Making difficult decisions or choice 10/7

This was a class of 8 adult students at the intermediate level. The class is seated in a horseshoe shape. The teacher observed starts the lesson with a short listening comprehension activity. After an audio (an exchange between co-workers with one of them sharing details about finding a wallet) the teacher checks for understanding by asking the students questions such as “How do they know each other?” She uses the picture on the projector to guide the students and to elicit responses to help students form explanations for their answer. The teacher asks the students questions after they respond that they are colleagues, such as “What tells you they are?” “What are they wearing?” Having been asked these questions, the students listen to the audio a second time and are able to listen with more intention and are then able to provide more details about what happens in the dialogue. More concept checking questions are asked the next time around, this time involving understanding of key information such as “Do they keep the money for themselves?”

There were many instances of the teacher using techniques to facilitate students’ grammar and speaking. Information gap was used when they were doing worksheets and then checking with a partner. The teacher isolates grammar points and explains them in detail. The model sentences are written on the board and she writes out grammatical structures such as IF + S + past simple + S + ‘d + infinitive. She checks for comprehension by eliciting the target language and uses techniques such as gesturing over her shoulder when talking about the past.

One of the ways she works on their speaking is when the teacher helps her students with pronunciation by marking the stressed syllables on vocabulary words like charity and careless. She also writes down whether it’s a noun or adjective and provides the phonetic transcription, which has me wondering whether the students have knowledge of the phonetic symbols. The students practice saying certain sentences as a class and then the teacher has them saying them individually. In this lesson, there was a clear focus on helping them with the correct way to say words with contractions. There were many opportunities to practice expressing themselves and fluency in speaking while incorporating the grammar learned as the students had a lot of pairwork, often working with practice cards with prompts on them. They asked and answered questions such as “If you found some money, would you keep it?” Following the grammar structure demonstrated, they make sentences with a partner and tells the group the information about their partners. An activity towards the end has them changing information on cue cards so the information is true about them – such as “I wouldn’t buy a bigger house, I’d buy a small cottage in the middle of nowhere.”

The teacher is very focused on the lesson objectives and listens in on the conversations between students, often crouching to their eye level as they are seated. For me, I liked how clear everything is as there are many explanations and examples used throughout the lesson. I did find the drills to be on the repetitive side and thought that there was a lack of variety in the practice activities. Taking into consideration the many different types of learners we have inside the classroom, this is something I would do differently. After a couple round of drills and practicing with a partner, I might switch it up with activities that involve some movement or a game while working on the language because it’s easy to lose engagement over the extended time. There were many targeted practice for grammar but I think when lesson planning, some of the practice could be about a different topic (while still using the conditional) to add interest.