Matthew - Class Observation #3

Last Tuesday I sat in an afternoon class with Ryan for a listening class in the intermediate/high level. The lesson plan for the day was on the board and together they briefly went over what was going to be covered. At the beginning, Ryan handed out a teacher evaluation for the class to fill out. This will let him see what is working for the students and what they are interested in learning for the remaining weeks.

After this was completed, the first lesson was based around watching a movie and filling out a sheet with the missing words in a sentence. The class first observed a 4-5 minute scene from the movie "The Terminal" and was asked to look over the document before really trying to fill in the missing words. They then proceeded to watch the segment two separate times. Each time the scene ended, the students were given a few minutes to fill out what they comprehended. I thought that this was challenging, even to myself, because of the slang and dialect that the actors were speaking in. This seems like a good method of learning how to listen because the student gets to understand the context of the conversation and can determine what they expect to hear by how the conversation is going. I found that the students were generally interested in the movie because it had a good level of entertainment. To me, having that level of enjoyment while learning is important. One thing that I found challenging in this lesson was the speed of the language while trying to fill in the blanks at the same time. It was noticably challenging for one section of the paper because there were a lot of missing words in a small segment of conversation. Personally, I could understand what was being said, but being able to write as fast would definitely be challenging. I will take that into consideration when I use this teaching method (considering the level of the students).

The second portion of the class was dictated around a listening to different accents approach. There were two speakers that would discuss different topics. One had a very interesting southern accent and the other was a teenage african-american male. Students were to write down key topics and general outlines of what they were talking about. It was a good exercise to allow the students to experience the melting pot of American accents.

Until next time,

Matthew