We had a successful lesson again on July 15. It was our 7th hour of teaching the level 4 ESL oral communicative class. We had 5 Chinese students in the class while a Japanese student was absent. The goal of this class was to encourage the students to practice summarizing language, express their own opinions about health with discussion language, present their main ideas with summarizing language and practice their listening skills in capturing information. We did a class introduction and warm-up activity before the group discussion, which followed by the presentations. Lastly, we did an exit activity to finish the class.
This time we added a “hook” at the beginning of the class. We put a piece of art on the cover page of our slides to match the topic of health, and we asked the students to guess from the art about the topic of the lesson. I found it a very successful approach as it increased the students’ interests as well as curiosity, and it could have all the students engaged from the very beginning of the class.
We found in the previous classes that the students tended to miss the “s” when using third-person singular verbs and we decided to work on this. After the warm-up activity, we included a brief grammar review, in which we instructed the grammatical rule of using third-person singular verbs. It seemed that all of the students were aware of the “s” rules, they just forgot to put it when they were speaking. Our sponsor teacher suggested that we could use a card with an “S” on it as a reminder, and we could hold up the card when the students forgot the “s”. This new measure went quite successfully. The students correct themselves quickly when the card was held up and I could see that they were trying not to forget the “s” after we started to use this reminder. I think this is a really good approach to remind the students when they forget about the “s” at the end of third-person singular verbs, even it can be a great reminding way for other common grammatically mistakes as the students will be reminded exactly on time without being interrupted in speaking. I think the reason for them forgetting the “s” on third-person singular verbs was that there is no verb form difference in Chinese grammar, and they have not practiced enough the third-person singular in the correct way. At the end of our class, I told the students to keep in mind the pink little card with “s” when they are expressing themselves. I think this vivid reminder in their mind will be helpful for them to remember the third-person singular “s” in speaking.
The students’ participation was so great this time. In previous classes, the female students would always participate after the male students and also not as much the male students; however, all of the three female students participated quite actively and even volunteered to present very soon after the presentation session got started. I was very happy to see the progress of the students and see them become more confident as well as feel better about themselves. I think that seeing themselves improving in English speaking and public speaking might be a reason for their positive changes.
This time, I showed the students that each of them was going to present a 3-minute summary of their partners’ opinions in their post-discussion presentations. I thought that this way the students would be able to take the notes of their partner’s ideas and have their presentations organized. Also, asking the students to summarize their partners’ ideas would encourage them to practice listening while taking notes of the key information. In the presentations, as each student summarized their partner’s ideas only on a few of the discussion questions, the listening practice questions were not all covered so I then decided to change it to a one-sentence interview and asked each student on the questions that they were involved in.
In our next class, we will keep using the “hook” as the starter and the reminder card to help the students to practice their third-person singular verbs throughout the class.