Proceedings of The International Conference on Research in Social Sciences and Humanities
Year: 2019
DOI:
Some Practice Before the Lesson Starts
Cevdet Bala
ABSTRACT:
It is thought that warm up activities energize the class, set the mood and give a good dynamic start to the lesson in the beginning. No matter what the skill being taught is, teachers are advised to start the lesson with warming up the students. Methodologies to teach English suggest that we use different warm up activities before we start teaching the main part. Mostly, all course books guide the teachers what to do with their teachers’ handbooks. As a lecturer teaching for over twenty years I have benefitted from the suggestions and materials a lot. During my teaching experience, I noticed that students like to talk about themselves, their experiences, likes and dislikes. Taking this reality into consideration, I prepared a lot of questions to be asked, and I tried to warm up my students with starting the day with a question I named as ‘’The Day’s Question’’. All the students in the class are expected to answer the asked daily question in turn shortly. I used this way during the whole spring term lasting 16 weeks. I observed that, as they talk about free and generally personal topics, they are eager and they talk voluntarily. With this starting, they have the chance to practice English by talking and listening to their friends. This study defines how I use this warm up activity and presents data collected from a questionnaire evaluating the students’ perception on the effectiveness of it.
Keywords: warm up, practice, speaking, listening, questions, alternative.