I completed two more teaching hours on June 21st. I decided to teach vocabulary again this week because I wanted to get more practice. This would help my sponsor teacher assess my teaching ability and to provide me with more feedback about what I did well on and what I need to improve on.

Reflecting on the courses

I think that the teaching that I did for the reading course went better than last time. The biggest obstacle that I encountered was that I had over-prepared. I planned an interactivity where students would be quizzed on the vocabulary from chapters nine and ten. However, I found out that the students had only covered chapter nine and had not yet been introduced to the other vocabulary. My sponsor teacher and I decided it was best to begin the lesson with the interactive activity instead of teaching it at the end of the class. This activity utilized a quiz app called Kahoot!, which I had the students download. There were some students who were familiar with the app and have used it previously in other classes. The competitive aspect seemed to engage most students. As a whole, I think that the activity was a success even though some students became less focused as the activity went on and were distracted by other things.

The rest of the class utilized the materials from the textbook. My sponsor teacher stressed that there is nothing wrong with teaching from the textbook and I wanted to try to incorporate them for the remaining time. Since the students were only familiar with the vocabulary from Chapter nine, I had more vocabulary that I could introduce if we finished the materials for Chapter nine. The vocabulary warm-up activity that I had created for the students went by very quickly and the students found it too easy. So much so, they asked me what they were supposed to do next after they finished finding their classmate with the matching card. I also had students take turns reading sentences in a cloze activity where they chose which vocabulary words belonged in the blanks.

If I were to teach the lesson again, I would further adapt the vocabulary matching activity. Students found the activity much easier than I had expected and adding additional stages to it could help make it more challenging. I don't think that the textbook activities require additional modification, so I would keep those the same. However, I would double check with my sponsor teacher which vocabulary she covered in class so that I would know which to start with and which require me to introduce new materials to the class. This would ensure that I would not add unfamiliar words as part of the quiz activity, especially since it was meant as a review activity and is less suitable for introducing new words. I think that the quiz could also be improved by changing some of the illustrations that I used because a few of them were somewhat ambiguous and may have confused some of the students.

I think that the teaching I did for the cultural conversational class went well. The theme for the class was reasons for meeting with a teacher or an instructor in an academic setting. Since my sponsor teacher has I encouraged me to use the whiteboard more often in my lessons, I made an effort to write down important information like expressions and reasons why students might want to meet with a teacher or an instructor. I tried to write some of the information prior to the start of class so that I would spend less time writing during the lesson. I think that this strategy was helpful because I had more time to talk to the class. Students also seemed more engaged and both the students and I had visual material to refer to. I think that the students completed the printed dialogues in the textbook without much difficulty. However, I think that the dialogue worksheet was somewhat difficult for the students.

I tried to help the students by directing them to look for contextual tools and to use the language on the whiteboard in their scripts. We went over the dialogues as a class after they completed them. I compared what the content of their scripts with the answers that I had prepared and shared other ways that they could have completed the exercise. I wanted to make the materials useful and to fit the needs of the students, so I included more feeling expressions. (e.g. "I feel stupid because...
) I realize that these are not pleasant things to say, but they reflect language that might help students express themselves authentically. For me, the key element that I want to focus on is providing tools for students to use in real life and that goes beyond using positive expressions that are prepared by teachers and curriculum and textbook designers. While I don't want students to think or label themselves as being stupid, they might feel that way when they are under a lot of stress. I think that some students appreciated learning the additional material.

If I were to teach the lesson again, I would spend more time teaching students about context and how to use it to infer the missing information about what the characters in the characters said in the dialogues. I think that some of the students had difficulty knowing what to write and how make the dialogues flow. I would include this topic in a separate lesson and incorporate teaching materials where we would focus on this specific element of conversational texts. Aside from this modification,I cannot think of any other things I would change or add to this lesson.