Last Thursday, I observed Ryan Flemming’s speaking class.
There were two major activities during the fifty-minute class. For the first
activity, the entire class went down to the computer lab. Ryan displayed several
open-ended questions onto the board with the projector, and each student had
two or three minutes to record their response to the question on a headset-mic.
This activity took about half the class. I imagined how much work it would take
for Ryan to analyze and give feedback to his students from all the voice
recordings.
The
second activity revolved around a discussion question, put together by one of
the students, Tingwei. He had typed up a discussion question about healthcare
in the US for the rest of the class. The question was quite lengthy,
multi-parted, and even contained a brief explanation of the situation in the
United States. After reading the questions and explanation from his paper,
Tingwei led the discussion among the students. I think just about everyone had
something to contribute.
My
understanding was that every student, throughout the course, is required to
prepare their own discussion question and lead their classmates through a discussion.
This seems like a great activity in that it facilitates outside-class writing
practice to put together a succinctly written question good enough to read to
the rest of the student’s peers. Also, it provides material that students can
communicate about. But, most importantly, it helps those language-learners
break that barrier of hesitation when it comes to speaking to others, to say
nothing of the social barrier that must be broken through when speaking a
foreign language to a group of people.
I
took notice of how Ryan interacted with his students. He spoke quite
deliberately, giving enough space between his words. He was also very
encouraging to his students in all their attempts, and gave Tingwei fair
critique on how he handled the discussion question.
No comments:
Post a Comment