In this hour of teaching the level 4 ESL oral communicative class, we had 4 Chinese students in the class while a Chinese student and Japanese student were absent. We decided to introduce some new language skills this time, and we gave instructions about summarizing language this time. The goal of this class was to encourage the students to express their own opinions about movies with discussion language, present their main ideas with summarizing language and practice their listening skills in capturing details. The topic Movie was also one of the topics that the students were interested in. We presented the class outline and objectives and did a warm-up activity first. After that, we had instruction about summarizing language, including a list of summarizing phrases, what the functions of summarizing language are, and some dos and don’ts when summarizing opinions. We then put the students in breakout rooms to discuss their opinions around a few controversial questions followed by presentations in which the students summarized their discussions. We also provided the students with a few questions related to their presentations to practice their listening skills. At last, we finished the class with an exit activity.
This class was again a successful one. First of all, the students’ participation improved again in class. In the warm-up activity, we asked the students to share their favourite movies focused on a few specific questions to help the students to get ready for the later main discussion about movies. All the students were engaged well and spoke much about the topic. In the discussion, the students were assigned in different breakout rooms and discussed in pairs about five controversial questions. The pair I observed had an active and effective discussion. Both of the students shared and compared their opinions on the questions. One of the students was taking the class in China, the class time for her was 2:30 a.m., and she was still attentive and engaged well in the class.
Also, the students’ willingness to share their cameras represents them being comfortable to open up and participate. In our warm-up activity, we wanted the students to turn their cameras on when presenting, and the two female students refused that. In the presentation, we asked the students to turn their cameras on again, but we didn’t ask again the female students as we didn’t want to make it stressful for them. Surprisingly, one female student turned on her camera this time without asking again. I felt that the student must have been felt less pressure so that she can open up more. Before the students got into the discussion, I presented the format of the post-discussion presentation. I think this could help the students to be clearer about their tasks in their discussion and do better in their presentations.
Another success we had in this class was that the students completed the listening practice very well this time. In the previous classes, participation in this session was not very balanced. I mentioned before the presentations to the students this time that I hope each of them can answer one of the questions this time and suggested them to take notes while listening. They all participated and got the correct answers this time, and I was so happy to see their improvement.
Lastly, we planned to assess the outcomes of our instruction about summarizing language by asking the students to share the dos and don’ts they just learned. All of the students were able to recall the points and we were very happy to see the progress in the students.
I have a few thoughts about our next class. Firstly, our warm-up activity finished a little later than planned as some of the students were very willing to share in detail. In order to finish the class on time, I then decided to cut a little bit of the discussion time as I had planned a few more minutes than needed just in case. In the end, we finished the class right on time. It’s good that the students were being very active, but we still should make the class going as planned. I think we can provide fewer questions in warm-up activity so that the students can share freely, and we can move the activity at the planned pace. Our sponsor teacher suggested that we pay attention to students’ grammatical mistakes in their presentations, for example, the third person singular verb form, so we will work on that next time and keep encouraging the students to practice their summarizing skills.