In the third hour of teaching this online level 4 ESL oral communicative class with my teaching partner, we had 5 students in the class (4 from China and 1 from Japan). The goal of this class was to help the students use discussion language to articulate their opinions about pets and improve their presentation skills. We chose pets as our discussion topic today as some of the students chose it as a topic they were interested in. After finishing the presentations of the two groups that were left from the last class, we started the lesson with a warm-up activity including a few interactive questions and a video. We did a review of the discussion language before group discussion, and the students presented a discussion summary afterwards. To end the class, we did an exit activity and let the students shared whether their minds have been changed by their peers’ opinions.
In the two presentations, the students were willing to turn their cameras on at this time and they looked more comfortable and confident in their presentation, their speaking was fluent as well. In order to introduce some listening practice in the presentation session, we put a few questions about the presentation contents in the shared notes before the presentations and asked the students who did not present to answer the questions. One of the students showed us his great concentration and listening skills by providing correct and detailed answers. I want to keep this listening practice in our future classes and encourage each student to actively participate in this practice to enhance their skills to capture details in listening.
In the discussion session, I joined one group in the breakout room to observed. There were three students in this group, and I found the participation was not well-balanced. After encouraging them all to jump in the discussion and to use the discussion phrases that was showed at the time, they worked hard on it to use the phrases and engaged well. In our next class, I plan to assign different roles in each group, such as the presenter, the active participant, and the devil’s advocate, so that they can be more engaged with their individual responsibilities. Also, while the presenter is presenting, the other group members should be there to add some more aspects.
As we had to finish last week’s presentations, we were a little short of time, so we asked the students to choose two or three discussion questions from the five one we had prepared. We finished the discussion and the presentation sessions for this time, so we will have enough time to focus on the topic for the next class. I found that it’s hard for teachers to turn time around in short-time classes as the schedule is packed. In short-time classes, teachers cannot turn the time around by adjusting the break time or activity time like in long-time classes, so teachers must be more flexible with reasonable plans in one-hour classes.
In the presentation session, I realized that it’s a good way to develop the summarization skills by asking them to give brief statements of the main points of their discussions. I would like to ask the presenting students to summarize their discussions in our next class while their group members should be adding some more parts of the summary. Also, I think we should increase the difficulty of the listening practice by providing more difficult questions for the students who listen to the presentations, questions that include more information and require them to think deeply. We should raise increasingly the difficulty of the listening practice and develop the students’ ability to catch the details in listening, deal with the information in mind while listening, and take notes while listening. Another issue I think we should pay attention to is that the students might be overwhelmed with too many phrases on a list of the discussion language as they might be confused about which one they should use. Also, they might always choose to use the ones they are more familiar with. Instead of asking them to practice many phrases together, we can ask them to intensively practice a few specific phrases at one time. After practicing them all in a while, we can then provide all the phrases together. By then, they will be using all those phrases easily.