Skip to main content

Ashley CO #1

The first class I observed was a Grammar Class on January 14th. This class was my first exposure to any of the CIES classes and I found it to be interesting as well as a reminder of how little I knew about how to teach english as a foreign language. The teacher, Ms. Sana McHarek, encouraged me to be interactive with the class and to walk around helping the students with class assignments when they needed it. Doing so forced me to not only be interactive, but also helped me to realize how much slower I needed to speak with the beginner students. It took me a second to adjust and realize how difficult it can be to depict the student's current level and then adjusting my speaking level to theirs. I started trying to help by recommending how to fix every error I saw on their practice worksheets, but then realized that this is not a good way to go about helping them productively, and should rather help them solely on the errors revolving around the lesson for that day. I found pointing out too many critiques at once was overwhelming, and it was better to take it one step at a time. While observing I took notes on several potential grammar activities and ways of teaching as well as interacting with the students.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ashley CP #3

My third conversation partner meeting was with Josue, my conversation partner from Paris, France. He suggested that we go to a restaurant for this meeting, and recommended the Colombian restaurant on Tennessee St. called "Super Perros". I had never been to this restaurant before, so it was interesting to not only converse with someone from outside of my culture but also at a cultural restaurant with an atmosphere and menu different than what I am used to. Most of the menu was in Spanish, so we were able to bond over trying to figure out what the menu was saying, and ended up sharing a lot of laughs over it. During our meeting, we caught up on how he was doing at CIES, what he's involved in in Tallahasee, and discussed deeper topics such as the current political affairs going on in France. This led to a grander discussion about American politics, and it turned out we had similar views. It was interesting to connect our ideas across border lines, realizing we all want the ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Angelena TS #14

On Monday, February 18 th , I met with Yahyia at CIES at 12:00.   He wanted to go over a reading passage that he needed to write a summary about.   He understood all of the main points of the passage, but just needed some help with certain vocabulary words.   Words included in the passage attuned, fraught, fixated, and obsessed.   I helped him figure out what the words could mean by using context clues from the sentence, which helped him.   Afterwards, I gave him synonyms for each word and would use the words in a sentence so that he could get an even better understanding.   Afterwards, I helped him write a short summary, but he seemed to have a good understanding of what to do for this and did not really need that much help.   When we were done, I told him to come up with at least two or three sentences for each vocabulary word so that he could get extra practice.  
Post a Comment
Read more

Jack CP #3

For my third meeting with a conversation partner, I met with Charles, who was Brazilian. Unfortunately we only met once because I had to drop the TEFL class not long after we had our first meeting. Charles and I met at the Starbucks attached to Dirac. His brother was a chemistry major and the building was right across Legacy Way, so it was a perfect location. I believe the theme that Claire gave us was about food, so we chatted about our favorite meals typical to our respective countries. Charles had heard of most of the foods that I mentioned, but he had a lot of interesting things to say about his favorite Brazilian meals. The names were quite long and in very fast Portuguese, so it was hard to remember exactly what he mentioned, but a lot of the dishes were meat based and sounded delicious (even though I am a vegetarian).
Post a Comment
Read more