In the second hour of my teaching with my teaching partner Sylvie, we had all five students in the class. Our objectives for this class was to help the students figure out their personal strengths in English communication and their learning goals, improve the students’ discussion language knowledge (including agreeing, disagreeing, verbal feedback, responding, confirming meaning, and expression of neutral/strong opinion), develop their discussion and presentation skills, and to find out about the discussion topics they were are interested in to use for our coming classes.
In the activity about figuring out personal communication strengths and learning goals, we found that most of our students wanted to improve their vocabulary and listening skills. I think we should include more instructions about vocabulary and some activities to practice their listening.
When we are playing our jeopardy game, there was one student who was not sure how to play the game as he missed the game introduction part. I realized that we might need to give the students a few minutes to take a break between their last class and our class. As they have another class right after ours, we must end our class a few minutes before their next class so that they can have a short break. We will ask our students about their ideas about this in our next class.
One thing I think we should spend more time on is the instruction part before games. We played a jeopardy game today as a pre-instruction activity to assess students’ current knowledge about discussion language. A student asked about the difference between responding and verbal feedback when the game was almost done. Since they got quite a few mistakes during the game, I think most of them might felt confused about this question, yet nobody asked earlier. Next time, we need to give some more instructions before games. Although the game was for assessment, helping students to learn and practice should be our main direction. Also, I’m thinking of adding more focused practice about the discussion language to see if they are all clear about it before getting into discussions so that they can use the phrases better in discussions, which is also the communicative practice.
We didn’t ask our students to turn their cameras on this time. When I was observing their former class, I noticed that they showed only tiny parts of their face and I felt they were really uncomfortable with the cameras. Helping students to learn effectively and happily is essential, if the students will be stressed and affected mentally by turning of cameras, it will be a counter effect then. We may ask the students the reasons for not wanting to turn cameras on next time. Our time-control was overall good today. As we started a little late, we were not able to finish the presentation part and we left two groups to the next class. For our closing activity, we asked the students to choose the topics they are interested in from a list provided so that we can prepare even more engaging and motivating discussion. contents for them in the coming classes.