The ninth hour of my practicum was another wonderful lesson, and it was the second evaluation of my teaching. In this hour of teaching the level 4 ESL oral communicative class, there were 4 Chinese students in the class while a Chinese student and a Japanese student were absent. The objectives of this class were to encourage the students to share their own opinions about festivals with discussion language, summarize their partners’ opinions, and practice their listening skills in capturing information.
My teaching partner and I decided to try a new warm-up activity this time. The goal of this activity is to practice summarizing language and discussion language. We prepared a circle on our PPT and asked the students to place their name cursors on it to simulate sitting in a circle in the classroom. We then provided a couple of questions about festivals. The students took turn responding to the former student’s opinions with discussion language and share their own opinions. The last student summarized the mini discussions with summarizing language. This activity went quite smoothly. The students showed interests and were actively engaged. They used summarizing language and discussion language well.
After stating their tasks in the post-discussion presentations, I put the students in pairs to discuss a few questions about festivals. The pair I observed had a pretty active discussion. The students appeared interests, creativity, and critical thinking upon the questions. In order to enhance the students’ attentiveness and listening skills in the discussion session, as well as their participation in the presentations, I asked them to summarize their partners’ opinions in post-discussion presentations. I could see the improvements the students have made each time. They have been getting more and more confident and open-minded while developing their speaking skills.
The students also did great in the post-presentation listening practice. This listening activity was meant to have all the students being attentive while listening to the presenters and develop skills to capture key information in listening while taking notes. I went through the listening questions with the students ahead of the presentations and ask the students to answer the questions when the presentations were finished. When we started this activity a couple of weeks ago, the students were not very engaged, and their participation was not balanced. Through the time and practices, the students’ participation in this session and skill of capturing main information were significantly improved.
As before, we took notes of the pronunciations that were mispronounced by the students throughout the class, and we did a post-presentation instruction on it. We sent two mispronounced words for each student, demonstrated the correct pronunciations, and have all the students to turn on their mics to practice with us. In our exit activity, we asked each student to make a sentence with the two words they were assigned. We saw improvements in their pronunciation as well. I believe that communicative skill is closely related to listening skills, pronunciations, fluency, confidence, and an open mindset. In order to develop students’ communicative skills, we should put effort into these factors and be encouraging and supportive to the students during their improvement.