Matthew CO #1

Date: September 1st 11:00-11:50
Subject: Intermediate Reading
Teacher: Jasmine Carnell

I learned a lot from this class, though not as much about teaching reading than the proper way to command a classroom in an orderly fashion. In the first minutes of class the teacher referenced the article that they read before and instructed them to start reading the next article. She instructed her students to ask her if they were not familiar with any of the words in the text. When they asked, she did not directly answer but reminded them to use context clues. If they were still unable to figure out the vocabulary term, she would relent. Unlike my preconceived ideas of teaching, she would break down a long passage into short sections and promote discussion after each group was done reading. I think this is very important and I definitely implemented it in my tutoring sessions after this observation. She also kept the class in order by emphasizing that the students raise their hands without talking, since that classroom would probably get very loud without this instruction. After the students finished reading, she instructed the quicker readers to re-read the assignment to get more understanding, improve reading rate, and improve accuracy. She asked if anyone had any questions about the reading before a pop quiz related to the material. There were four types of questions: factual, main idea, vocab, and inference. After the quiz, she went over the homework and the agenda for the following day.

This classroom observation helped me understand EFL/ESL classrooms in contrast to the classrooms that I remember. Even though this was an intermediate class, she talked fast and expected the students to understand her. I think this is important to familiarize the students with real, pragmatic speech that they will encounter. This 50-minute classroom observation probably taught me the most out of the whole course.