Good Lesson Essay

Gap-fill exercise

This exercise contains an essay written as a response to the question; "Write about an event which happened in the classroom (good or bad) and how it affected your teaching career." Some grammar and vocabulary mistakes have been highlighted with an *asterisk* on either side of them. They are then followed by a gap for you to fill in. To give you more help following the gap is a marking code (preceded by "«" and also between *asterisks*). To download an MS Word doc with an explanation of the code click here.

Fill in all the gaps, and then press, "Check" to check your answers. Use the "Hint" button to get a free letter if an answer is giving you trouble. You can also click on the "[?]" button to get a clue. Sometimes the clue button will give you a link to a page on the web where there is information that will help you. This may be a page from a dictionary or thesaurus, or the results of a search from a web-based concordancer.

Note that you will lose points if you ask for hints or clues!

In Hong Kong, English is not our mother-*language* «*Wrong-Wd*. The Hong Kong children always have difficulties in learning English. The rote method of spelling for students is also humdrum and so their *learning motivation* «*Wrong-Wd* is reduced.

The students in my class, for example, thought that it *is* «*Tense* not easy to memorize the spellings of *vocabularies* «*Uncount*. They frequently felt bored *in* «*Prep* spelling words. In order to reinforce their *vocabularies* «*Uncount* and spelling skills, I designed a game which I called ‘Letter Bingo’ for my English lesson.

Last month, I used this game in my English lesson. Before starting the game, the class had been divided «*☻* into teams of four players. Each team was given «*☻* one game sheet, a pencil and a rubber. I showed them different pictures and asked them some questions about the pictures. For example, I asked them the initial letter for the words shown in the pictures. Then, each team spelled the words together and circled the correct letters on their game sheets. The team that was the first to circle four letters in a vertical, horizontal or diagonal row and shout “Bingo” was the winner.

We played several rounds of the game. All of them liked the game and participated enthusiastically. *Obviously* «*Wrong-Wd*, the game could help to increase their interest in learning English.

This lesson was extremely *special* «*Wrong-Wd* and meaningful to me. It is important that the game can *bring* «*Be* fun for the students. This means that the students can actively participate, learn efficiently and improve their spelling skills. Through the teamwork, their communication skills can be enhanced.

I also learned from this lesson how useful games are in my teaching and I must use games more in the future lessons.