In this hour of my classroom observation, I observed an ESL class that consisted of 8 international students from various cultural backgrounds. In the class, the teacher gave instructions around making decisions.
The teacher was very friendly with enthusiasm during teaching. I learned some useful teaching approaches from this observation. Firstly, I found that the result of the listening practice would be better if the teacher did some warm-up and instructions before letting the students listen to the dialogue. In this class, before listening to the dialogue, the teacher provided a picture and a few questions with students and taught the students some main sentences that were going to appear in the dialogue. The picture and the questions could build an impression and assumptions about the dialogue. With the impression and assumptions, students could focus better on the details.
Second, using hand gestures when teaching phonetic combination can be a very effective approach. The teacher used her fingers to show the students the phonetic combination of “I would” (I’d) by putting two of her fingers together and she used the hand gesture to remind the students when the students are practicing the sentence. This approach could help students to learn quickly how this phonetic combination works and create a visual memory, which will remind them when they are speaking.
Third, the way the teacher asked the groups to present the opinions was very creative. The teacher asked the students to talk about their ideas in pairs of two and ask the students to present their partners’ opinion instead of their own. I think this approach could enhance students’ interaction and communication with their peers as it requires them to listen carefully speak actively and memorize what they heard. The students will improve their language skills through these listening and speaking practices.