Lessons

28/7/2011

Hi everyone,

Just two more days until the end of semester two at BEA. It's been such an amazing year, and I can't wait for the start of the new semester in September. However, there's still a lot to do before then...

Tuesday's Lesson: Wonders of the World
I was off teaching on Tuesday to catch up on paperwork while Shally taught the kids my “Wonders of the World” lesson. This type of lesson introduces global society to Cambodian students while also giving them the necessary vocabulary to talk about such topic. In this lesson, Shally reviewed the vocabulary from Monday’s lessons and then introduced other famous monuments found throughout the world. The purpose was to have the kids use this vocabulary to talk not just about Angkor Wat, but also other places.

Each student was given two pictures of a famous building with some basic facts. The students had to talk about two of the four following places: Macha Picchu, Neuschwanstenstein Castle, the Great Wall of China or The Golden Pavilion. They then has five minutes to prepare a mini-presentation for their partner. During this time, Shally was kept really busy with pronunciation instruction. One of the challenges of introducing supplementary material in a Cambodian classroom is that students want to know the meaning and pronunciation of every single word. After their preparation, they explained their monument to their partner, and their partner had to ask questions. The students were given only basic facts about each place. However, they wanted to know much more about each of the places, especially the pre-intermediate class.

Here’s one of the dialogues from two pre-intermediate students:

Kimsan: If somebody paid me to visit the Great Wall of China, I would go right away.

Saren: No! You have to keep the money for university and for your family!

Out of the four places, the Great Wall of China and the Golden Pavilion were the most popular places that students wanted to visit.

Sample Lesson Plans:
For those of you interested in our lesson plans and materials, you can view them at the end of this blog. You can see how we've localized vocabulary for a Cambodian classroom. In addition, you can see the process in which I've been training Shally to develop his lesson plans. This is a review vocabulary lesson, so it's a bit different from our typical speaking, listening and reading lessons. However, you'll get a sense of how we approach teacher training at BEA. These lesson plans also play an important role in Shally's online teacher training when I'm back in Japan.

Please forgive any typos - we're just in the first draft stage.

Wednesday's Lesson: Sentence Auction
In Wednesday’s class, it was Shally’s turn to get caught up on paperwork. He’s been spending most of the week calculating second semester grades. He’ll meet with each student on Thursday or Friday to discuss their progress at BEA and to pre-register them for their new course in September.

This was actually the first time I was completely on my own without Shally in the classroom. It was quite pleasant to have the kids all to myself.   In today’s lesson, I decided to review some of the writing problems they had in the paragraph writing section of the quiz. Overall, the students have made a lot of progress in writing more clearly and coherently. I now have no trouble understanding their writing. The reason for this is that they are now consistent in their use of English writing structure. I was also surprised to see that the writing workshops in February had a big impact on the structure of their writing. Almost every single paragraph included topic and concluding sentences. When I did the writing workshops in February, these two structures were the most difficult for the students to grasp.

In order to review some of the key grammar and structural difficulties from their paragraphs, we had a sentence auction. The first part of the activity consisted of a worksheet with sentences taken from their paragraphs; some were correct and some were incorrect. Students then had to work in groups to identify the correct sentences. Afterwards, we played a sentence auction game with these sentences. Each group was given $25 BEA dollars (our school’s currency used for games) and had to compete with other groups to buy the correct sentences in an auction. In the Basic B class, students took up a bit of class time arguing about which group had the most powerful team names (before we play a game, groups have to choose a team name). In this class, the groups chose “The Birds”, “The Rabbits”, “The Tigers” and “The Apples”. The Rabbits claimed that the would win because they were the most clever while the Tigers believed they would win because they could eat the Birds, the Apples and the Rabbits. Indeed, the Rabbits did up winning the sentence auction. I always love these types of classroom deviations. As usual, winning teams got three pieces of chocolate while the others got one piece each.

Evaluations:
I’ll be spending my morning making up our course evaluations for the students to complete later this afternoon. During the month of August, Shally and I will review these to see how we can revise our program and make BEA an even better experience for the students from September.

Back to work…

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Wonders of the World Lesson Plan
File Size:	153 kb
File Type:	pdf

Vocabulary Review Worksheet
File Size:	201 kb
File Type:	pdf

Wonders of the World Activity
File Size:	2475 kb
File Type:	pdf

Review Week / Lesson 5: End of Semester 1

19/2/2011

Hi everyone,

Well, we made it! We had our last class of our very first semester at BEA. Shally finished up our student conferences. Once again, students had a lot of questions for Shally, especially about our program for next year. We haven't even started the second semester, and our students are already thinking about their second year. I'm glad to see that they're planning ahead! Many of the questions dealt with the number of additional students we'll be enrolling next year, as well as the courses we'll be offering. At the moment, Shally and I have a general outline for our expansion in September 2011. However, during our semester break, we'll be drawing up a more concrete plan once we've considered our school finances.

For our last lesson of the semester, I decided to let the students have a bit more fun than usual, which sometimes leads to complete chaos in a Cambodian classroom. For the first part of the lesson, I handed out out chopsticks to each group. The students then had to make a list of all the possible uses of chopsticks. They came up with some pretty interesting uses. Here are the "Top 10":

1. hair clip
2. conducting an orchestra
3. playing the xylophone
4. snooker
5. flag pole
6. wand
7. backscratcher
8. toothpick
9. ear cleaner
10. nose picker

After our brainstorming session, students played the game "I am King". Each of the chopsticks were labelled with the numbers 1, 2, 3, and a picture of a crown. Students had to draw lots and keep their number secret. The student who got the "king" chopstick, chose a number, and then gave that student an order to perform. Well, this is where all the chaos started. Students had each other singing, dancing, walking like a monkey, slapping boys, and kissing the teacher. Despite the chaos, it was a great lesson to review infinitive forms.

After Shally finished up the conferences, we had a small awards ceremony in each class. Shally announced the names of the top three students in each course and presented each student with $5.00 worth of school supplies, which consisted of an English-Khmer dictionary, a personal diary, and a plastic carrying case. I got plenty of photos, which I'll upload to our site next week.

BEA is now closed for our semester break until March 14. During this time, Shally and I will be quite busy. This week, we'll be finishing up our presentations for the CamTESOL conference in Phnom Penh on Febraury 26-27. This is an international conference for those involved in teaching English as a second/foreign language.

Shally's workshop will focus on how to effectively use western-published textbooks in the Cambodian classrooms so that Cambodian culture and values are reflected in the lesson. My workshop will center on how to teach business letter writing in the Cambodian classroom. I will use my research from the pre-intermediate course's second writing workshop on the process of teaching how to write a cover letter for a CV. All the materials from our workshop will be available on the website before we head to the conference.

After the conference, we'll be ordering new tables for our library, adding more lights in our classrooms, setting up our library program, and finalizing all the programs for our second semester.

We will still have regular postings while BEA is closed, so we hope that you'll still keep up with BEA news during the break.

Onwards to CamTESOL,
Nicole

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Review Week / Lesson 4: Spelling

18/2/2011

Hi everyone,

I decided to make two postings for Thursday; one focusing on Shally's student conferences and another on my spelling review lesson.

While Shally was holding student conferences this afternoon, students reviewed the spelling of some of the more difficult words from their textbook. When I planned the lesson this morning, I thought there would be enough time to have a group "Spelling Bee" - something along the lines of the "Scripps National Spelling Bee" contest in the United States. However, we didn't even get past the first practice activity. My time allotment for each activity was completely way off base for today's lesson. For next semester, this lesson will definitely have to be spread out over two days.

For the first part of the lesson, I had the students scan through the units they had studied over the semester and note down 10 words that they considered difficult to spell. Prior to the lesson, I made up my own list with words that I considered difficult for Cambodian students. Once again, I was quite shocked when I monitored the students while they were noting down their words. I had anticipated about 30-40 percent of the words, but there were many words that I had never considered would be challenging for the students. One of the more surprising words from the basic class was "parents". A student asked me if it was possible to use only "parent". I understood why she asked this question because quite a few of our students live with just one family member, such as a mother, father, grandmother or grandfather. It is not uncommon for fathers to leave and remarry without getting a divorce, or for students to live with their grandmothers because their parents have passed away. Her question has not got me thinking about the term "parents", and how it's difficult to say that it only refers to just a mother or father in Cambodia. Anyways, once we're on our semester break, I'm going to compile the list of words that all the students wrote down so that we can give more emphasis to these words when teaching them in next year's courses.

For the second part of the lesson, students worked in groups where students took turns dictating their words and the others had to write them down in their notebooks. After, students had to check they they had spelled the words correctly. I noticed that this was quite a challenging activity most many of the students. When I first planned this activity, I thought it would be quite "boring" for the students. However, almost all of the students seemed to enjoy it, especially the role of dictating their word lists. I am now considering that we'll have to include spelling tests as a part of our evaluation for next semester.

Back to the books,
Nicole

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia

Review Week / Lesson 3: Reading Lessons

16/2/2011

Hi everyone,

I spent the morning planning Shally's reading lessons for this afternoon. We're in the last week of our first semester, so we're review some problem areas some of the students had during the semester. A common error I noticed with the basic classes was that they still have difficulty with using the auxiliary forms of "do / does" in simple present questions. I often heard questions, such as "Do she go to the market?", or answers like "She go to the market." I figured a review in this area would help remind students of the different forms.

I was able to find a short reading passage from a very useful site called "Handouts Online" that has a variety of lessons for different levels. However, the lessons are for those familiar with British and American society, so I often have to re-write parts of the lesson so that it is more appropriate for Cambodian students. I was running out of time because I had spent too long on planning the pre-intermediate lesson, so I kept the reading passage and added a vocabulary matching activity. The passage had words such as "a bowl of cornflakes" and "a slice of toast", which of course almost all of our students have never heard of. I've found that having the students match new vocabulary to pictures is the quickest way to introduce such cultural terms.

From Shally's observation notes, the matching activity was useful because he was able to avoid an endless barrage of vocabulary questions from students, which always happens in a reading class. Most of the students want to know every single word when they read, but I'm trying to get them into the habit that it's not necessary as long as you have the key vocabulary to understand the main ideas. If we have more money in our budget next year, I would really like to include dictionaries in the students' supply package. An Oxford pocket dictionary is only about $2.50 in the local books.

Anyways, the students in both basic classes were able to complete the grammar section where they had to write down the rule for using auxiliaries in simple present question forms. As usual, students spent most of their time on the speaking activity, which focused on switching between the use of "Do" and "Does" questions. Shally observed that students seemed to be using the forms more correctly. However, in the feedback sessions after the discussions, he noted that students often have difficulty reporting the main points from their partner's conversation. We'll have to teach the students how to give feedback in next semester's lessons.

For the pre-intermediate class, students also had a reading lesson based on the theme of "Happiness". Once again, I got the material from "Handouts Online", but had to rewrite most of the passage because it was laden with too many American idioms. As usual, I was hoping that I had planned a sufficient vocabulary building activity for the students before they started reading the passage. However, once again, students overwhelmed Shally with vocabulary questions. In the passage, most students know the majority of the vocabulary, but the vocabulary knowledge is vastly different from one student to the next. Ideally, I would have students do vocabulary preparation for homework, but it's still the issue of dictionaries. Shally observed that students were fully aware of the main ideas of the passage and could answer all the comprehension questions, but they still wanted to know every single word in the passage. In future reading lessons, I might break up the lesson over two days. The first lesson focusing on comprehension and the next on discussion.

The students were disappointed that they couldn't completely finish the discussion section, but they enjoyed learning about the different types of happiness. In all my years of teaching, I've never come across such a talkative class. I am almost tempted at times to simply tell the students to discuss their classroom tables and chairs, and then leave the classroom for the rest of the lesson. I'm know for sure that they would still be talking about the tables and chairs when I returned to the classroom.

While Shally was teaching this afternoon, I finished up grading all the final drafts for the second writing workshop. Once I get back to Japan, I'll start writing a journal article the different aspects of Cambodian writing style in English.

Back to the books,
Nicole

The Bayon English Academy (BEA) is an NGO school that provides underprivileged youth with quality English language education in a safe, clean environment in Siem Reap, Cambodia.