21st Century Skills Training

 21st Century Skills

Reflection on the sixth week of the training

Hellloo everyone!!! I am here with our last session of the training program. 😢

In these 6 weeks, we shared lots of things; information, experience, entertainment, responsibilities, fun...

I really appreciate and glad that I have got a chance to be a part of such a well-equipped program. I am glad to know our trainer Melda Yılmaz. She is always kind, supportive, eager to learn and teach, helpful, and funny. I have learned lots of beneficial things from the training. It brought us amazing things.

Our training is over but we continue with our project so I am still here. Today I will tell you what we did in our last session and I will share a suggested activity with you that you can use this activity to show your students different varieties of English.

At the beginning of our session, our trainer separated us into groups and we discussed this week's reflection questions. By the way, we are good at group works anymore. Actually, we were not bad but now we can organize and do our duties according to our roles. And also we are more comfortable talking and sharing our ideas, thoughts. After we discussed the questions in groups we turned to the main session and discussed the questions together. 

While we share what we discussed our trainer show us her presentation to go deeper on the topic.

In the other part of our session, we were again separated into groups and we discussed and evaluated the coursebooks this time. After we returned to the main session and shared our coursebook evaluation with everybody. 

While we were evaluating the coursebooks I realized how we were unlucky to not being exposed to different varieties of English and meaningful tasks. In my learning process, my coursebooks were based on American English. And the culture that was presented in the coursebook was again the American culture. We didn't expose to different tasks and activities or real language use. And I think it is awful. Plus knowing that after these years, nothing changed at all, it is so bad. Lots of things could be done to make language learning enthusiastic and meaningful. I hope in the future things will change and learners will be able to learn in an authentic and meaningful way. 

After we finished our discussions, our trainer wanted us to discuss an activity that is based on the GELT model and prepare it with our main groups. I and my group members discussed for activity and returned to the main section. And after we made a candid, sincere, and also sad conversation we ended our session. 

Now, this is the listening activity that we prepared as a suggested activity for you. The main focus of this activity is showing different varieties of English to students. It is based on the GELT ( Global English Language Teaching) model. We hope you find it effective to use in your class and use it.

Here is the procedure of the listening activity that we prepared;

T asks anticipation questions to warm-up;

“Have you ever had any traditional food from different cultures before?” 

“What do you know about South Korean/Singaporean/Ghanaian food culture?”

Students watch the 3 videos of local food recipes from South Korea, Singapore, and Ghana.

                                            

T asks the general comprehension questions below;

“Would you cook any of the foods you have watched? Which one is your favorite?”

“What are the ingredients you have heard for the first time?”

“Which ingredients do you think you can find in your local market?”

T asks students to watch the videos again and list the ingredients for each dish.

POST ACTIVITY 

T says:

 “Now it is your turn to make a recipe video. Think about your favorite traditional dish. Which ingredients are required to make it? How do you prepare it? Record yourself while giving the recipe and bring the video to the class and share it with us.”

I believe, with this activity, you can show your learner that different people from around the world use English. They use it to communicate and take and give information. When they listen to these people, they will be aware of different varieties of English and will be more eager to use this language. I hope you find it meaningful and effective for your teaching process. 

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