It was on Wednesday the day I taught my last class in intermediate
English II. This time, I had to explain the use of the quantifiers since the
topic was countable and uncountable nouns; it was the grammar part. For us,
this might seem something which we get effortless; however, being at that level
the situation changes. More than explaining, I tried to exemplify each
quantifier. I had words such as much, many, a few/ few; little/ a little;
several, plenty of etc. To start the class, I asked the students to tell me
general information about countable and uncountable nouns to see how much they
knew about it. After that, I invited them (the students) to tell me some count
and some noncount nouns they knew; I took like 5 minutes to do this. It was the
warm up.
To get more in depth, I asked my students to take out some material
that my tutor had already provided. I must say that I changed and personalized
a little bit the lesson. I start explaining the material and, to some extent,
it was pretty hard because some students did not get what I was saying. The
topic was sort of tough for them because for some quantifiers such as a few/
few and little/ a little, what changes is the meaning and not the structure.
So, explaining that the difference is in the connotation/ meaning we give to
the sentence was hard as I saw some students that could not really understand
it, and, for sure, there were some others that understood the point quickly.
Though the material was digestible for them, I tried to make it even clearer
adding some other examples. What I also saw was that some of my students were
not paying attention and, when giving me feedback, I commented that situation
to the teacher and he told me that In that case students have to be aware that
there are moments in which they must be there in class and know that they are
responsible for their own learning. I had never called the attention to my
students, but this time I had to do it. Moving on with the explanation, I also
want to say that 50 minutes were not enough to explain a topic like that.
Probably, if I had had more time, I would have felt more satisfied; anyways, I
think I did a good job in general terms. I organized the content in my own way
and I could see students liked that because the way it was established was a
little bit complicated for them. I show a chart in which every word was sorted
according to the usage. Sometimes it is necessary the fact of making the
content the easiest possible to the students; remember that we have to think
the way they think. Here I leave you a chart that I used to explain the topic.
