CO #3

I sat in on Victoria’s listening class on 2/12/13.  This was a class that I purposefully signed up for simply because I found our TEFL listening course plan incredibly difficult to do and I wanted to see how a class would be run!  Victoria definitely showed me that this shouldn’t be a stressful type of class to teach and seeing how deftly she dealt with the class (it was really small that day because people were sick and because of an awkward class situation that had happened the day before, which I came to find out after the class let out).  The class was learning terms about being sick and listened to a recorded dialogue on VOA website about sickness and specific terms and phrases to use when talking about being sick (i.e.- “bill of health”, “splitting headache”, “running a fever”, “at death’s door”), which I thought was super helpful, considering I was sitting in the corner hacking up a lung at that point.  Victoria often paused the recording to check for comprehension and to allow students the opportunity to ask questions.  Often times, she would explain phrases any way, as sometimes students would adopt the “knowing head nod” instead of admitting that they were confused about something in particular.  Victoria made use of the board by writing phrases and terms, but also by drawing very simple pictures next to certain ones and that seemed to help explain things more thoroughly.  After listening to the recording and going over any difficulties the students might have, she gave them a group assignment of coming up with a  dialogue about a visit to the doctor’s office that was anywhere between 15 and 20 lines long, and that it must include the vocabulary that they had learned.   She walked between the two groups to check their work, but didn’t hover too much.  It was mostly to make sure that everyone was doing what they should be doing.  After they had finished their presentations, she asked both groups to present and would often pause to ask the other group questions about what was being presented, which seemed to be helpful for the students to start piecing things together in context instead of just knowing what it meant on its own.