Reflection of the Lecture

   This speaker told a lot of approaches about how too teach English more creative or brisk. Among them, there are three methods let me feel most impressive, the first one is he taught us how to let students understand tenses more easily. He used an activity to explain present perfect progressive, because of this activity and our involvement, I think this grammar really becomes easier to understand. The second one is that he chose an article in which has lots of dialogues and ask some students to stand up and played the roles assigned. There is a very important tip he mentioned that we have to mark the characters’ dialogues, so both the ones who are acting and also the students who are watching can better understand what is going on. Through acting, we can better understand the meaning or the situation of this article. The last one is that let the whole class to create a story together. Usually when we want to tell a story, we will use past tense, so this activity is designed to train students’ usage of tense. There are two stages to proceed; the first one is to ask each student to use one sentence to continue the story and the second stage students will be required only to use one word to create the story. In addition to letting students understand the usage of past tense, you can also train their concentration.

     I have to say this was really an amazing lecture, the way he taught was interesting and the methods he talked about were creative and brilliant. But is it possible to adapt to Taiwan’s English teaching system, only the time will tell. Because we lack this kind of teachers who are willing to use more creative way to teach in Taiwan, and also so due to our school teaching culture and exam –focused education. They are all obstacles to this new way of teaching English, but I think if we have more and more interact and exchange with other English-speaking countries, we may receive lots of information about how other teachers in different countries to teach English. I also think that this new teaching method can be experimented first in some English cram schools, because it requires more involvement of students. It will be more effective if there are about 20 students so that each student will have chance to participate.