April 16

Interruptions…hate them or use them to your advantage

Have you ever had one of those days when it seems like someone is knocking on your door every five minutes? I don’t know about you, but I hate it when that happens – you’re just in the middle of explaining something and the secretary or DoS comes in to tell you something. Bang! Your students’ attention is gone.

“What did she say?”
“Something about books?”
“I understood everything. She said…”
“Well I heard her say something about a problem.”
“Are they going to fire you?”

…and so on.

So then you try to get them back on track and carry on with your enthralling explanation of the present perfect passive, bypassing their questions by saying that it was nothing important and that no, they’re not going to fire you.

Whilst these interruptions can be irritating, your students are very interested in these little encounters and love the fact that they are able to pick out certain words or understand the gist of the conversation. Use this to your advantage and one day ask a teacher to pop in “unexpectedly” and mention some problem (nothing too serious though) and wait for the barrage of questions and theories…

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Posted April 16, 2009 by Teresa Bestwick in category My thoughts

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