For my practicum experience, I am doing some hours at Heartland Community College in two Reading 3 ESL courses. The level for these courses is intermediate to intermediate-high English skills and the course objectives are to give students a better understanding and insight into reading academic English; according to Sue, the instructor, the students read some novels like "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "The Giver" to enhance their English reading and discussion skills. Both of the classes are adults; the ages range from around 22 to about 40 in both classes, and the backgrounds of students vary as well. Most students are from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mexico, or Asiatic countries like China and Japan, among a few scattered other countries like Iran, Morocco, and Russia.
I noticed in my general observations for this week that the teacher exhibits a lot of the behavior that one would expect from an ESL teacher, which I found very interesting because I was talking with Sue (my cooperating teacher) and she does not have an ESL background. She actually worked at Heartland for about 4 years as a English reading and writing tutor and they ended up hiring her to teach some courses. I would never know that she did not have any background in it because she works so well with them! She exhibits such great teacher talk and behavior; she is really comfortable with the students and the students seem like they really respect her and value her opinion. They are all very talkative and very willing to participate in discussion; I was glad to see that there was a lot of laughter and joking around with the teacher, and an excellent rapport has clearly been established. Something I noticed right away as well was that Sue has an English-only policy in her classroom. Some of the students in the night course I am observing are very prone to talking in French (their native language), and she squelches that right away, saying "I don't hear English over there, remember what I told you guys the first day of class?" and the students immediately went back to talking in English, but they lapsed back into it again. Sue also is very good at praising her students and encouraging them to talk when they are too quiet' she tends to call on a random student and ask what they think of the question, and says things like, "Oh well (blank), I know you are really good at conjugating verbs. what do you think the answer is?" She makes jokes a lot, and gets them laughing so that they will talk more and feel more comfortable.
I also observed that some students are really inclined to talk in their native language with people that also speak their native language, which of course is an obvious behavior that one would expect in an ESL classroom. Since they are adults and in a college setting, she does not do much to stop it because she admitted that she does not want to treat them like high school students. She does keep an eye on them during class and does the typical teacher method of proximity to get the talking to stop, which is always a good non-invasive classroom management method. Sue does a lot of paraphrasing as well when she speaks, which we all know as ESL teachers we need to do with our students, no matter what age. She also listens very patiently when they are answering a question and then comments on their answer, saying, "Oh, you mean 'this'? Yes, that is very close, but I think maybe you meant..." or "So you're saying that..." and helps guide their answers to fit what she is looking for.
The students in Reading 3 use a reading textbook and a lot of the textbook are based on TOEFL examples and common activities; this class also seems to do a lot of error correction in order to ensure that their grammar improves along the way. I was pretty impressed because they seemed to know a lot of the proper names for grammar terms, like past participle and past tense, among others. I felt like I did not know any of that until at least high school, unless I learned it in grammar school and it is my native language so it is basically inherent for me. She also handed back their quizzes; I thought this quiz was really comprehensive and extensive. The quiz was divided into 1) vocabulary, where they had match words to definitions, and 2) syllable stress of the words. Even I had to think about it and I speak English! I think it is hard for us as native speakers to break things down to such a basic level; I feel like that about Spanish too sometimes when I have to identify a specific verb conjugation. I have been studying it for 10 years and now it is my second language. It is such an eye-opening experience to see how difficult English is to learn. The students complained every now and then about the weird grammar rules that we have, and I totally agree with them. Every language seems easy in comparison!
As for my upcoming observations, I will be looking at classroom management skills, teacher talk, what type of metholodgy the teacher uses, among many other concepts.
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