Hong kong china lesson plan - kpy

Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation / SEAMEO Regional Language Centre
Language Education: An Essential for a Global Economy
19 - 21 April 2010
SEAMEO Regional Language Centre (Singapore) Prepared by: Ko, Po Yuk (Dr.)
Hong Kong Institute of Education
(pyko@ied.edu.hk)
Lesson Plan
Instructor: Dr. KO, Po Yuk (with two colleagues from HKIED) 1. Date & Time: from September 2008 to January 2009, four cycles of research
lessons in total, each lesson lasted for 60 minutes 2. Grade: Grade 5 (four classes of Grade 5 students, 5E, 5A, 5C and 5B)
3. Name of the Unit: Learning Study Project: Understand subject pronouns and use
4. Reasons for Setting up the Unit:
In October 2008, a primary school invited the instructors from the Hong Kong Institute of Education to support the professional development of a group of teachers who teach English to Primary 5 pupils. Three instructors and six English teachers in the school formed a project team. As the first step, the project participantsworked to identify the topic for the research lesson (i.e., the object of learning so called in Learning Study) for the research lesson. Like in other Learning Study projects, the learning objective was related to the pupils’ learning difficulties or any teaching issues that teachers would like to explore. In the first few weeks’ meetings, the participants brainstormed to identify the pedagogical issues they wanted to address in the project. As the discussion developed, the focus of the research lesson was narrowed down to pupils’ knowledge and the use of pronouns. Although pupils were taught about pronouns in Grade 3 and 4, teachers were often troubled by the discovery that their pupils were still confused about the English pronoun system (which differs in many ways from the Chinese language system) and they were unwilling to use pronouns in writing. Therefore, “pronouns” was identified as the tentative topic for the research lesson. However, there were many kinds of pronouns (like subject pronoun, object pronoun and also possessive pronoun) and it was difficult to teach all of them in a 60-minute lesson. In order to find out which kinds of pronouns should be taught in the research lesson, teachers and researchers carried out a total of 4 pilot tests to check students’ prior knowledge on English pronouns. After the pilot tests, it was found that students had little understanding on the meaning and functions of pronouns. They usually made their choices by guessing or simply by the position of pronouns in sentences, e.g., the beginning, the middle and Based on the data collected from the pilot tests, the team carried out further investigation on students’ learning difficulties by designing pre-tests for the four classes of Grade 5 students so as to check their prior knowledge in English pronouns. The analysis of the pre-test revealed that most students had little or inappropriate concept of English pronouns. For example, they didn’t know how to differentiate “they” and “it’ and they confused the meaning and function of “we”. In particular, many of them equated the plural form of “it” with “its”. After the diagnosis, it was further confirmed that students have a lot of confusion on pronouns and the most important learning difficulty for students was that they didn’t know how to use appropriate pronouns in certain contexts, especially on the way to use subject and object pronouns in their right forms. It could be concluded that students lacked the concept of pronouns and also the awareness to use pronouns in their writing. As a result of the diagnosis, the project participants decided to focus the research lesson on the use of subject pronoun first. Therefore, “subject pronouns” was chosen 5. Goal of the Unit:
The object of learning for the research lesson is “Understand subject pronouns In order to help students understand and grasp the object of learning, the project participants identified four critical features [CF] (i.e., the critical points that students must understand fully before they can learn the object of learning) as shown below: 1. Subject pronouns represent nouns (people, animal or things) [CF1]; 2. Subject pronouns are used to avoid repetition of nouns [CF2]; 3. Subject pronouns have to correspond to the nouns they represent [CF3]; 4. Nouns cannot be represented by subject pronouns in some contexts [CF4]. 6. Plan for the Unit:
7. Things to Prepare:
8. Progression of the Lesson:
After planning the research lesson, the teachers took turns to teach the lesson while the researchers and the other teachers observed the teaching. In the project, four different teachers taught the same lesson during the four cycles, each with minor variations in the planned activities and procedures. After each lesson, the whole team met to reflect on the teaching and to discuss whether or not the lesson plan needed to be revised in the next cycle of teaching. Below is the approximate Activities

Source: http://cttevt.apec.org.tw/examples/files/lesson_plans/Lesson_Plan_Hong_Kong_China.pdf