In the practicum teaching this semester, I will be teaching an online level 4 ESL oral communicative class with my teaching partner Sylvie. There are six adult students in our class, five of them are from China while one is from Japan.
The first hour of the teaching was an introductory class. We had five students in this class as the Japanese student was absent. In order to meet our goal of getting to know each other, helping students to learn how to better use the BigBlueButton, and build an encouraging learning environment for the students, we planned a series of class activities, including student introductions based on some key points, the introduction of our expectations, questions and expectations for student teachers, BigBlueButton orientation, two truth and a lie activity, and a closing activity.
I found two challenges in this class. Firstly, there are differences between the students’ participation. Although they all participated in the activities and completed the speaking tasks, it was easy to tell the ones who liked to speak more. It’s good that students are active and willing to speak up, however, while some students behaved very active in class, the others might become relatively quiet. I believe that teachers should manage the class participation and keep a balance between students’ domination of discussion and students not willing to speak so that each of the students has chances to practice in class. In our next class, I will try giving the speaking opportunities first to the students who spoke less.
The second challenge was that the students did not like to turn their cameras on when speaking up. The reason for them not willing to turn their cameras on might be them not being prepared to show their looks and their space. As we are having online classes and not able to communicate face to face, I think turning cameras on is helpful for students to practice their non-verbal communicative skills and build a close learning community. Since we have stated our expectations and the reason for turning the cameras on when doing presentations and answering questions, they may be able to prepare themselves and turn their cameras on in discussion next time. I don’t want to make the students feel stressed about this, especially the shy ones. After all, helping the students to learn effectively and happily is one of the essential objectives. Sylvie and I have talked about this issue, we will see next time if the students can accept this better, if not, we may figure out some other ways to maintain the students’ learning effectiveness without them turning cameras on.
In the self-introduction activity, we asked the students to introduce themselves based on some key points we provided. I learned this approach in classroom observation and I found it very helpful for students to figure out what to say. With the key points, the students introduced themselves easily and they came up with even more topics around the key points we provided, which enhanced the class interaction. I felt we have already created an encouraging and supportive learning environment for the students in this hour of the class.
We almost finished our lesson plan in this class except for a two-minute closing activity. Also, we learned that the students have another class right after ours so we will plan our next lesson according to this situation. In our next class, we will introduce the students to some discussion language and arrange class discussions around some interesting topics to enhance students’ discussion skills.