Appendix C Teaching notes:

Date Monday, May 24, 2004 8:59—May 24, 2004 8:59—9:35 Class (7)

Today’s objectives: to practise students’ ability of grasping some new words by referring to some implications.

Teaching methods: Reading and guessing.

Order of doing things:

Step 1. tell the students how to do this kind of reading. They should following four steps:

(1)    Read through the passage without pausing even they come across any new words or something difficult to understand.

(2)    Grasp the main idea of the passage.

(3)    Read the passage slowly and carefully again. And try to guess out the unknown words according to the implications in the context.

(4)    Write out the meanings of the new words that they have guessed.

Write the four steps on the blackboard.

Step 2: Ask the students to read the passage and guess the new words by following the four steps.

Step 3: Explain the key points of the passage to the students.

Step 4: Check answers with the students

Step 5: Summarizing the lesson.

Homework: Finish the similar reading material provided by the teacher after class.

Date: Tuesday, May 25, 2004 7:50—8:35 Class (8)

Today’s objectives: Use implications to guess the new words.

Teaching methods: presentation and practice.

Step 1: Get the students to read through the passage without pausing to grasp the main idea of the passage.

Step 2. Find out the key points or implications to about the new words.

Step 3. Guess the meanings of the new words by relating to the implications.

Step 4. Write the them out and check the answer.

Step 5. Summarizing the lesson.

Homework: Finish the reading material provided by the teacher.

Week 2

Date: Monday, May 31, 2004 8:50—9:35 Class (7)

Today’s objectives: Use the former knowledge to guess the new words.

Teaching methods: reading and guessing

Step 1: Repeat the four steps of reading.

Step 2: Ask some volunteers to come to the blackboard and writer down the meanings of the new words on the blackboard.

Step 3: Check the answers and give marks to the students.

Step 4: Summarizing the lesson.

Homework: do some additional exercises,

Date: Tuesday, June 1, 2004 7:50—8:35 Class (8)

Today’s objectives: Use former the background information to guess the meanings of the new words.

Teaching methods: presentation and guessing.

Step 1: Ask the students to read the passage quickly and grasp the main idea of the passage.

Step 2: Give the background information of the passage to the students.

Step 3: Think over the information and guess the meanings of the new words.

Step 4: Get some of the students to write the meanings of the new words on the blackboard.

Step 5: Check the answers with the students and summarizing the lesson.

Homework: Select the similar passage to do after class.

Week 3:

Date: Tuesday, June 8, 2004 7:50—8:35 Class (8)

Today’s objectives: Use the word-building to guess some compound words.

Teaching methods: presentation and guessing.

Step 1: Introduce some ways of word-building to the students.

Step 2: Read through the passage and grasp the main idea.

Step3: Work out the underlined new words by referring to the ways of the word-building.

Step 4: Write out the meanings and summarizing the lesson.

Homework: Learning some other ways of word-building.

Date: Wednesdays, June 9, 2004 10:10-10:55 Class (7)

Today’s objectives: Use word-building to overcome the new words.

Teaching methods: presentation and practice.

Step 1: Revise some word-building.

Step 2: Read through the passage quickly.

Step 3: Use the word-building and relate to the context to work out the meanings of the underlined words.

Step 4: Check the answers and summarizing the lesson.

Homework: (1)do some additional exercise.

                 (2) consolidate the word-building.

Appendix D: diaries

Week 1 Monday, may 24, 2004.

In today’s lesson, I taught the students how to overcome some new words when they did reading comprehension. At first, I asked my students what they though of doing comprehension. Most of them seemed worried about that because of the unknown words. Then I showed them the model passage and got them to follow my steps to work out the new words without referring anything. Twenty minutes later, most of the students felt very surprised and happy to finish the work. Some of them said that they had never thought doing reading comprehension was so easy and the new words were not the barrier at all.

Through this lesson, I felt more confident that my students could do better with the new words.

Week 2

Date: Tuesday, June 1, 2004.

Today, I continued to teach my students to overcome new word in reading comprehension. To my great surprise, most of the students were very active in my class. I asked them to use their former knowledge to guess the meaning of the words and they did very carefully as I asked. I found Zhou Long and Zhang Chao had made great progress in guessing new words. They also went to write the meaning of what they had guessed on the blackboard and did a good job.

Week 3

Date Wednesday, June, 2004.

After three weeks’ training, I found most of my students became more and more interested in this kind of lesson. They said it was very interesting like playing games. So all of them took an active in English lessons. Now, most of them were eager to do more reading comprehension with so many interesting new words instead of feeling boring about it. “It’s really an exciting challenge.” Tanghu said.