Wednesday afternoon (the 31st)
I observed Candace Walter's speaking class. For the first little bit
it seemed the students were a bit quieter than normal because Candace
asked them if they were being quiet because they were nervous. They
soon livened up a bit and there was some friendly discussion, and
then Candace asked me to introduce myself. Several students asked me
a few questions, and then everyone settled down to the lesson.
Candace had several items of review
and instruction to go over with the students: some of it was on the
board and some was on the projector. The students were going to be
having a timed speaking exercise, so some of the things shown on the
projector were various instructional examples on transcribing their
speech and editing it for errors.
After the instructions everyone
moved upstairs to the computer lab and 'plugged in' (put headsets
on). There was a practice question for warm up and to try to alleviate
some of the nervousness. The question was “Do you prefer being rich
or famous? Describe why?” The question was displayed on each
student's computer screen for one minute while they prepared their
speech, and then they had one minute to speak. After the practice
question the students were asked “At what age did you begin to
study a second language? Does age affect a persons ability to learn a
second language?”
After the students recorded their
speech they started to transcribe it. Not all of the students were
totally done when the class time ended, and I'm not sure if any of
them had edited their transcript, so they were given instructions to
save the files and have the assignment done by Friday.
Observing this class was
particularly interesting to me because the day before I had developed
a lesson plan in which the students developed a speech and
transcribed and edited it. I was able to see the process in action
and observe the reality of interruptions caused by technical
difficulties or students forgetting to press the record button :0)
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