Today I observed the Group 2B Listening class taught by Calyn Stringer. The instructor started off by writing the overview of the class on the right corner of the board. She commented to her students that she felt the audio materials in their textbooks didn't go into vocabulary she deemed practical so she uses audio from NPR. One thing that I liked about this is that she is willing to put forth material that'd be more valuable to the students than whats just mandated by the textbooks. Of course with this decision I'm sure you have to run it by other instructors to get the approval. But as she later went on to say, some of the vocabulary may be useful to the students in her class. For example, they went over "to allocate money" and she mentioned it to one of her students that it would be a good term for him to know since he works in government back in his home country. Having that level of communication with her students is a level I would like to achieve with my future students.
She went on to write key words from the audio they were going to listen to and asked the students to provide possible definitions explanations to each if they could. They then listened to the audio which was about 2-3 minutes in length three times. The first time she provided a transcript so the students could follow along. The second time she removed the transcript and told them not to take notes only listen. The third time she went over note taking and had them split a piece of paper into a main idea and information column so they could fill in while listening to the final play through of the audio. Afterwards she compared her own notes to the students and this is another good way that I found to relate to the students, by engaging in the activity with them rather than just assigning and telling them what they are missing/doing wrong.
No comments:
Post a Comment