EFL Class in Korea 9/15

This class was with children who were in the beginner level. It was a class size of around 30 students or more. The focus of the lesson was learning simple past tense sentences.

The first thing I noticed is that there were two teachers in the class. They worked together by taking turns with the lesson (asking students questions for the drills, and playing the game at the end) and had pretty much equal time teaching the students.

They started off by asking “How was your day?”, which introduces the language lesson of the day. The students were given time to think of responses and ideas to write down before practising and while doing so, the teachers went around to the different tables to check and assist, which is great to make sure the practice or game goes smoothly. The teacher only spoke Korean to help some students understand the “Louvre Museum” and sometimes the students wrote ideas in Korean, and the teacher had to tell them to write English responses. Other methods used were practising with a partner, using claps to regain everyone’s focus and attention, and playing a group game. Some of the tools used were video clips with a dialogue between two people demonstrating the language focus and reward and praise including prizes for the winners of the game. There was a song that was played first, taught line by line by the teacher, and then everyone sang to which practised past tense sentences such as “What did you do?” and “It was fun!”  Before watching the videos and writing down the sentences on the board, the teacher would ask the students “Who do you see in the picture?”, “Where are they?” or “What are they doing?” first, eliciting the target language. After listening to a dialogue, one of the teachers asked “What did you hear?” to again elicit the language they have just heard, which were sentences such as “How was your vacation?” and the past tense response with it.

I really liked that you could really see the energy level go up with this group of young students while playing the Last Word game. It was a great idea to move the chairs when forming groups for the interaction. One thing I might change would be when they had two students stand up in their seats to almost recite dialogues (it was not as natural as it didn’t seem like they were talking to each other) I would probably have them either go up in front of the class and face each other or just practice with the person next to them. At the end, I might have reviewed all the past tense verbs we covered in that lesson: went to, watched, ate, studied, visited, read, bought, made, etc. with a short sentence for each.