David_TP#6

With this group we were going over conversation. Seeing as conversation is a fast thinking exercise where students have to work fast on their feet, I wanted to help with that.  What I did was I brought with me some flash cards, and wrote various subjects on them. Things like: weather, sports, school, family, work, cars, food… ect. And I would place these on the table face down, and they would pick form them and have to generate a conversation either with me, or with one of the others there. It was difficult at first, because they were not sure what to say, so I modeled a conversation with several of them, and they quickly got the hang of it. I tried to stay out of it as much as possible, and would only come in if they were stuck and needed a word or direction. Some of them wanted to do it with me, and I was glad to let that happen. A lot of their out of class talking might be done with native speakers, and I was a little harder than I might have been. I modified my speech a little less. We had also talked about contextual clues, and they worked on that, and they seemed to really pick up on it… we might continue to work on these things in the future. I feel like they really responded well, because this is something they can use and it is helpful. I think they recognized that, and it gave them intrinsic motivation to keep on trying.