Hi there! Hope you enjoy your week. Today, I'll be sharing my reflections of the second week. It was a really enjoyable one as we had lots of group work included. So, let's get started!
Before we had the session, we had some pre-tasks to do. Firstly, we had to read a chapter from Galloway & Rose (2015) and answer the reflection questions. It was basically about English Language Teaching in a global scale and nativeness of English teachers. After I read thechapter, I realized both native and non-native speakers have their own advantages and being native does not make a person more proficient in the language education. As the writers mentioned, professional qualities are more important than nationality. Secondly, we had to check the website called 'IDEA: International Dialects of English Archive'' which includes a world map of all countries with speakers of different dialects. It helps us obtain the scope of World Englishes and recognize the varieties of language in the world.
In our second session, we started with an activity. Our instructor shared a picture of a song lyrics in a swan shape. Words were written with different sizes randomly. I'll add the picture below. We were supposed to guess what the song was about and write our answers as stickers by using Linoit website. We could see all our friends' stickers on the web page. I think it is always a good idea to use such websites which allow each student to get their voice to be heard.
After this fun warm-up activity, we worked in groups of three in break-out rooms in zoom -this is the first time I have learned this break-out room feature of zoom btw- . We were supposed to choose 15 words and use those words in a story. All the groups came up with great ideas, all the stories were very creative. Now, I want to share my reflections on our group work. I knew none of my teammates. As we did not know each other before, we had difficulty in labour division. I did not know what they were good or bad at so, we wasted some time to get to know each other. However, we achieved to create a nice story by cooperating at the end. We also wrote our stories on stickers and shared them with the whole teams, thus we could see all the products there and it was much easier to follow. When we finished reading out loud our stories, our trainer played the song whose lyrics we worked on. It was The A Team by Ed Sheeran. It was a song I very well knew beforehand, but still I couldn't guess the song this way. Then, we worked in groups again and created a videoclip for this song. We were working with the same group again; as we got familiar, we had no difficulty in this activity. We shared our ideas with the whole groups and watched the original video clip. It was an enjoyable activity. I understood better what my teachers in university told us that we should use familiar content to get our students involved in the class. The idea is more clear in my mind now. I see how important it is.
For the next activity, we worked in groups of four to find out the murderer. The statements of suspicious had been distributed before the meeting. Each group member had a few statements; therefore, we had to work collaboratively in order to find the murderer. We needed each other's information. So, it was basically an information gap activity. I think information gap activities are the best to apply group work. In other group-work activities, we might not be sure whether each person attends to the activity and owns a duty in the group or not; yet, everybody needs to speak and share information in order to achieve the task.
The next part of our session was about Global English Language Teaching. We, again, worked in groups of four to discuss on our reflection questions which we answered before the session. We agreed on some points such as teachers should not be evaluated by their nativeness or not. Being a NNST is not a negative issue, on the other hand, if teacher and students share the same linguistic and cultural background, the teacher can relate to what their students are going through. Because they were once learners of English as well. Making something a non-thing is very discriminative.
Finally, our trainer demonstrated us some websites we can make us of:
- Linoit (I have already mentioned about that above.)
- Mindomo (to create colorful mind maps)
- Coggle (this one is also to create mind maps)
To sum up, we need to have a good communication with our group members, divide the labour and share the roles, cooperate, and keep the pace (we should be on track to meet our goals) in order to have a successful and effective collaboration group-works.
As you might guess, it was an enjoyable session although it was a long one. I love group-works because as we share ideas and feelings, we reach to the better ones. This is what group dynamics means. I will let you know in the following sessions. Have a great week!
Zey.
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