Thursday, October 31, 2013

Jodie CO #2



I observed Felicia’s Group 2 grammar class.  Her voice and smile showed the students that she was glad to be there to teach them. 

The class started with an exercise on the projector.  It had 15 or so sentences with various errors.  The students were instructed to correct the sentences.  The errors were on verb tenses, contractions, conjunctions, singular vs. plural, and articles.  The students worked on the sentences individually, and the entire class went over the answers together.  She explained very clearly the reasons for the corrections.  Students were free to ask questions when they did not understand.  For example, there should not be another verb which follows “it’s” because “it’s” is “it is”.  If there is another verb after “it’s” in the sentence, then there are two verbs for one subject in that sentence.  Felicia also reminded them the reason for the different usage between simple present and present continuous.

The second activity was a handout.  The students moved around in the classroom posing questions to other students using the suggested phrases.  Felicia walked around the classroom to listen and correct their questions and responses.  Most of the students did not understanding “traffic court”.  She then broke the two words down and explained the meaning very clearly.  The students seem to be very relaxed in her class.  They seemed to be very eager to participate when they knew the answers. 

The way Felicia corrected her students was very good.  If a student gave an answer that was not completely correct, she would say, “Good, your answer is close”.  She also let students correct their own errors.  For example, a student said, “Yesterday, I go to the store.”  She repeated the student’s sentence to a certain point and waited for the student to continue with the correct word. “Yesterday, I … “

I applied her technique for correcting my tutees and it worked very well for us.

No comments:

Post a Comment