Microteaching reflection

Before I designed my lesson plan, I had suffered torments about what to teach and how to teach. It was really a big deal for me to select teaching materials. At first, I would like to use a part of materials form my tutoring student’s textbook but the biggest difficulty is how to teach students these traditional materials adapted from formal textbook for junior high school students in a new way different from grammar translation. I had thought about it for several days and I decided once to use the textbook for children rather for junior high school students. At last moment, I changed my mind to set my target students as ninth grade students because my tutoring students are in ninth grade. I couldn’t avoid facing the problem that how to teach in a new way instead of grammar translation so I chose this. After I decided what to teach, I encountered another difficulty that how to teach. Finally, I chose not to follow how I usually teach (vocabulary listàgrammaràreading text) but to teach reading first and then vocabulary and grammar.
As I expected, students kept silent most of the time. Although I knew there must be such situation in advance, I still expected there were some volunteers. I was a little bit disappointed because there was no volunteer. If I am the teacher in the future, I will look forward to some volunteers. Peers all gave me some positive opinions and also advices. I apologize for that I didn’t demonstrate and instruct the game well and it made some students confused. I think a part of the reason is time is insufficient so I was afraid I would run out of the time. What’s more, I didn’t show who my target students are in the beginning. Actually my target students are ninth grade students in junior high.
Response to teacher’s questions
1. What level? Ninth grade students in junior high
2. Why read conversation silently instead of reading aloud?
I have thought about that let students listen to the recording when I designed my lesson plan; however, I thought my target is reading rather than listening so I let them read silently. On the other hand, I was afraid the recording or reading aloud would make them distracted.
Methods, approaches and techniques
In my microteaching, I have used “natural approach”, “meaningful learning of cognitive principle”, “risk taking of affective principle”, “communicative competence of linguistic principle” “responsive, selective and extensive way”. In the part of teaching vocabulary, I adopted some techniques such as objects, collocations, analyzing vocabulary, repetition of read; what’s more, I helped them to learn in context and develop the strategy to guess. In grammar teaching, I have used deductive way, meaningful drill, charts, objects, dialogues to check comprehension and definition clues in text to provide clues. In the grammar game, I used substitution drill and moving slot substitution drill. Overall, I taught in a teacher-centered way and used many controlled techniques when I taught grammar or vocabulary.
Changes I will make
1. Ask two students to read the conversation out loud for the class.
2. Highlight target vocabulary in the text.
3. Demonstrate rules of the game more clearly after instruction.
4. Teach grammar in inductive way.
5. If time was sufficient, I would like to go back to the conversation to teach in a free way. Let students share their traveling experiences and talk about how will they do next time when they are packaging.
6. In the beginning, show who my target students are.
7. Pay attention to my diction (simple words) for that some students couldn’t understand what I am talking about.

what have I learned
I think it was a progress fro me to teach those materials in a new way instead of grammar translation. The experience gave me lots of confidence to try something new and reminded me there’s not only one way I can do in my teaching in the future. Maybe the microteaching was not so perfect, making some mistakes, but it was just a start to realize what I should do in the future. I know there's still great room for improvement. Thanks for everyone's opinions and advices, I learned a lot from it, especially teacher's advices.