For my first classroom observation, I observed an adult ESL class and an instructor interview. The class was taught by Tanya Cowie at Vancouver Community College. The class was at beginner level 1-2 (literacy) and there were 12 adult students in the class. The main goal of the class was to help the students to be familiar and fluent with clothing words as well as be comfortable using the words while shopping.
Throughout the class, the instructor used various effective teaching strategies to facilitate the class. Firstly, the instructor brought the clothing items to the class as object teaching materials to teach the clothing words. While learning the words with visual stimulation, students remembered the words easily because they had the connections between the words and the objects in their minds. Also, the class looked more like a clothing store which made the learning process more interesting. Second, I got inspired by the approach that the instructor used to help students to remember the dialogue. After the teaching and practicing parts with the dialogue on the whiteboard, the instructor erased one or two words in each sentence and left underlines there to replace the words and assist students to read the sentences out. After a couple of repetitions of doing this, there were only underlines in the whole dialogue. Students learnt this whole dialogue by heart smoothly and easily. I agreed that students should learn the basic sentence structures by heart in order to use them for different situations, and I found that the instructor’s method was a great way for students to manage this. The third thing I learnt from this classroom observation was the teaching process that the instructor applied. Usually, teachers only do the teaching and practicing parts in the classroom and leave the learning by heart part as homework. However, the instructor involved this part in the middle of her class. As the instructor said in her interview, the students in her class mostly worked in the daytime and came to learn English in the evening. They could be very tired already and had no much time for after-class homework. The instructor’s teaching approach could reduce homework stress for working students. Also, to make the repetition practice more interesting, the instructor employed various class activities and games so that students could learn the contents by heart in a relaxing and interesting repetition time.
I observed some challenges for students in learning. Sometimes the students could not manage to pronounce the word accurately even though the instructor tried to correct them. In my perspective, it is important for language learning students to practice with accurate pronunciations and usages when they are learning new content because it will take much more effort to change once the inaccurate language usages settle in their minds. For adult language learners, do listening practice repeatedly is even more important than rushing to the speaking because only if we absorb the correct input can enhance the accuracy of our output.
After the classroom reflection of the observation, I found that I learned various kinds of class activities and games, which can increase students’ interest in learning and help them to learn easily and effectively. Also, we should increase the proportion of listening practice for adult students, especially for beginner-level classes. Finally, considering students’ living situations is helpful for teachers to design the whole class goals and processes more suitable for the class.