Our form one and form two teachers have assiduously incorporated those cognitive skills and language items usually found in the science and social science content areas into our English teaching.

Procedural Ordering

As a part of our Language Across Curriculum program, students are learning science-related skills and strategies in English class. This is the first unit in the second LAC module, which covers procedural ordering. The LAC adviser from the Education Bureau, a former colleague and the creator of the science and English modules, is teaching my students, with the rest of the form one teachers eagerly observing her.

The students in groups first perform a series of increasingly complex tasks where they must logically arrange a scrambled set of instructions; the students review the results as a class on the blackboard.

Making Inferences

Afterwards, students read to infer meaning; that is, students read a paragraph of instructional material and next need to number the instructions in the correct order; some of the instructions that need to be numbered are not explicitly stated in the paragraph; the students found this inferential thinking most difficult!

Writing Biographies

Post-Lesson Reflection

The lesson, the kids told me after class, was a bit boring. I agree. I wasn't very impressed with my pacing: we spent so much time pre-reading that we didn't begin reading the passage until 12:30, five minutes before the end of the double lesson!

There was much chalking, but thankfully, there was also much talking, much of it coming from the mouths of my students; during our class discussion, a dozen or so students raised their hands to offer ideas and suggestions; that was a good sign. During our collaborative work, group time, however, some students were silently thinking on their own, though there were others who were working diligently to group and label the vocabulary words - I was quite happy to see some students working well together.

My class, I think, needs more collaborative activities to liven an otherwise morose lesson - a worksheet or two will help next time. I should be more prepared, especially in determining which phonemes our class will focus on during our phonics time.

There were a few, minor discipline issues that I attribute to the camera rolling, and fatigue on a Monday morning.

1R Science in English Lesson 18/10/07
Task	Objective
1) Questioning Students the past tense in biographies key topics and important information in biographies	To provide students with grammatically structured revision of homework, including past tense verbs, and content area vocabulary
2) Phonics Instruction B, A, C, T, I, M, S, H, O, R Sh, Ch, Tr, Or, Ar, Th, Ai, Oa Throats, AirMai, Chart, morbi, trash	To provide explicit, scaffolded teaching of phonemic recognition, phonics and fluency reading skills
3) Reading Aloud of Marie Curie Passage Students should consider the label for each paragraph; what is the topic of each paragraph? Is the topic important?	To provide students with an opportunity to apply not only content area vocabulary but also phonics skills; to review past tense verbs in biographies
4) Introduce the use of prepositions of time in biographies introduce prepositions examination of prepositions of place in biographies completion of page 2, unit 2 worksheet	To familiarize students with prepositions of place and their frequency and usage in biographical text
5) Reading Aloud and Review of Mother Theresa Passage Can we memorize the usage of prepositions? How else can we learn to use prepositions well?	to provide an opportunity for students to use phonics skills; to familiarize students with using prepositions in biographies
6) Introduce the use of prepositions of place in biographies introduce prepositions examination of prepositions of place in Mother Theresa passage What is the most frequently used preposition of place?	To familiarize students with prepositions of place and their frequency and usage in biographical text
7) Completion and of Thomas Edison biography using prepositions	To provide students with additional reinforcement of prepositions in biographies
6) Reflective Writing	To reinforce learning by reflection

Post-Lesson Reflection - Part One

This lesson, perhaps owing to the principal's presence in the classroom, was certainly livelier than Monday's lesson. I was satisfied, though not ecstatic, regarding both the students' performance and mine; there is much to consider in hindsight.

Prepositions as a topic is difficult to teach, I believe, especially to Chinese language learners because their first language lacks such a peculiar group of essential words. That my students understood the difficulty of understanding these words, with one boy iterating the necessity to read them in context, made me glad. However, I wasn't able to offer much sounder advice than that, during my class instructing my students based on my instincts and familiarity with this tacit knowledge that oftentimes defies verbal description. I struggled with explaining why "during" and "within" were not interchangeable while, in my opinion, "in" and "during" are. On a final note, regarding the teaching of this topic, since it is a part of our science in English module, I wonder how its creator would have taught this lesson; maybe, for next time, I will ask her in advance for some expert advice in teaching prepositions, whether they are used in science or anything else.

The students were quite sharp in identifying topics covered in biographies; they easily spotted key words, and associated them with superordinate terms such as "family," "education" and "awards." Furthermore, they can determine the importance of the topics, discriminating topics that discuss important events and those that provide background information alone.

Finally, my time management has improved when comparing this lesson's flow with Monday's lesson. I didn't let sections of the lesson drag; instead, I would clean-up the topic: revealing answers to final questions; reading aloud to finish passages; and refusing responses to questions which generated more than enough adequate answers. Yet, I can still trim the lesson more, which will require delicate, balanced practice, especially in consideration of my keen, precocious students.

Post-Lesson Discussion - Part Two

The principal was quite helpful in offering pedagogical advice to improve my teaching of prepositions, and grammar in general. The inductive approach to understanding grammar, she said, is appropriate for the 1R students. But there are still a number of facets to adjust in my lesson, much of it involving explicit teaching, to facilitate students' learning. She first stated the importance of modeling activities so students can sense distinctly what they must do for tasks such as filling in word boxes and finding prepositional phrases in passages; some students, she observed during my lesson, stumbled when left to complete independent work. Moreover, it would be wise to provide structured grammar notes to which students can refer when mining texts, allowing students to see grammar points in action. Further to this point, I should open students' eyes to the world by giving students more opportunities to use self-directed learning materials on the Web that will allow students to think, inductively, on their own. And finally, as a class, we can begin employing an authentic text, self-collection strategy, much like the vocabulary self-collection strategy that our students already practice. In this linguistic activity, students can search for authentic texts, focusing on a specific grammar item such as prepositions of time, and report on their findings in class. As I am already a fan of these strategies which empower students, making them responsible for their own learning, I will immediately adopt this ATSS for use in both form one and form two English classes.

Classifying Items

Our third and final language across curriculum module for the 2007/2008 academic year will teach students to classify objects, a skill useful in both the physical and social sciences. The first completed by the students involved sorting rubbish into bins; that is, from a list of products, students had to place each individual item into a bin, whether for paper, metal, plastic or other waste. Furthermore, the students determined whether or not an item could be recycled. But before students could accomplish the latter task, they first needed to understand the term recycling and its related forms, which we accomplished through a swift morphemic analysis.

For the LAC lesson which was observed by a colleague, my class plowed into the first unit of the third module that focused on deriving examples and groups for classification from the introductory paragraph and the conclusion of a text on textiles. Furthermore, in response to the difficulties I saw while observing other classes engage the materials, we attempted to respond to questions whose answers weren't superficially placed within the text; indeed, the students had to search for contextual clues - those key words - that would lead to the discovery of relevant, specific information.

We did not delve too deeply into the language of topic sentences and example sentences since they were, I thought, irrelevant to the introductory paragraph and the conclusion. In ruminating on the language items introduced in the LAC packed, I commented to my colleague that the next version of the packet should highlight the preposition "from" and the conjunction "or" because they featured prominently as contextual clues in the introductory paragraph and the conclusion of the textiles passage.

We spent the rest of the lesson analyzing three texts, all on textiles, to glean names and their semantic relationships, to be constructed visually. And as we reviewed fastidiously the students' maps that had been put on the board, a few adroit students, possessing a critical eye, revealed subtle semantic differences, such as that between a group for animal sources and one for animal fibers, of which our students should have been aware. Another student also pointed out the possible discrepancy in using "textiles" and "clothes" interchangeably; to which I responded by establishing the rule that, at least for our intents and purposes, they were synonyms. So far from being bored out of their wits, students in the class can illuminate and excite an entire room with their keen insights.

We finished the lesson not with homework, which would have been a map classification exercise, but with a game that I had played with my students the previous year, a game that involves a quick mind and hand, lest the reward for one's effort turns punitive. The kids had fun!

<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://student.mckln.edu.hk/%7Emck-wd/graphics/classifying_relativepronouns.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 320px;" src="http://student.mckln.edu.hk/%7Emck-wd/graphics/classifying_relativepronouns.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a>
Having introduced the topic of relative pronouns to the form two students, and having seen the difficulties they faced in understanding it in abstraction, I thought it would be appropriate to review the grammar item with the form one boys and girls who had covered the topic weeks earlier; but this time, we would apply our classification skills to construct a semantic map through which the class could refine the relationships in their head. After inputting the necessary semantic information in a table, the students then individually constructed maps, with a few volunteers sharing their visuals on the blackboard to glean generalizations in the relationships; the map pictured was mine.

Paragraphing and Topic Sentences

As a culminating exercise for module three, we reviewed the importance of the content found in introductory paragraphs and topic sentences by assembling a simple Wikipedia article on the violin whose paragraphs and topic sentences had been separated and scrambled. The activity, which had been suggested by a colleague, required students to first attach topic sentences to their corresponding paragraphs, as though attaching heads onto bodies; and then the students had to put the paragraphs in the correct order. The results were impressive as students met the challenge and conquered it easily. The lesson ended with a discussion of the general questions answered in introductions, and the differences between introductory paragraphs and those found in the body.

Defining Terms

The students have been learning to construct definitions that incorporate three important pieces of information: the term; the class (group) to which the term belongs; and the special characteristic which sets that term apart from other terms in the class.

Students have been taught three language patterns to construct definitions: relative pronouns; to-infinitives; and prepositional phrases.

The language patterns haven't proven difficult for students to master; however, on a conceptual level, the idea of class (a general semantic group) still vexes students at times; they confuse class as the creator or source of terms, rather than a more general idea to describe the term.

Quiz_construction form Quiz_blank Quiz_answers
Next week, my students will take a quiz on classifying and defining terms. The exercises are simple: students need to construct a sentence using a term, a class, and a characteristic; and then for the latter half of the test, students need to order classes, as well as examples within the class, from general to specific. The linked documents are indeed self-explanatory if this description doesn't suffice.

The students actually generated their own quiz; they created the classifying and defining examples from which I chose to create the test. The sheet that I used to collect the data has also been included.

Quiz Feedback

The average score was around six, with most of the points coming from the second part of the exam where students classified nouns from general to specific - you could do that easily. It appears that we must continue working on creating definitions that include a term, a class and a characteristic, utilizing either relative pronouns, prepositions phrases, or to-infinitives.

No student in the class correctly answered question four because software, unfortunately, is uncountable yet every student put an indefinite article, "a" in front of it. Moreover, a musical - the adjective - instrument was acceptable while music instrument was not; and at length, many students spelled grammar incorrectly!