Alanna Felton CO #1

For my first class observation, I attended Professor Flemming's 2-2:50pm listening class on Monday, May 2nd. Professor Flemming was absent that day and Dr. Rios substituted for him. The class began by listening to a four-minute podcast about offshore oil-drilling. Students were instructed to listen to the podcast and take notes. Afterwards, Dr. Rios called on students and asked them to list pros and cons of offshore oil-drilling. He wrote down students' answers on the whiteboard in a t-chart with a "Pros" column and a "Cons" column. This activity tested students' listening comprehension skills by asking them to summarize and categorize the arguments they heard spoken on the podcast. 

Next, the class read an article about bioluminescent marine organisms. Dr. Rios took turns calling on students to read allowed from the essay, testing their reading fluency. After each paragraph, Dr. Rios asked students to tell him the main idea of the paragraph, testing their reading comprehension. After they finished reading the article, the class worked together to fill in a list of key terms from the article, defining the words and identifying which part of speech they were. 

Observing how Dr. Rios conducted class inspired me. He kept students engaged by continuously calling on them and connected the subject matter of the podcast and article to humorous personal anecdotes. He made sure to contextualize necessary terms like off-shore drilling and big picture before beginning activities and thoroughly answered students' questions about grammar. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Alanna Felton TS #18

I met with Hyobin over Zoom on Thursday, August 15 th . Like last time, we spent this tutoring session working on a homework assignment. I believe that assisting Hyobin with homework is helping me practice guiding a student to the correct answers without just sharing them. Hyobin had to write sentences with vocabulary using simple subject and simple predicate. I will admit that I quickly looked up the definition of both terms to make sure I was giving Hyobin correct information. (I believe that it is better to be honest with a student if I am unsure about anything rather than passing along false information. I would also hope that it might help by showing them that language-learning is a continuous process, one which even native speakers are always engaging in.) After that, we worked on the sentences together.
Read more

Alanna Felton TS #15

I met with Hyobin over Zoom on Monday, August 29 th . We spent today’s tutoring session completing a lesson about sentence structure. I began by asking Hyobin to define simple and compound sentences to check her comprehension of the lesson so far. After we finished the presentation, Hyobin asked me if I could help her with a homework assignment requiring her to write sentences using vocabulary words. She asked me what a word meant, and I tried to guide her to the answer by breaking the word down into components that she was already familiar with, instead of giving her the answer outright.
Read more

Isabelle TS#19

During my last tutoring session with Henghua, we worked on intonation and the use of emotion during speech. We started out with a discussion on the two types of intonation: rising and falling. I explained the patterns, how both sound, and when they are usually used. I then had him try to speak a few sentences using either rising or falling intonation. After this, I played some audio clips from a website that used rising and falling intonation and had him try to distinguish between the two. He did a good job in hearing the differences. It was just a little hard for him to do it in his own speech. I then wrote out 2 sentences and had him read them in different ways- like: angry, happy, worried, sad, etc. I modeled how to do it for him and how I would say the sentences in those different emotions. We decided to work on these topics this day because he told me that these were things he struggled doing when speaking English, and that he wanted to get better at them. At the very end we did o...
Read more