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Teacher Shally's Writing Workshops

29/5/2014

Teacher Shally and his Advanced and Intermediate course students have just finished up their cover letting and resume writing workshop, which is part of BEA's Job Hunting Skills Program. During the past two weeks, Teacher Shally taught ten intensive writing classes that included how to describe educational experiences, qualifications and qualities, as well as the differences between resume formats between Cambodia and countries like the Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. By the end of the two-week workshop, students turned in their own cover letters and resumes, which is 10% of their final grade for the second semester.

As part of BEA's commitment to Cambodia's development in English language education, Nicole Takeda, BEA's executive director, is almost finished the school's first writing textbook that includes teacher-training lessons and student materials for Basic, Intermediate and Advanced courses. The textbook Cambodian content and is directly targeted towards Cambodian instructors that teach writing in university, public school or at NGO schools.

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

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Review and Sample Lessons

28/7/2011

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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

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

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

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Writing Workshop Lesson 2-4

10/2/2011

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Hi everyone,

Today's classes were quite busy for Shally. After observing our practice editing lessons in last week's class, it was his turn to run these types of lessons on his own. Eventually, he'll have to teach the writing program on his own.

In our practice editing class last week, we had a sentence auction. Students had to categorize sentences into correct and incorrect sentences. They then had to correct the sentences with errors. We then had a sentence auction in which students had to compete against other groups to "purchase" correct sentences with "BEA dollars". I've noticed that students have been able to identify errors in isolated sentences. However, they've had difficulty finding errors, especially structural errors, when these sentences are in a paragraph.

For this week's practice editing class, I decided to tweek the activity. Rather than identifying errors in isolated sentences, students had to find both grammatical and structural errors in a paragraph. Students then played the same sentence auction game, but they were "purchasing" sentences within a paragraph this time.

For today's lessons, I wasn't in the classroom with Shally. When Shally and I are in the classroom together, I often find that students will turn to me for grammar explanations rather than asking Shally, especially in the pre-intermediate class. Since the last part of today's lesson is going through the answers by analyzing each of the errors, I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to have Shally show off his own grammar knowledge and to show the students that they can turn to both of us for grammar explanations.

Prior to the lessons, Shally and I did have a mini-training session dealing with some of the more difficult points of the pre-intermediate lessons, such as the use of acronyms (=a word formed from the first letters of the words that make up the name of something) in formal writing style.

From Shally's observations, the lessons seems to go off without a hitch. He observed that students in all the classes were able to identify the errors in the model paragraphs (for the Basic courses) and in the model cover letter (for the pre-intermediate course). Hopefully, this a positive sign that students are starting to internalize the writing process. We'll see in tomorrow's editing class.

I was a little surprised at how Shally altered the administration of the auction game. Usually, the groups have "money" and they use this to pay the auctioneer (the teacher) for the sentences. However, he decided it was easier to manage the game by keeping track of the money for each team by writing the amounts on the whiteboard. In one way, this does make this game easier to manage, but at the same time, it makes it more teacher-centered.

While Shally was teaching, I was able to finish marking all the final drafts from our first writing workshop. However, at the end of class, the students handed in their first drafts for the second writing workshop, so it was back to checking in the evening.

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.

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Writing Workshops Lesson 1-3

3/2/2011

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Hi everyone,

I can't believe how quickly this week has passed. It's already Thursday and we'll be collecting students' first drafts in today's lesson.

We continued learning about paragraph structure in both the basic and pre‐intermediate courses. In our basic course, I was quite surprised at how quickly the students grasped the concept of paraphrasing to help them write their concluding sentences. Especially in our Basic (B) course, some of the students not only wrote a summary for their concluding sentence, but also added their own opinion of their important day to leave the reader with a strong impression.

I also introduced simple past verb forms through a grammar game - sentence auction. In this game, students have to find the mistakes in a list of sentences. Students then participate in a group auction to buy the correct sentences from the list. Everyone show a lot of enthusiasm, especially since the winning team got chocolate.

The pre‐intermediate course also did very well at understanding the concepts of paraphrasing and summarizing in order to write their concluding sentences. This class, however, was also required to summarize the supporting ideas from their paragraph in their concluding sentences.

The sentence auction was also a hit with them. Shally got a chance to run this activity, which is part of his teacher training, and really got the students into the game. However, I noticed that the students do need more activities related to the use of transitions in their paragraphs. There was some confusion over the use of "Finally" (=used to introduce the last point in a list) and "In short" (=a summary word used to introduce a concluding sentence).

On a lighter note, there was a slight communication breakdown between myself and one of our students due to word stress. One of the difficulties some Cambodian learners of English have is the use of correct word stress. This is mainly due to no access to dictionaries for their studies because they are too expensive for most students. Anyways, one of the students told me that he wanted to be a "sexy fool" teacher. Of course, I was quite shocked and tried to explain the implications of using such an expression linked to the teaching profession. After much frustration on both our parts, I then looked at his outline and saw the word "successful" - not "sexy fool". We then had a short pronunciation session so that such misunderstandings could be avoided in the future.

For all classes, students have to write their first drafts and submit them in today's class. I'm looking quite forward to their drafts since they've showed such great work already in our lessons.

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.

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Teacher Shally's Writing Workshops

Review and Sample Lessons

Writing Workshop Lesson 2-4

Writing Workshops Lesson 1-3

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