Assigned class for Beginners with Nora and Melinda..

Thursday 19 June 2008. I am now officially assigned a class to help teach. After had been observing classes, gathering research articles, searching for materials to co-write a Basic Reading textbook, I was assigned a class to help teach in the Beginners for this week and next week. Then, I will be assigned to help teach other levels. Thus, from now until then,I will be helping Nora (works from Mon.-Wed.) and Melinda (works from Thur. and Fri.) teach in four different skills: Integrated skills, Reading and Pronunciation skills, Listening and Speaking skills, Writing and Spelling. The class contains a group of 9 students: Mohammed, Yousef, Bander, Adel, Abdullah (from Saudi Arabia; Teresa, Khanh (from Columbia); Khanh and Tan (from Vietnam). The age range is from 20-35. Today,there were 4 courses-Integrated Skills, Listening & Speaking, Language Lab and Video (Speaking and Listening). In the Integrated Skills, we introduced them all the four English skills which are based around the week's theme in a book titled "Straightforward" The theme is about International School. The students learned days, colors and Verb to be. A couple of students have ZERO English background and the rest have difficulties in communication. Therefore, students worked on their own pace and did a lot of repetitions. Consequently, we had to go through the exercises slowly. While they were doing exercises, we stayed back to observe them and provided help to them individually. Then, students checked the answers with their partner, and we discussed the answers. Finally, we had them practice the exercises by role-playing and practicing dialogues in peers. The teacher prepared more exercises for the students to practice (just in case we had spare time). In Language Lab, we had them work on a software that was related to the book. Here, they reviewed all the four skills by themselves on the computer under the teacher's supervision. After coming back from lunch, we had Video class(speaking and listening);students watched a cartoon movie titled "Wallace and Gromit: A Grand Day Out." We provided a worksheet of exercises (before watching and after watching exercises) for them to work on before they did more talking with their classmates about the video. We tried to get them to involve with each other as much as we could.

Having observed and helped the class and students, I found that there were a couple of students who are a bit slow and have started learning English from scratch. Juliette, who has been in the program for quite some time, has a bit of difficulties in expressing herself as well as a habit of misplacing capital letters in a sentence. However, as we pointed out the errors and tried to encourage her to learn from them, she tried very hard and became gradually better. With the assistance and support from the teacher, I found, students usually attempt to do better and work even harder. The teacher and I were very proud of them. On Friday, the students had a test on Grammar and Vocabulary. Prior to giving them the test, the teacher reviewed the main points they learned in the past week. After they finished, I discussed the answers with the students while the teacher was checking their papers.

After the test, we did some activity with them, which I found really interactive and communicative. I then understood that one of the traits that a teacher should possess is to think from the feet. The teacher recognized that they lack on saying date. Thus, she nailed that down by having them practice, practice and practice. They enjoyed playing the game (asking their peers for their birthday and age, then they had to line up in order) and most importantly, they learned to say dates correctly.