January 25, 2017
Room 314, 11:00-11:50 AM
Group 2B: Reading
Prof: Andrew Wilson
To start the lesson, Professor Wilson asked me to introduce myself to the students. Since the class was small, the students took turns introducing themselves as well. I noticed that on the upper right corner of the board, Prof. Wilson had written the agenda for the day. I thought it was a great way to stay on track and to let the students know what to expect. First on the list was the Word of the Day: Struggle. He asked students if they had an idea of what it meant, and though they were eager to share their guesses, they didn't quite get it. So Prof. Wilson wrote the definition on the board: "to have problems or great difficulty doing or achieving something" and asked students what they have struggled with. He emphasized that the question was in the present perfect tense and required an answer in the present perfect. Each student had a chance to respond.
The next thing on the list was reading comprehension (intensive). The students were given an article titled "Over-Night Shipping: FedEx vs. UPS vs. Postal Service." Instead of jumping directly into the reading, the class did some pre-reading. Prof. Wilson made sure that students first understood the title and subtitle. He asked for students to guess the meaning of "over-night shipping" and spent some time explaining the term. To build schema, he explained its historical origin (it's called shipping because stuff used to arrive on boats) which I thought was a good tactic to help students remember. He explained that the subtitle was a list of different competitive shipping companies. Then, students were to skim the paper quickly in two minutes without taking notes. The second time, they had 5 minutes to read it carefully and circle unknown words. Afterward, the class went over the main idea of the passage, and Prof. Wilson drew names at random, asking each student a comprehension question. Whenever a student made a grammatical error, Prof. Wilson would ring a bell to call attention to it and correct the mistake on the spot. He asked students to share some of words they circled and spent time explaining each one: paperback, flat rate, mid-week, shopper/shipper.
The last activity was an inference worksheet. Students had five minutes to read two passages and decide if choices A-D were facts or inferences. After working through the correct answers together, Prof. Wilson reminded his students that making inferences would be on the test (a clever way to create positive backwash - it indicates what they should study and it'll stay in the back of their minds). To conclude, he returned the students' speed-reading logs. He encouraged students to push themselves to read faster next time if they got most of the answers correct, and to reinforce the new vocabulary, he quickly picked on students to define the words they just learned.
January 26, 2017
Room 314, 1:00-1:50 PM
Group 1A: Speaking
Prof. Andrew Wilson
Introductions between me and the students commenced this class as well. Following his agenda, Professor Wilson introduced the Idiom of the Day: "to make up one's mind." He told a funny story about a husband and wife who could not decide where they wanted to eat, and ended up driving around for a long time. The wife finally said, "make up your mind already!" With context given, Prof. Wilson asked students to guess the meaning and then he clarified it for them. On the board he wrote the meaning, "to decide," and came up with some example sentences. Next, he fixed some pronunciation/spelling errors: desert vs. dessert and sweat vs. sweet. To help them remember the difference, he said "two s's are better than one" (because food is better than dry sand) and "two e's are better than one" (sugar is more appetizing than perspiration).
The main activity of the day was a role-play exercise. In pairs, students had to prepare skits about a tricky aspect of American culture: polite complaints and conflict resolution. Prof. Wilson gave examples of both polite and impolite complaints, emphasizing tone and pointing out polite vs. impolite words. Because there was an odd number of students, he asked me to join in on the activity and work with the student seated in front of me. We came up with a skit in which I was a customer and my partner was the manager of a restaurant. I was unhappy with my food and my complaints were rude at first, until the manager's polite tone and willingness to help calmed me down (ex: "This soup is cold and it doesn't taste good anymore." In response, "I'm sorry, can I change that for you?") After ten minutes, each pair had a chance to act their skits. I liked how this activity accomplished the goal of getting students to speak and teaching them about American culture, while allowing them to use their own creativity and humor.
Before the activity, Prof. Wilson asked me to record any beautiful mistakes that I heard during the skit presentations. I only caught a minor error because the students were very well-spoken. Prof. Wilson concluded the class by going over the mistake that I pointed out: instead of "I got the low grade," we say "I got a low grade."
I enjoyed the light-hearted and comfortable atmosphere of Professor
Wilson's classrooms. His teaching style is kind of goofy, which is great
because class time isn't boring at all - not even his reading class
that I observed the day before. He makes sure that each student has a
chance to participate, doesn't forget to correct beautiful mistakes, and
uses clever & effective tactics to make sure that students
understand and retain the material.
February 7, 2017
Room 313 & Lab, 1:00-1:50 PM
Foundations: Speaking
Prof. Leslie Wagner
Class started in the computer lab, with a quiz of two parts: simple present (every day) and present continuous (right now). Prof. Wagner went over the instructions twice, very clearly: speak into the headset and don't touch the computer. She asked the following questions and the students answered in the simple present: What time do you wake up every day? What do you do every afternoon? What do you do every day? For the last question, they had five minutes to come up with as many sentences as they could. To complete part two of the quiz, students were given a sheet of paper with a picture of family members in their living room (ex. A kid at the table with books, grandma sitting in front of the tv, etc). First, Prof. Wagner asked what some of the characters were wearing, and then they had one minute to describe what the characters were doing in the present continuous tense (ex. Evan is studying, grandma is watching tv).
When we all got back to the classroom, I realized that the class was much smaller than it seemed in the lab. There were only five students. Professor Wagner also had an agenda for the day, which she went over with students prior to starting the lesson. The main topics of the day were blends (2 or 3 consonants together), digraphs (two consonants that make a new sound), and the simple past. Prof. Wagner refreshed her students' memories by reviewing the difference between consonants and vowels. Then she explained blends and projected a list of examples like br - bring, dr - drip, and sm - small. She repeated that for digraphs, but added an activity: she would read words from either column and the students had to hold up their fingers (1 or 2) to indicate which word she was pronouncing. For example, "chop" was in column 1 and "shop" in 2. If Prof. Wagner said "shop," students would hold up two fingers. She often had to repeat the word many times until the students were able to tell the difference. Students were given a list of words, and in pairs read them to each other. The goal was for each student to practice and correct each other's pronunciation if needed.
For the rest of the time, Prof. Wagner focused on the simple past. She wrote some words that indicate the past tense on the board
(yesterday, last night, last week) and explained the formula of the
simple past. Prof. Wagner
emphasized that they need to remember irregular verbs like get/got and
go/went. She asked each student what they did yesterday. When a student used the wrong tense, she corrected him immediately: "'go' is for every day and 'went' is for yesterday." Until class ended, the students took turns changing
infinitives into the simple past form by adding "ed" or by using the irregular version.
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