Day 3 of the Teacher Training Program in Shilou Summer 2010

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In the mornings we have classes for the participating English teachers. The teachers have been placed according to English proficiency level. We created a brief oral placement test that included not only questions asking the teachers to describe themselves but also to describe a picture. The placement was done by all participating interns and both Judy and myself. For such a diverse group of interviewers, I think that we did pretty well. The groups seems to fairly homogeneous.

We are using a book recommended by Monica Weiss called Teach English by Adrian Doff. This is a trainer's handbook. There is a student workbook to go along with it. The students have received copies of the student workbook and we are more or less following the Tableof Contents of this book. the first unit was on presenting vocabulary so we focused on different ways to present vocabulary and gave the teachers examples -- the second hour they are to prepare lessons/presentations using these techniques to teach their particular books, and the 3rd hour they are presenting their lessons. I think that this part of the program works very well. They teachers enjoy presenting. They like to be able to work with their books, and in addition, they are practicing their English. I think that they are learning from each other as well as from us.

The second class day we worked on asking questions -- wow! That was today ... I didn't prepare a powerpoint for this morning but went directly into the different types of questions...we touched a little on presenting the structure of the questions...but I really didn't have enough time or the energy to approach that clearly. We then went on to how we would use questions in the classroom with the textbook...my teachers were very enthusiastic and they were eager to apply the knowledge....some are better than others...there was a particular grammar point that came up today about tag questions that was curious -- the use of an affirmative tag to communicate sarcasm or criticism...Most of the teachers have been taught that is there is a negative meaning, like an adverb that limits (e.g., little) then you use the affirmative tag: e.g., There's little water in the classroom, is there? Now I have to say that I've never heard that before nor would I say it and my gut reaction as a native speaker is that this is incorrect. They kept saying in their book it says that when a sentence is negative...so I looked at the examples...then finally I came across the last example, "So you think you're a good athlete, do you?" Now I think that we use a tag question here to communicate sarcasm or criticism...One teacher said, what about this structure: "You never went to school, did you? I replied that we would say, "You never went to school, did you?" because the verb is actually negative: never went = didn't ever go -- a negative verb. This explanation satisfies me as a native speaker and a teacher and I think it satisified this English teacher.

In the afternoon today we did an interviewing game in which different groups of teachers interviewed different teachers and interns. We went from room to room and they interviewed us. This was fun for eveyrone...and I realized how much I like my class.

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