Mary_CO2

The second class i sat in on was Ryan Flemming’s speaking class for intermediate/advanced students. He apologized to me for what he considered a “low-key” teaching day, but I did not feel the class was uneventful at all. He began the class with unstructured conversation. One student asked, “Do southern people eat raccoons?” which turned into a conversation about opossums and stew. The teacher used google image searches to quickly explain vocabulary, which was time effective although not necessarily best for long-term retention. The teacher introduced the agenda for the day, which was essentially working on a presentation making an argument. Within this “low-key” class session, he was able to have a lecture on the components of a good introduction and conclusion, pair work on sentence structures, and time to work on media in the lab. I noticed the teacher touched the students on the shoulder when asking or explaining something. I’ve never seen this kind of intimacy in my classroom atmospheres, but it felt natural and helpful in this context. Something I thought was a very good idea was that the teacher had the students correct their speaking mistakes verbally and then write them down in their notebooks for future reference.