Jackie CO-3

As I have only been to observe grammar courses because of my hectic day schedule, I could see many dramatic differences in teaching styles between professors. Felicia, of course, as we saw in the video of her teaching, is very direct, articulate, and commanding. She was much more relaxed in the course I observed, but probably because it was a level 8 class. If they weren’t fluent, they had tiny errors in tense shifts or pronunciation. It was so refreshing to hear them speak because I have seen both the bottom level and now, the top of English language learning. Felicia started her class by writing a tentative schedule on the board that were the activities she was going to go through, but not necessary the general topic like “Chapter 8.” This made it more difficult to understand what it was going to be going over, but her whole class layout seemed to go with that—the students had to guess by context clues what they were doing activities about. Then, afterwards, the examples would be given and explained. So, the students learned by themselves almost and were reaffirmed what they had just learned by Felicia. One great tool Felicia used during the whole lesson was the “what” strategy. The students did in fact know what they needed to say but they would have to repeat it until they got it correct. Felicia was relaxed the whole class by sitting down, but she sat at a desk by herself in front of the room, which commanded attention. Much work was done in pairs, and most of the pairs were assigned different topics. Overall, it was the best observation I have made in terms of classroom structuring, command, and overall teaching method being completely student-centered.