Alexandra CO 2

OBSERVATION 2 – Grammar with Olga

Today I arrived in Olga’s morning grammar course. By coincidence I knew two out of the three students in the class since they were my tutees (Dongsoek and Ahmed). Olga, had a very informal style, and seemed very comfortable in her presentation style, despite tending to stay mostly in one corner (unless she needed to write something on the board or to oversee class activities). She reviewed with the students the various forms of conditional statements, writing an example of each and leaving the examples on the board. This was very constructive and informative for me as well, since I had never formally studied conditional statements in the English language, so I appreciated the extra time this gave me to take notes from the whiteboard. It was interesting to two of my tutees in new environments and to observe how they play interacted through the games Olga had prepared for today. These particular games centered on the grammatical idea of the conditional, and the cultural idea of superstitions. She encouraged me to collaborate in the activity.

In the first game the sets were self-contained couples of zero conditional statements split in two, which meant that my partner and I had to match couplets to arrive at complete statements about superstitions. We did not know many of the superstitions, so we had to guess many of their meanings, which was fun. It was interesting to hear the students reasoning for putting two particular clauses, even if I knew them to be incorrect pairings. In the next game, she distributed matching pieces across the two groups, but this game was more complicated since it involved many styles of conditional sentences and therefore a great variety of grammatical constructs. This required collaboration between the two groups. The game got competitive, since Dongsoek would unapologetically steal our pieces, which was matched with Ahmed’s retaliation, (much to Olga’s amusement). She did not stop it since it was necessary for the game, seemed constructive and was done in good intentions. I appreciated this hands-off, yet vigilant approach, and found that Olga’s very straightforward style had led to my own retention of the concept.