week 9?

In this activity, students are required to listen and understand a talk. Question (A) is asking about what are the changes that happen to the teenagers and the counsellor’s role in helping students to solve the problems. Question (B) will be about what effects that growing up have on teenagers. Firstly, students will be discussing about the questions based on the audio recording. The question starts with a bottom-up process where students have to listen to the topic in the talk and later on they will have to answer a question about changes that teenagers are facing now, activities that involved in this question are answering and duplicating. First, the listener will listen to the topic and then they will answer the question, other than that they are actually duplicating what is mention by the speaker in the audio. Next, the question which can a counsellor help them to solve those problems actually involved top-down process, students have to discuss the question based on what they know simply saying that they will have to utilize their schemata. We would say that the extending activity involved in the question because they have to think beyond the text by continuing whether talking to a counsellor can help students solve the problems.

Question C need the students to use both top-down and bottom-up processes. To understand what they have to do, first they have to listen the audio recording and recall back a situation where they seek for someone advices and then they will have to relate the experiences to their friends. The audio recording acts as a guide for them to recall what information that they can use in relating the experience to their friends. This guide or scaffolding, become the base of their knowledge and they can get access to it. This is the combination of both top-down and bottom-up processes, often called the hybrid process.

The listening process play a crucial part in this activity because they need to be able to understand the text to be able to answer the questions. To be able to understand this, they need to listen properly to the audio recording. Picking up the major points from a text is the most crucial ability to master and by training them to listen properly, little by little, they would be able to pick up the points from a recording. This contributes to generate meaning from what they heard. With the information they collected, it is now possible to answer the questions by referring back to what they heard and thus comprehension is established.

Reflection
Doing this activity was hard for me as I was having a hard time to understand on how this activity is supposed to be conducted. But thanks to my group member I can say that I understand most of it now. Although there is no guarantee that I will remember this activity for long. But I guess this activity is good to be use in class not because it was us who made it but its because its an activity that is possible to use. I may not be able to use it now but when I start teaching, this blog would be one of my first platform for designing and remaking activity for my students.  

Week 4 and Week 5 reflection

So this two week we were given one task if my memory serve me right. It was using the checklist given to us by our lecturer to do an evaluation of a textbook more specifically a chapter of the textbook well actually two chapter or three. My group we were given the Byrd checklist which sounds more like bird than Byrd right. Well that's just my own opinion. After we did our analysis and evaluation were to make a presentation slide about the problem we face during using the checklist and the solution we can use.

How it affects me?
Well at first it was hard and confusing reading Byrd's article since we never read anything related to checklist criterion and stuff like that. So there a lot of fuss on how we should do the presentation because no one really understand the article at first. As for me I thought the two checklist given inside the article were both Byrd's checklist but instead the first checklist was the original version from where the Byrd's checklist were modified and the second checklist was the real Byrd's checklist. That was my own mistake for not noticing. So just reading and understanding the article was confusing but with the help of my friend we manage to understand it. Then we use the checklist on two chapter of the textbook and we found it hard to do. Because the Byrd's checklist is only suitable for use if you want to make an evaluation of the textbook as a whole not chapter by chapter. So we conclude that the only way for us to make an evaluation of a chapter in a textbook is to use other checklist that specifically targets chapters of a textbook.

How does it affect my current level of knowledge?
I never knew that we(future teacher) need to make an evaluation and analysis of a textbook. It comes as a shock to me that we need to an evaluation of a textbook.  I always thought that textbook are there only for us to follow it and teach the students with it and now that  I know i'm going to need to make an evaluation in the near future I feel a little bit relieved that I have knowledge on checklist and how to use it as well as when and which one I need to use for my evaluation. So I guess i'm thankful my lecturer gave me this knowledge.

How can I use this knowledge to improve myself?
In textbook there are a lot of activity from different theme. From my experience as a student I found  that a teacher of mine when she uses the textbook to teach me it always follow the sequence in which it was already decided. Even when the activity does not suit our need or is not that good she still uses it. So for me, i'm thinking that isn't it better to use the textbook according to the suitability of the activity and not just following the sequence. Another point is that if the activity is not suitable then would it not be better to use a different activity. I doubt that she used a checklist to improve or modify the activity in the textbook because if she did then we wouldn't use the textbook in every single class.
If it were me it should be possible for me to make a new material which is suitable for them and although constant evaluation of textbook is somewhat not entirely possible nowadays at least the use of checklist should be implement so that I and other teachers can at least see the activity that can and cannot be use for class. As teacher we should and must modify the activity when the need of it rises.