Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Hi it has been quite a while since I posted on the blog.
Just wanted to share what I did in class and thus far
has been quite successful. I dare not say it is very successful
because I have not read the students essays.
The Curriculum Cycle was first introduced to Singapore when
MOE introduced the 2001 EL Syllabus. It is based on Halliday's
theory of Functional Grammar. According to Halliday, language
is learnt based on its function/s. There is a Theme, Rheme and
Subject Complement/ Object and Direct Object in a sentence.
According to him, if learners know the function of the different
part of the language, they would understand better.
Let's get back to Curiculum Cycle. It was started by Beverly
Deriawanka (an Australian). She developed an improvised
version of Halliday's Functional Grammar. Like Halliday, Beverly
also believed that in learning a language, learners need to know its
function/s. She came up with a simplified version of Functional
Grammar and this is taught through the Curriculum Cycle.
There are 3 main Phases of Curriculum Cycle :
a. Exploring the genre
b. Joint Construction of the text
c. Independent Construction of the text.
Unlike Halliday, Deriawanka believed that learning the language
can be further enhanced through text types. Each text type has
its features and grammatical structures. In total there are 8 text
types.
Enough of theories... I introduced to the students the features and
grammatical structures of a narrative. Gave them examples to look at.
In the 1st phase of Curriculum Cycle...
Teachers are supposed to get the students to know the genre through
watching a video. I showed my pupils a short video on 'youtube'...
together students identified the structure of a narrative based on the picture.
Students then write out the story.
Students enjoyed it. They had never thought that an advertisement has
any educational value. I will continue about what I have taught my kids
tomorrow... I am feeling sleepy. I will sleep now because I need to be up
in an hours time to prepare for school.
Adious....
*
any comment?
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