The second hour of teaching brought with it new experiences to learn from. The class was the same as last week plus one additional student who is a level 1 speaker. The rest of the class consists of 5 adult level 3 speaking students from various cultural backgrounds. The overall main objective in class is to get the students speaking as much as possible. To try and increase their interest subject matter on the subject, we asked the students to email us a list of topics they are interested in.
Overall, I think the lesson went okay. The students were pretty quiet for the main activity but seemed to enjoy the warm up activity which consisted mainly of casual conversation skills. In the main discussion the students became quiet, with two students answering most of the questions. The other students were very reluctant to speak, and needed a lot of prompting from me. I’m not sure how to engage students more who appear to be reluctant on speaking. I’m not even sure why they were reluctant. Perhaps it was the subject matter? We chose a level 1 article, went over difficult vocabulary, and read it twice. They also had a copy available to look at. We thought the questions would be easy to understand but maybe they were not engaging enough. The students seem to be pretty quiet, maybe this type of discussion set up doesn’t work for the students in the class. In the future, I think I will approach discussions in a different format, perhaps role playing, or a more competitive format to engage the students.
I think my performance in the class was okay. My speech is a good speed and quite clear. I think I chose appropriate vocabulary for the students in my explanations. The biggest thing I want to change is shifting from a teacher-centric lesson to a student-centric lesson. I don’t want to develop any potentially bad habits this early in my teaching career. The next week I’ve already addressed this, and am trying new strategies to see how they work. I really hope I’m on the right track. I’ll be reporting back next week with the results!
