Xueping CO 2

       I observed Natalie’s listening class on May 14^th.  The students are in Group One.

       During this class, three aspects impressed me a lot: the organization of the class, the teacher’s voice and spoken speed, the participation of the students.

       At the beginning of this listening class, Natalie reviewed the listening materials that they have learnt the last lesson.  Then she moved on to the next part—Part 3 in their listening text books.  The topic of their listening handouts was “Jara Heads”.  She asked the students to turn to Page 13 and learn all the vocabulary that would be heard in their listening videos.  Since these students are low level English learners, Natalie spoke in a slow and very clear voice.  In order to help the students to concentrate on the vocabulary studies, she wrote down all the new vocabulary on the whiteboard, including the definitions and the sample sentences.  Before she wrote  down the complete sentences, she always asked the students to come up with their own sentences firstly.  Sometimes, she also did some actions or interacted with the students to help them to understand the meaning of the vocabulary.  It seemed that the students were interested in learning about these words instead of feeling bored.

       After the students had known how to use these new vocabulary,  Natalie started to play the listening video for the students.  She played the video for three 3 times.  Each time, she showed them different tasks to do.  For the first time, she reminded them to focus on catching the main idea of this video.  For the second time, she asked them to read the transcript when they were listening.  After the last time, she paired them into 3 small groups to discuss all the comprehension questions and compare their answers.  Then, she reviewed all of them together with the students to help them understand this video correctly.

       At the end of this class, all the students were required to summarize the main idea of this listening material.  I totally believe that this was a well-organized listening class.  I appreciate this observation class, which had shown me many teaching techniques in a real class.