Best EL Lesson (Weina)

My EL class during practicum was the second best class in the Secondary 3 level, based on their sciences combination for the Olevels examinations. Hence, the students in the class were generally very motivated to learn, but not particularly vocal.

Before I started on summary writing, I actually spoke to my EL HOD to get a clearer idea of the summary writing skills the students have been taught in their EL lessons since Sec 1. The HOD told me that they had actually learnt summary writing skills in lower secondary level. However, they would require a good dose of revision before attempting to do a full piece on summary writing.

So I decided to start off the lesson with a Mr Brown podcast on H1N1 (with a Nobody song twist to it), followed by a parody video using the same song in Mr Brown’s podcast. This listening and viewing activity was accompanied with an activity worksheet that required the students to pick up the important advice that the public had to know related to H1N1. So the use of the song & video could appeal to the audio & visual learners, and engage the students in interesting materials they would enjoy. The students thoroughly loved the trigger activity, as seen by their enthusiastic response as they volunteered the various advice found through the lyrics of Mr Brown’s parody song. Using the song as an example, we discussed in class the important and not-so-important bits of information – and we compared it to that of a comprehension, picking up the important information that answered the questions, and ignoring the examples and elaborations.

With that planted in the students’ minds, we went on to do a very brief recap of the 5 golden rules to summary writing as taught to them during their lower secondary days. Mere recap was not enough, so we completed steps 1 – 3 together in class. After each and every step, I would get students to volunteer their answers to assess that they were on the correct path. When it came to the step of identifying the points in the selected text, I sat down in front of the visualiser, showed the text on the screen and went through the text line by line, to explain to the class why certain points were selected, and why certain points were not. During this process, I picked students out to share their viewpoints with the class. With such guidance in class, I could see that the students felt more comfortable in voicing their questions. The results were obvious in later lessons as the students did not have much problems pulling out the required points from slightly more challenging ones.