I observed Vicky Ledbetter's high-intermediate reading class and it really struck home how much review of earlier-learned skills must be reviewed at every level. In the previous class, they reviewed the basic phonics skills and in this class the reviewed the multi-syllable decoding skills. Ms. Ledbetter is what I would call a very high energy teacher. Although she lets the class go off on tangents, she always brings them back without the class feeling that their thought patterns were being interrupted.
It was also my first experience where a teacher said that she was not sure of the answer to a student's question. The interesting thing is that instead of just letting the point go, the students opined on the question and actually helped the teacher figure out the solution. Whether intentional or not, it really led to a class feeling of inclusion and student-led learning.
After the initial discussions of phonetic rules, the class began a discussion of the differences between paraphrasing and summarizing. During the discussion, the teacher asked a student to paraphrase a paragraph. When the student ran into problems, she did not correct him, per se, but guided him towards a more correct answer. When the student got stumped, she never let the class fall into dead silence and lose the student's attention. She kept providing hints until she felt that she had to "take the wheel" in the situation. Even then, she turned it into a group-think exercise for the class and simply helped organize their thoughts. By turning it into a class activity and keeping the original student participating, the student did not feel like he had failed. She never talked above the student's heads and backed up many times to make sure that everyone understood the terminology, concepts and conversation before moving on. She also did a really nice job matching questions to students individual levels, which did vary, so that they all felt a sense of accomplishment.
One really nice touch was that she took the last 5 minutes of the class to recap everything that had been covered.
It sounds like at least some of the students have a higher reading level than speaking level. I know we have discussed that this is often the case, but seeing it in class like you did is a good reminder to me that we develop different skills at different speeds. Before coming here, the question "How's your English?" was asked from a kind of one dimensional, all encompassing perspective of language learning. This course has helped me realize there are many facets to language learning, and many ways to address the different facets that can, in fact, produce positive carry over to the other areas of language learning.
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