Evaluation of teaching 少儿英语教学评估 英文论文

Evaluation of teaching & learning materials

Topic 1 Selecting

The course book I have used in my teaching is Super Kids book 4. The content of unit 1 is about different countries in the world. The countries include Australia, the U. K., France, South Africa and the U. S. and this is the vocabulary of this unit. The context is that the school is out in three days and students will have a holiday. Deciding to go for a trip on holiday is the topic of this unit, which is realistic for young learners. Included in this unit are the map, national flag and famous sights of each country. Therefore in this unit the context is likely to hold the students’ attention. Deciding where to go will meet needs as well as interests. If they are going to go abroad, they need to know different cultures of different countries, which are supplied some in the course book. The primary aim of this unit is to develop the learners’ speaking skills and enrich their knowledge and I think this material supplied by the book will be suitable in terms of achieving the aims.

Topic 2 Rejecting

The activities which I thought unsuitable and chose to reject were as follows:

Learners are likely to talk about what they are going to do. For example, learners will look at the pictures and say ‘I’m going to take a trip.’ The aim of this activity is to develop learners’ speaking skill and to use ‘I’m going to ….’ What I thought unsuitable was in terms of content rather than the aim of this activity. Each item only shows one picture to learners which doesn’t give them more choices. The learners would become bored or feel easy with this and this activity is not linked to the countries which are the important contents in this unit.

In China young learners are always told to do this and do that by their parents and have to obey them. These kind of activities, to some extent, contribute to the effect that our learners lack the ability to analyse or decide for themselves.

We should design activities to challenge our learners and enable them to decide something by thinking themselves .

Topic 3 Adapting

In order to make the activities more suitable and effective for my learners, I adapted some of them. As the activites supplied in the course book are based on the sentence ‘We are going to …’. However, the target language in this unit is about where the learners are going to travel rather than what they are going to do. So I divided my learners into several groups. Each group had four or five members and I gave each group the short texts about different cultures of those countries. As there are five countries, I prepared five texts. Since the countries’ cultures were supplied in the course book and the learners had already learned, the five texts I prepared were not new knowledge for them. In order to develop the learners speaking and listening skills, I instructed that one member of each group choose a text, read for the rest, who would listen carefully and talk about whether they liked that country or not and why. After they completed all the text, they should decide which countries they would travel to and give reasons. During this activity, the learners read, listened, thought and talked. The dialogues which included the target language they made were like this ‘ We’re going to Australia.’ ‘ Why?’

‘ Because the Great Barrier Reef, Sydney Opera House and Ayes Rock are in Australia. We will have fun there. I want to see koalas. They are cute and cuddly.’

‘ How about France?’ …

Topic 4 Supplementing

What I supplemented the course book material was the content of those countries’ cultures and I added our country, China to them. In the course book countries’ cultures are about the maps, the national flags and the famous sights.

Young learners, who may have no idea about the capital city of a country or just know the name of that city, are more interested in the famous animals and flowers in those countries. As the learners are learning a language, they also want to know what language foreigners speak. The capital city of a country will not be ignored either. The content of this unit is about countries, so introducing the continents will give the learners a general idea about the whole world.

Moreover, China is our motherland, we need to know about China. As the 2008 Olympic Games are coming to Beijing, friends all over the world will come to our country. Young learners need to consolidate their knowledge about their own country.