Chau Nguyen
I am Chau. I am teaching English at the College of Foreign Economic Relations
Location I am from Vietnam.
Activity
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
The teacher told students a story. She used pictures to show them the characters of the story. To check if students understand the meaning of the verbs in the story, she asked students to carry out the actions (roll and swim). I think we can use this technique with older learners for some simple actions.
To check if my students understand the meaning of the... -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
My learners: freshmen
Language point: used to (would) is used to talk about habits in the past.
Context I would use: students ask each other about what they used to do when they were children.
Introducing the context: Use pictures to introduce the context because it is easy for students to identify the differences between the activities that a person did... -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
I quite agree with the teachers’ views.
I play the role of a facilitator, I create activities, let students join in the activities, and enjoy themselves. I only observe them and offer help whey they need. -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
Thank you so much for sharing useful links with us.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Thanks so much for sharing the links with us.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I find planning for differentiation and adapting the coursebook interesting. The materials and checklists are very useful. I have learned one new app, namely Kahoot which is very helpful in evaluating learners’ achievement.. I will try Kahoot.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I evaluate if my learners learned form or enjoyed the lesson by writing questions on Google Form and sending the link to my students so that they can answer the questions.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I will use all parts of the adult materials except part 4 which I don't think is necessary. In general, the vocabulary, grammar, and structure in this lesson are suitable for my students' language level.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I think the teacher has changed the letter into the email which is very popular with learners these days. She has made the information in the email more specific by adding some hints/prompts which students can base on to reply to the principal’s email.
In my opinion, she chose to do the additional activities to help students interact and communicate with... -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
I do not have freedom in terms of selecting teaching materials and references. I have to follow the course outline made by the English Department, i.e. teachers have to use the coursebook suggested by the Department and skip a certain part in the coursebook because there is not enough time to teach according to the number of periods required by the curriculum,...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I would like to suggest as follows:
- Lead-in: The teacher can describe a photo of her/his family. (whole class)
- Presentation: Explain the meaning of family words, teach students how to pronounce the words, and use the words in sentences, e.g. There are 6 members in my family: my grandfather, my grandmother, my father, my mother, my brother, and me.... -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
I think the teacher prepared the lesson plan well, she thought of all the factors mentioned in the task sheet, including:
• aims: Students can talk about what they like to do in their free time).
• stages: First, the teacher asked students some questions. Then she elicited the questions from students. Next, students wrote the questions into their notebooks.... -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
I would add:
"Voting": Ask students to read their poems in front of the class, the rest listen and vote for the most interesting, the second most interesting, and the third most interesting poems. Each pair/group is not allowed to vote for their own poem. -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
Second-year students
Major: Hospitality
In this task, I ask my students to play the roles of a receptionist and a guest based on the following situation:
Student A: a guest
Student B: a receptionist
Student A calls to book a room in a hotel and candidate B takes the reservation. Make sure you include the following:
- The number of people is going to... -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
The stages I wrote during the observation to the one in the lesson plan are somehow different. I write the aims towards the learners’ benefits.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Lead-in:
Aim:
- Express students’ background knowledge about poems in Serbia and Haiku poems of Japan.
- Know how to spell words and write the example of a Haiku poem correctly.
Pre-writing
Aim:
- Review vocabulary of feelings and times of the day.
- Know the number of syllables in a word and each line of a Haiku poem.
Writing
Aim:
- Share ideas... -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
In my opinion, teachers shouldn’t inform their learners of the aims of a lesson or activity. At my college, teachers are often required to give students the course outline at the beginning of the course so that students know what they are going to learn in the course and what they will be able to do after the course.
Teachers often have a time limit for a... -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
I decide reading or listening texts based on the aim of the lesson, students' major, their language level, and their interests.
Before reading or listening, I often ask students some questions about their experience or their interests related to the text. Then I help them with some new words in the texts by asking them to match the words with their... -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
How can we teach writing skills effectively online?
Would you please recommend us some technological tools for teaching writing skills? -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
I would like to add the following two questions:
Can we use another word rather than using it? In what contexts is it used? -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
To tell you the truth, at my college, teachers' lesson plans are not checked by the Dean so we just make lessons plans on our own, which depends on our students' needs and their learning styles. I often make my lesson plans on my laptop. I just write the aims of the lessons, duration for the lesson, and then I add a table with rows and 4 columns with column 1...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I would like to thank the course developers and educators so much for allowing us to attend this course free of charge. This information in the course is extremely helpful for me as a teacher to test my students' knowledge more fairly and effectively.
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Chau Nguyen replied to Chau Nguyen
@JonathanDixon Thanks for you interesting questions. From my experience, I often consider students' language level, their interests, their needs, and their major.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
My course plans are somehow different from the one in the download. Besides the content of the course, the course plans at my college often include the aims of the course (knowledge, skills, and attitude), coursebooks, and reference books. We follow the concept “plan, do, and review” in order to help students have the knowledge and skills necessary for their...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
• I often plan lessons before going to school, which makes me feel more confident when I stand in front of my students.
• I often write my lesson plans but I sometimes do not use all the things I have planned in my lessons because it depends on the students’ language level. -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
I do not spend a lot of time planning courses because courses of a training curriculum are often designed at the end of the previous academic year by the English Department. As a teacher, I only spend a lot of time planning lessons. The more thoroughly the lessons are planned, the more confident we feel in teaching. This is the reason why I often spend a lot...
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Thanks a lot for your comment. My students had learnt the vocabulary in their units so the purpose of the quiz was to check if students remembered the vocabulary they had learnt (achievement test).
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I am very grateful for sharing interesting and useful with us.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I am not sure about the answer. Based on the figures, I guess that Q2, Q6, Q7, Q8 are problematic for achievement tests because the facility values show that very few students have the correct answer for each question.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Last week, I asked my class of 37 students to do a quiz on vocabulary on the Quizzes tool. After students finished, Quizzes showed me the statistics of the quiz result in the following table:
Questions Number of correct answers Facility values
Q1 31 0,83788
Q2 ... -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
The values of the last three questions are 0,1875, 0,8125, and 0,71875. Thus Question 8 seems too difficult, Question 9 seems very easy, and Question 10 is acceptable.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
One of the speaking test tasks I have used with my students is the one in which a student plays the role of a guest who calls to book a hotel room and a receptionist who answers the phone. I think this test task is relevant to students’ language needs, namely English in the area of hospitality and it really encourages students to think like they would in their...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Thanks a lot for your advice.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I have assessed my students' speaking skills, writing skills, vocabulary, and grammar online. For speaking skills, I give each pair of students a situation and they play the roles of a customer and a supplier of products or services, or a guest and a receptionist, or a waiter/waitress and a customer on ZOOM. I use quizzes tool to assess students' vocabulary...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I teach students from 18 to 23. The fact that if assessment tasks work well with students no not depend on each student’s learning style and language level. Some students are good at speaking skills, others are good at writing skills, or reading skills, or listening skills. From my experience, some students often get high marks for speaking tests, but they do...
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When I was a student at Hue University, Vietnam. I was taught writing skills by an American teacher who asked us to make a portfolio of essays we wrote. We had to hand in an essay several times. For example, he asked us to write an opinion essay if students should have military training at university. We handed in our essay to the teacher, he gave feedback to...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
We test skills separately because we want to help them realize the skills they are still not good at and want them to focus on improving those skills.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I often make and deliver progress tests. After attending this course, I realize that the tests I have made need to be improved in terms of the diversity of the test types.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
My first-year students are from 18-20. Their major is Logistics/Import-Export/ Marketing, they come from different parts of Vietnam. The students who come from cities are often better at English than those from villages and remote areas. First, their pronunciation is better. Second, in terms of speaking and listening skills, students from cities are also...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Yes, we are often required to produce tests with the content and structure similar to what students have learned in the coursebook. A test consisting of vocabulary, grammar, 1 passage for reading comprehension lasts 60 minutes.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Assessments are usually planned at the same time as writing the course outline/syllabus but we often design tests during the course because we have to consider our students' level, i.e. the difficulty of tests is adjusted in order to be suitable for students' level of each class.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Thanks so much.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I am very grateful for sharing with us interesting and useful information.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I will try AWL Highlighter and Gapfill, I think this tool is user-friendly and very useful for designing tests. I will use the rest to check if grammar and vocabulary in the test are suitable for my students' level.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I have used matching tasks. I think matching tasks are popular with teachers and they are good for testing both grammar and vocabulary, but I usually use matching tasks for vocabulary.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I think MCQS are a type of task which most teachers like and I am not an exception because it is not time-consuming to mark. However, this type of task does not encourage lazy or weak students to learn because they can randomly guess the correct answer. And I believe in the famous phrase “no pain, no gain”, if students do not work hard, they will certainly...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Whenever I design a test, I often think about the time allotted for the test, the task types familiar to my students, and make sure the language in the test is suitable to my students’ level, i.e. I design a test related to what my students have learned from the coursebook, not beyond the content and structures of the sourcebook, which gives students a feeling...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I think we should change the verb "says" into "said" so that learners just choose the only answer, namely "couldn't".
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I completely agree with Mr. Sullivan. I usually give feedback related to grammar and vocabulary to the whole class after I have given marks to my students’ test papers. I ask them to take notes of their mistakes and write the correct things. By doing that, I hope that it will help students avoid similar mistakes in their future tests and communicate well in...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Recently I have taught “reported speech” in class. According to EGP, at A2 level, learners are taught how to report statements with verbs “tell and say” and change pronouns. At the low level of B1, learners are taught how to report statements, Wh-questions, yes-no questions with the change of pronouns and tenses. At a higher level of B1, students use other...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I think the Aptis format related to grammar and vocabulary is more suitable for my students’ level. I can apply the Aptis format to designing progress and achievement tests. The formats of PET, FCE, CAE, also called proficiency tests are more complicated with a lot of parts. At our college, we just test what students have learned from the course, we do not...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I usually test my students’ grammar regarding forms, meaning, and usage. I think to some extent these factors have an effect on students’ communicative competence. For example, native speakers often use “always” with simple present tense for habits or routines like in the sentence “He always gets up early.”, but they use “always” with the present continuous...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Thanks a lot for recommending us a lot of useful resources related to vocabulary, which helps us know how to teach vocabulary more effectively and design better vocabulary tests.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
This is the first time I have tried DIALANG. I think DIALANG is very interesting and useful. All skills, grammar, and vocabulary are tested separately, which helps learners check their knowledge of each skill, grammar, and vocabulary. DIALANG also provides learners with feedback so that they can learn immediately what they have never known before through doing...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
The list I wrote at the start of this step consists of meaning, pronunciation, spelling, and how the word is used in a sentence. In comparison with what is presented in the article, my list needs to be added more things.
I usually test collocations and grammar patterns, meaning, and word families. -
Chau Nguyen replied to Chau Nguyen
I think if they cannot recognize plural nouns or present simple verbs, it means their listening skills are not good, so they do not deserve full marks.
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Chau Nguyen replied to Chau Nguyen
I think speakers in the video should say spell it. It will be easier for non-native learners to write the name.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
When I was a student, I used to have grammar and vocabulary tests. The tests I give to my students are not similar because I do not ask my students to translate sentences related to the grammar points in the tests from English to Vietnamese or vice versa as I used to be asked.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I am excited about learning new things in the second week.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Thank you for sharing with us a lot of useful resources.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
- This week has been very useful for me as it has helped me improve my knowledge of teaching.
- Watching other teachers from other countries teaching English is very interesting to me, which helps me learn their method of teaching.
- I will try giving my students tiered instructions and holding the dictation activity. -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
The teacher in the video has made a deep impression on me through his method of teaching. I have to admit that he is gifted with teaching. He has not used any technological tools but his class is very lively. He has used a lot of scaffolding such as demonstrating a conversation with a student, using the board to explain the new word “alphanumeric”. He has...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
In my opinion, learners should have a choice of their outcomes. As a teacher, I often give only one instruction to the whole class for the first time to make sure that all students will do the same thing in class, but I always have extra tasks for fast-finishers. I only give them more tasks when they finish the first one perfectly, if not they have to improve...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
In order to ask students to write a story, first, the teacher in the video reminds her students of how to spell regular and irregular past verbs. Then she elicits the parts of a story and words that are necessary for writing a story. Next, she asks students to arrange the content of the story in a logical way. Finally, she asks students to write a similar...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I use collaborative activities with my learners when teaching writing skills and speaking skills. Students are required to write essays in pairs on Google Docs and share the link with me or discuss a problem and find out its causes and solutions to the problem. For the first time, I let students choose partners, but students are asked to swap partners with...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I usually test vocabulary and grammar with reading skills because students cannot understand the vocabulary or grammar structures, they cannot understand the text well. I often ask students to match the words in the test with their definitions or I ask students what tenses are used in the test and give examples of the tenses in the text.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I sometimes have to weigh my “brain” to score listening tests because some students do not do well in their listening tests. They had only one answer meaningfully correct, but grammatically wrong but I had to give them one mark for that answer. I also consider deducting marks if learners make spelling mistakes of plural nouns, present simple verbs with third...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I prefer version 2 of the listening and version 2 of the task with a combination of easy and difficult words in one answer. In version 2 of the listening, speakers repeat what they say so it is easier for A2 learners to listen. In addition, scoring one mark for one word is clearer. I would play this short clip three or 4 times for my students for version 1,...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I don’t think this test is suitable for A2 level learners because it is rather difficult for them to write the foreign names without being spelt. In addition, the instruction is not clear for this level. The learner should be instructed to write one word, two words, three words, or no more than 4 words.
For each question, if learners can write one word... -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
I weigh questions and tasks differently. The parts with easy questions often have fewer points than the part with more difficult questions. I often inform my students in advance about how the tasks will be scored and I often deduct points for vocabulary, spelling, and grammatical mistakes. I have to do so to motivate my students to learn how to spell...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Thank you so much for providing us with useful tips of developing listening tests.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I have never created original resources or used materials from the internet. I often choose listening exercises from coursebooks or workbooks with the same language level as my students’ for testing their listening skills.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I cannot give an opinion about the grading of all task types because I cannot find the scores in TOEFL listening tests and Aptis Listening test. For IELTS and Cambridge listening tests, each answer carries one mark, and the level of difficulty increases towards the end of the test.
The tests I develop for my students include gap fill and short answer... -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
What a shame! I cannot find any sample tests on Cambridge English Tests and open tasks on CEFTrain Project.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Some of my students randomly choose the answers to TRUE/FALSE questions or misspell words when they are required to listen and fill in the gaps because they have the habit of cutting the final sounds of most words. Therefore, when listening, they cannot recognize and write the correct words.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
As far as I understand, the higher-order listening processing needs our background knowledge of the world to process information, whereas the lower order processing is based on our listening skills such as skimming, scanning. For example, when I hear the sound /trӕm/ in the sentence “I go to school by tram. I can write the word “tram” correctly. In this...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
After this unit, I have recognized 5 factors affecting the reliability and validity of a test. I will try to diversify the test types for assessing my students' reading skills.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Aptis has 4 test types including sentence comprehension, text cohesion, opinion matching, and long text comprehension. Whereas, IELTS consists of test types such as information transfer, matching, multiple-choice, gap fill and close, T/F/ not given. In IELTS tests, multiple-choice and matching, and gap-fill and close are more frequent. I think all of the test...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I have never noticed unsuitable and culturally biased topics or tasks in a textbook or in a text. In my opinion, teachers should not choose topics that are not suitable for learners' age or topics related to religions. For example, you should not choose topics about marriage for young learners because they do not have enough knowledge of that topic or topics...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I am not familiar with these tools. I have tried all the tools mentioned in the lecture and I think they are interesting but we should not completely rely on them because they are not humans, as teachers, we can base our judgment on intuition, i.e. we know what our students have learned and we can read and choose the most appropriate text for our students.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
To judge the difficulty of a text, I often look at the vocabulary and grammar structures and sentence types of the text. If the text has a lot of new vocabulary and grammar structures or sentence types that my students have not learned yet, I will not choose that test.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I think these types of text would be appropriate to assess reading skills because they can be used to test intensive and extensive skills or lower-level processing and higher-level processing. However, it depends on learners’ needs and language level, we can choose the most suitable one. For example, we can choose the abstract from a journal article to test...
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I think these types of text would be appropriate to assess reading skills because they can be used to test intensive and extensive skills or lower-level processing and higher-level processing. However, it depends on learners’ needs and language level, we can choose the most suitable one. For example, we can choose the abstract from a journal article to test...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
The type of texts in the tests I have used in class was aimed at lower-level reading processing. Students understand each individual word in a text by matching each word its definition. Students are also required to scan for specific information in paragraphs of a text or skim to answer the main idea of a text.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I have read emails, messages, news, articles about teaching and learning English. I just scanned emails and messages, news to check if there was any important, interesting information. As for articles, I have to read them carefully to scan for specific information that I need.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I use all of the patterns mentioned above. However, it depends on the content of the task, I have to choose the most appropriate one. If I ask students to work in groups of three or four, I have to indicate the roles for them to play and students take turns to play roles.
My classroom furniture is not convenient for students to work in groups because desks... -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
I think we can cut a story into individual sentences and ask students to put them in the right order. Next, we ask students to underline the past verbs in the sentences. Then we write some questions related to the story on the board and ask students to answer the questions. Finally, we can ask students to tell the story in their own words in the simple past...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
In my opinion, differentiation means a teacher's ability to identify the differences among learners and customize their lesson plans so that they are suitable to different learners in his/her class.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I think one more criterion necessary for successful speaking activities is instructing students how to stand and establish eye contact with the audience when they speak. Some of my students often look at the ceiling or the floor when they speak. I always encourage them to look at their friends and stand confidently in front of the class when they perform a...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Teachers in the video use real objects or a bag of objects, give content words and ask them to express themselves, use pictures to motivate learners to speak.
In addition, they praise learners, smile with them, move around the class to monitor learners. Besides these ways shown in the video, we can motivate older/younger learners to speak by asking one... -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
I think teacher attitude is the most important factor which has a positive or negative effect on students' learning. If a teacher is enthusiastic, friendly, and energetic, he will make students feel close to him and motivated to learn in his class and vice versa.
I would advise a new teacher to be friendly with students, smile with them, always prepare... -
Chau Nguyen made a comment
I completely agree with what Patrice says. Teachers should be honest. We should only praise students when they deserve it. I deserve students when they give correct and interesting answers. My praise depends on the skills students are learning, if students learn to speak, I give praises orally in front of the class, I often say "It's a very good idea/ good...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
I do not think reading and listening are passive skills because when reading or listening, we have to focus on what we are reading or listening to in order to process the information and understand it. For example, when we read an opinion essay, we have to figure out how many paragraphs the essay has, analyze what each paragraph is about, what the writer's...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Thanks so much for sharing useful information.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Thanks a lot for the interesting information in the video.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
My students find writing about their part-time jobs, their favourite jobs or favourite products motivating and interesting. These days, I teach online so I ask students to write in pairs on Google Docs and share their links with me. I give feedback to their essays and assess them directly on Google Docs.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Task 2 looks achievable for my first-year students. I think band A2.1 describes their writing. Their responses are on topic. They use simple grammatical structures to produce writing at the sentence level. However, they sometimes make mistakes in simple structures, spelling, and punctuation. They sometimes use inappropriate vocabulary in their responses. In...
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
We agreed on a standard way of marking writing. We discussed the points we need to focus on such as ideas, grammar, vocabulary, and use of linkers, punctuation but I do not believe that most teachers follow the scale in reality because they do not give marks for each individual criterion, but give marks for the whole essay.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
In my opinion, the Aptis scale is holistic and IELTS scale is analytic. I usually use the holistic scale to mark students' writing because I focus more on what students can write than their mistakes. I encourage students to express their opinions as mus as they can.
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Chau Nguyen made a comment
Task 4 requires students to write an email to a friend and an email to the president of the travel club and express their opinions on the book they intend to buy but the writer has not signed his name on it. In the email to their friends, students can use informal language, but in the email to the president, they have to use formal language. In addition, they...
