Real stories of real people represent an idea of an internal project

Several weeks ago I was having a successful series of classes with Pre-Intermediate students. At that time they were studying how to talk about their job and current working issues; no doubt that was achieved by revising Present Simple and Present Continuous as well as learning new ways of using Present Continuous in terms of speaking not only about a moment of speaking but also about changing situations.

The coursebook offered 3 texts about people presenting their jobs. It can be seen on a picture below: Present Simple and Continuous are used along with some necessary vocabulary to talk about their jobs.

 

After the whole unit was finished it was high time to revise the material. As for vocabulary revision, I decided to ask stronger students from Intermediate group write their own short texts about their work using the proposed vocabulary and grammar. For having them as better visuals all necessary grammar and vocabulary was given in bold type. My story came along with theirs. The result you can see below.

Anna Z. English Teacher. I work for Epam Systems in Sergiev Posad office. My job involves organizing and conducting English classes for EPAM employees. I also take part in different conferences, webinars, trainings for teachers and special projects. For example, now I’m working on my blog where I write posts and articles about my teaching practice and tips for other teachers worldwide.

Anton A. Business Analyst. My position in EPAM as a Business Analyst. A lot of my job consists of communicating with customers. Also I’m involved in organizing meetings for all Business Analysts of SP office and I’m a chairman of these meetings. Currently I’m working on a project with energetic Company ‘CHEVRON’. I’m planning future releases and I’m clarifying all the requirements.

Vitaliy A. Software Developer. I’m a Software Engineer in Epam Systems. I’m involved in implementing new functionality. I also write emails and test my work to ensure that my code works correctly. Currently, I’m working on a foreign project for a Canadian customer. Here I’m implementing tasks, related to service integration processes. These tasks are hard, so I’m reading a lot of documentation to get the idea of how it should work.

The idea was quite simple: I asked students to use those texts to talk about their jobs and current changing situations. Moreover, in the working kitchen where people get together during lunchtime we placed those stories and asked everybody to pay attention, saying that those were examples of “About myself”. The idea was welcome by other employees and we succeeded in motivating others to participate in other projects, as we called them. I was inspired too, as I could see students’ interest in doing this unusual thing.

In conclusion I want to say that if you like this idea to be used with your students, ask stronger students to help you. It will definitely generate their interest, too. Along with this, your target students will be really excited about reading stories about real people they know. Also, I’d say they liked idea about reading my story: they come a lot more familiar with what I do and what my responsibilities are.

Now I’m open to new internal projects. They are inviting and definitely worth trying.

Thanks for stopping by!

What I like and what I dislike

Source: http://easysketchproreview.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/thumbs02.gif

About two days ago I was reading a book for my son before going to bed. Very famous Russian ‘Denis’s stories’ by V. Dragunskiy. I absolutely adore this kind of stories for children, because they are full of emotions and there are so many good things to show to my son: how to behave oneself, how to be fair and honest, how to love people and respect their labor and work. This is very Sovietic book, but despite this fact it is very actual for nowadays.

Among many thought-provoking short stories are two ones with simple titles: ‘What I like’ and ‘What I don’t like’. They are definitely very sincere and touching from the point of view of a boy aged 6-7, who simply explains things or people which surround him and why he likes them or not.

My Intermediate students now are learning how to talk about work-life balance and their leisure time. As for the material in the textbook, it goes without saying that they are introduced with vocabulary about interests and hobbies, and verbs and collocations helping them to express their likes and dislikes. I wrote about likes and dislikes here, and personally I enjoy working with this vocabulary, and it was time to introduce this useful vocabulary to Intermediates to talk about their leisure time. Moreover, I decided to give them a written assignment for hometask. My post today is going to be an example of how to write about likes and dislikes, I’ll send them a link to my blog and after reading and analyzing they are going to write on their own. So…

Today I’m going to write about things that make me happy and things I’m not crazy about.

As you may know, I’m a very artistic person and I prefer doing unusual things. To begin with, I love trying new styles. Today I’m a sporty lady with white sketchers on my feet, tomorrow I’m a romantic woman in pink. Also I absolutely adore different accessories like bracelets, earrings, rings and necklaces. I sometimes order them from trade-masters from abroad, for example, from Israel or from India. These things are gorgeous and nice to use.

I love singing. I’ve been taking part in a choir since 2010. There are 8 ladies (4 of them are Annas :)) and we’ve participated in many concerts so far. I can’t say that our rehearsals are very frequent, but I simply can’t help admiring all the girls in the choir who always encourage me. We are happy to sing, we are united with one idea – to bring warmth and love to people’s hearts. We are winners of many festivals and song contests and for me it is not easy to say whether I like it or not. On the one hand, it is time-consuming and rather demanding thing, because we all have our children and families and can’t leave them for a long period of time, but on the other hand, is is very rewarding thing to participate and I love it very much.

I enjoy travelling. I should say I haven’t visited many foreign countries, but I’m fond of travelling, that’s true. My number one place is the Crimea. I’ve started going there since 2002 and now every year I try to find time for going there with my family. I’m pleased with the fact that my little son Yaroslav is also fond of travelling and he shares my interests. Among places in Russia, I prefer vising Saint Petersburg, this city is incredible. I would love to live there someday…

As for things that don’t make me happy… To begin with, I hate boring weekends. Of course, that depends on me whether to consider a weekend boring or not, but I hate just sitting at home when the sun is shining and the weather is fine for walking and for visiting some interesting places.

On the other hand, I hate this situation when I should create something for every weekend. Why not just relax and find something interesting in this meditating practice? Why run somewhere and spend time on things that don’t interest or bother me? Perhaps, it is just that I can’t relax and keep quite. That’s a thing I would like to change someday. I believe, it’s better to feel internal harmony even with such a dissonance in your soul J

As for my job, I sometimes can’t stand minutes when I’m empty and no idea springs in my mind, especially it relates to preparation for lessons. Just imagine a situation when I ‘m sitting at my desk at work, with a pen in a hand and a blank sheet of paper ready to be competed with some fine ideas… but nothing happens and I just sit and wait. It’s awful! But I try to change methods of doing this, and I’ve achieved some results here: I gave up waiting and started doing something very different. For instance, I call somebody or visit a social network page or talk to someone on the phone for a very short period of time, and the ideas visit me. Not that fast, I should admit, but they are ready to come when I’m relaxed and keep calm.

God Almighty! It turned out to be challenging to write about my likes and dislikes. But at least I tried to be in my students’ shoes when they are supposed to provide me with a well-done written assignment and I’m looking forward to reading them.

Thanks for stopping by!

Looking forward to hearing from you soon…

Scribbles… or a successful blog?

I remember myself in a rather early age and I always wanted to write. It was not important for me what to write and how, be it a poem or a story about relationship, I always wanted them to be puslished some day. And once I was invited to a local newspaper to write some articles as a part-time journalist. Or it is better to say a newsperson, for I do not want to offend journalists, because my literary trash could not be considered as something outstanding. To be honest, my articles were appraised by the chief editor as something obtaining a personal style of writing, but still they needed to be improved. How? Only by means of writing, exploring specific books, getting in touch with professional journalists, asking them for help. My writing practice almost came to naught when I gave a birth to my son. Writing became unimportant and really impossbile those days.

As for my blogging experience, I want to say I also have some, but in Russian. After my son was born, I was taking notes on livejournal.com about my not very intriguing life. I was writing posts about rare travels, about my very challenging marriage and about how it came to an end one day, about my son, about my charity activities with several guys from Moscow and about our ways of doing charity things with the old. So to tell the truth, I did not have anything attractive to share. A couple of friends were following my blog and that was really it. This March I have made an attempt to start my own blog on WordPress.com and I wanted to devote it to my teaching practice and some reflections. But as it turns out, it is more challenging than I have ever thought…

First of all, I shoud thank those who I had a chance to follow and my associate Olga who supported me in the idea of starting to write my reflections on teaching. I have so much to read and to comment in each blog I came across. Secondly, writing is still a dream for me, though it appears to be very challenging and demanding, and time-consuming as well, and I do not want to share ‘scribbles’ that are competely unwholesome. I do not expect people to comment my every post, and I am honest here, at least with myself. So I will start writing and reflecting on things that happen in my teaching practice. I really want to learn how to write (or to blog) and improve my vocabulary and writing skills.

Thanks for stopping by!