On Tuesday I had the opportunity to observe Natalie Upshaw's listening class at 2:00pm. As it happened, Faisal, My CP, and two of the friends he had recently brought into Lofty, Muhammad and Rahmeen, were attending the class. It was nice to see what kind of curriculum Faisal, and the other CIES students, experience.
The class began with a review of what they had gone over last time they met. This included a quick verbal recalling of a story they had listened to "Harry the Dirty Dog", read by Betty White (Awesomeness!). As well as some of their vocabulary that they would need to look out for. Some of this vocab included words like "trick", "place", "under", "over"...all of these ended up appearing in the story which I thought was a great way to help cement them. Having a story, that they had apparently been working with for a couple days now, that continually used all of their vocab in different ways seemed a great way to keep the students thinking about the new words instead of just asking them to rote memorize them all.
After the vocab review Ms. Upshaw put the video of Betty White (/swoon) reading the story back up on the projector and the class settled in to watch and take some notes. I noticed that Ms Upshaw just said to "take notes" but never on what, and was pretty surprised to see that most of the students did have pretty complete notes on the story afterwards. However, I did have a flashback as the movie played because this is the same book and story that I remember reading to my sister while I was still in elementary school (Betty White so does it better). The story is very simple and definitely a children's story, and I could tell at least one of the students was having a hard time getting into the exercise. I think it might have been partly because the content of the story, while perfect for their listening level, was not really relevant to them as people.
After the movie Ms Upshaw queried the class about their favorite parts. One student, Yuki, a young Japanese man with a big smile and big hair seemed to be the most excited, raising his hand almost immediately. But it seemed that Yuki's zeal was unique to him alone. Ms upshaw needed to prompt the others by calling on people randomly, she did a great a job of always keeping the class moving forward. But even my boy Faisal was struggling with engaging the class, when she called on him to ask his favorite part he admitted to not really paying attention to the movie. This is the first time I've really seen the disparity between finding material that is appropriate to both language and interest of the students. I imagine there exists a balance but I'm sure it is not an easy one to find.
The class then broke off into two groups, based on their tables, and began to paraphrase the story together. Again I noticed that Ms Upshaw didn't give any real definition to what Paraphrasing meant but the students seemed to know what to do anyway, I think this shows that she has developed a good foundation for them. My presence became a little awkward at this point because no matter what table I was at the students kept "checking" with me to see if their sentences were correct instead of conferring amongst themselves. Which is totally understandable in my opinion, if i had a native Arabic speaking sitting a foot from me while working on an Arabic writing or listening assignment I'd be making good use of him/her as well. I tried to make sure that they worked for the information but after awhile I had to just back off and act like i was furiously taking notes on something very important.
They finished their group work and before I even realized it class was over (guess I'm getting used to 3 hour classes....scary). It was interesting to view this class before reading the listening chapter because it gave me a more practical perspective than the previous chapters. I'm trying to focus on finding that balance between content appropriateness and language level in my up coming lesson plan.
A big thanks to Ms Upshaw for letting me view her classroom and to her class for being so awesome to me while I was there, thanks guys and girls.
You bring up some great points. It may help if the teacher can try to get the students to relate to the topic in some way so that they can connect to it more. This is easier said than done, but it is a skill that students actually do need to instill, as it helps with comprehension and focus.
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