Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Logan_CO#2

J Logan Matthews
CO#2
Sep 2, 2014 (1:00am-1:50pm)
Hecht House, RM 313
Leslie's Foundations Speaking

My schedule still in disarray, I was present at the wrong time. That was because I had received a prior email to reschedule my observation for Thursday. However, the person who needed my slot had rescheduled as well so I was able to observe today's session without a problem. I quickly noticed that Leslie possessed a cheery inflection to her voice that seemed to prompt responses from the students more effectively than before. I could only ponder at how long it may have took to perfect the correct tone that the students enjoyed the most. Leslie quickly covered the prepositional review through elicitation and wrote some of the examples on the whiteboard.

Shortly thereafter they began two exercises for pairwork in which the students came up with ways to describe the placement of the objects in two instances of a classroom picture projected onto the whiteboard. With the picture superimposed on the whiteboard Leslie could denote the items where students had trouble in elicitation. I thought of how because of the small class size it is easy for the instructor to remember the names of the students. When this is not a ready convenience I suppose a ball or soft baton could suffice.

The final activity of the session was more pairwork where the students were informed to prepare some statements when asked about their partner. The instructor provided the necessary linguistic support with emphasis on the verb formats introduced from the grammar session, -s and -es.

2 comments:

  1. In lieu of calling students by name, would the teacher toss the ball or pass a soft baton to call on students to respond?

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    Replies
    1. Just something I had read before for large classes or in the beginning when you don't know everyone's name. The foundations class was rather small and personal.

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