Ryan CO#3

Before teaching my culture class, I went to go crash the last possible opportunity to get my CO done, Thursday at 2pm. One of the teachers was kind enough to let me watch without prior notice, and she was actually happy to have me. That's because for the last class they were working on English Idioms and she thought it would be great for my input for what certain things meant. It was actually pretty good practice at some points to come up with simple and understandable answers off the to of my head.

Class was good, I really liked some of the students' off-guesses (like a sitting duck = you stopped "flying") and I also appreciated how perceptive they were in the difference between "when pigs fly" and "til the cows come home" as a factor of something never happening, and there being a very slimslimslim chance of it.

Good class :)

Ryan - CO #2 - Reading

Classroom Observation #2

Last Monday, I went to a Level 2 Reading class. Students had just begun reading Matilda by Roald Dahl. Ryan, the instructor, played the audiobook while students read from their physical copies. I think this did a lot to help students hear the pronunciation of words, and maybe improve their ablity to focus on content and comprehension rather than struggle over difficult curveball words. 

One thing Ryan did differently than in the first class I observed was his manner of correcting mistakes. Whereas in my first CO the instructor would ask, “Can you say that onnnnnne more time?”, Ryan employed what he called the “what?” method, which is essentially just going…”what?” when someone makes a mistake in their English production. While it’s certainly more blunt, it also is identical to what most English-speaking conversationalists would hear as a response if they uttered something as unclear.

Ryan paused the audio at many points to ask questions for comprehension checks, and to allow students to ask about vocabulary words. I think this makes good sense, as it also catches up anyone else in the class who may have fallen behind. He also used it to explore emotions and character motivations, which I think can do a lot to illuminate how writers use certain words in context to create feelings.

One thing I though was really cool was the passage from Matilda that they just happened to be reading the day I came to observe. A librarian is asking Matilda, who she came to know as a precocious young girl and voracious reader of intellectual books, about her home life. Her parents are revealed to be mean, unsupportive, selfish, and borderline childabusive (ok, I know we’ve all seen the movie, sorry for the recap). At the end of the section, I just thought it was such an appropriate analogue to why the CIES students should be reading these novels and practicing their reading skills in the first place. It seems to fitting that they got read about a girl who has gone far beyond her means to read, in order to experience a life fuller and richer than the one originally given to her. I hope the CIES students will continue reading and enriching their lives long after their English courses at CIES are over, and long after reading Matilda way back in a forgotten level 2 reading course.

Ryan – CO#1 – Grammar Lv2

Ryan – CO#1 – Grammar Lv2

I went to my first classroom observation to watch Level 2 students practice grammar. When at first asked to explain the simple present tense, a student responded, “Action is start and end in past.” The instructor, instead of correcting him, asked him leadingly to say that again. “No,” he said, “Starts now.”

Throughout a lesson that covered the uses of the present tense, asking questions, talking about morning routines, proverbs and “idiomatic words”, students were consistently able to come up with the right answers. It wasn’t always immediate or the first guess, but I really liked how the teacher coaxed them into trying again. Her demonstrated faith that the students can get to the right sentence constructions and answers on their own seemed to do a lot to encourage each student to keep trying as they answered questions. ‘“Can you say that ooooone more time for me?”’ quickly puts a student on alert to fix their sentence and focus on getting it right. It lets them identify structural problems on their own, and practice fixing them. I thought it was much nicer, and more importantly, effective, than pointing out grammatical mistakes outright. I’ll definitely use this method of reinforcement and correction in my tutoring sessions.

One thing I found charming was the utterly pained look on a student’s phase as he repeated a phrase, strongly informing the instructor that this is not right in his language. She assured him it was correct and they moved on with the lesson, but I thought it was a quite telling moment to see where his skill level was. Clearly he has learned English grammatical patterns enough to contrast them with his native patterns, and to actively feel awkward about “breaking the rules” his brain had in place. It just does more to prove that I need to encourage my CPs and TPs talk as much as possible, and just let them keep hearing themselves (and me!) speak in unfamiliar patterns until it just starts to sound right to their ears.

So yeah! A lot of this class reinforced a lot of what we’ve been learning in class about how to teach grammar. By encouraging talking, and using a teaching method that allowed students to correct themselves, students were given the chance to learn inductively long after being initially taught a skill deductively. Group assignments, conversation pairings, and group sentence editing all did a lot to lower affective barriers.

I think many people have blogged about this too, and we learned it in class Tuesday—but I just have to say the “Beautiful Mistakes” work really well to let everyone work on mistakes with a smile on their faces.

Ryan