Ning'ou Qu

As a warm-up and introduction to the new unit, I showed several tricky pictures and asked students if they had ever been tricked by anything fake. After students shared their own experience, I drew their attention back to the picture and linked that to the topic our first activity ‘Nature Mysteries’.

This listening activity was not just aiming at improving students’ comprehension and listening skills, but also provided plenty of opportunities for students’ interaction as well as vocabulary learning.

Grammar is not directly taught in my class. Instead, as you can see in the video, I always encourage students to make the best use of what they can do and what they have learned, and guide them gradually towards what we are going to learn.

There are always various types of speaking or writing tasks following the grammar activity which allow students to practice the form, meaning, and use of grammar in real-life contexts.

I have many ways of keeping students’ interests and motivation in class. For example, in this class, students played a fully-interactive game in pairs that required them to guess situations based on evidence provided by their partner.

Also, students’ autonomy is highly valued in my class. Rather than using teacher-prepared materials, I asked every student to send me a ‘weird’ picture that they thought their classmates were not familiar with, then I showed pictures one by one on the slides while students guessing those weird pictures with what they had just learned‒modal verbs.