For this task I taught “Be going to + base form for future plans.” I practiced it with my daughter. It was a good experience because it felt closer to a real class situation.

I started by writing the two model sentences and asking her if the sentences were talking about the past, present, or future. From there I elicited that it was about the future and explained that we use “be going to” when we talk about plans. I also tried to drill the pronunciation, especially the contractions like “I’m going to.”

One thing I noticed was that eliciting takes more time than just explaining the rule. Sometimes it is tempting to give the answer directly, but when she figured it out herself it seemed to help her understand the structure better. The CCQs were also useful to check if she really understood the meaning.

Overall it was a useful exercise and it helped me understand that teaching grammar is not just about explaining the rule, but guiding the student to discover the structure step by step.

We noticed during the group call today that using hand gestures, such as swapping words, counting words on our fingers, and pointing to the error, was very useful for helping students notice their mistakes. We also found that giving students a few options can help guide them to the correct answer. For example, with prepositions we could ask: “I am married ___ a doctor — by, to, or with?” This helps students think and choose the correct form.

Preposition errors also seemed difficult to correct without explaining the correct usage, such as “depends of” instead of “depends on.” Similarly, expressions like “an English teacher” instead of “a teacher of English” may require clarification. Overall, this activity showed me that some errors are easy to correct, while others require deeper guidance

I found this exercise very useful because it showed me that error correction is not always straightforward. When the error is very clear, it is easier to guide the student to the correct answer through prompting. For example, mistakes like “He don’t like football” can often be corrected quickly by asking a simple question about the subject and the verb form.
However, some errors are more challenging because they require more eliciting or even a short explanation of the grammar. For instance, in the sentence “He is more tall than his brother,” the student needs to understand how comparative adjectives work. In this case, simply prompting may not be enough and the teacher may need to briefly review the rule.

The Czech teacher showed the class how to introduce themselves by saying their names. She explained that nationality in Czech has gender, as in French, and made this clear from the start. She focused on pronunciation, asked students to repeat after her, and wrote her name on the board, breaking it down step by step to show she was introducing herself.

For the “Teach Me Anything” activity, I followed the same approach. I taught my friend some Hindi, explaining that Hindi also has gender, similar to French. In Hindi, nouns are either masculine or feminine, and adjectives and some verb forms change accordingly. For example, chhota ladka (a small boy) becomes chhoti ladki (a small girl), and even “I am tired” changes depending on whether the speaker is male or female. I used simple gestures, elicitation, and clear techniques to help my friend understand both the vocabulary and the concept of gender agreement.

It was Infact Jonathan’s email that clarified why we use CCQs, guess more sessions like these would help us all understand the concepts better. thank you all.

Hi, thank you all for the Zoom discussion. It was fun, and great to know that we are all having similar experiences 🙂 especially the CCQs!

Thank you Emillie, it was a good group activity. Looking forward to the next one.

Thank you Alexandra. And your instructions on ” WHAT IS MY JOB ” was very helpful.