Today I taught my third hour in my level four advanced communication class. Today 5 students were present. They are adult students from Japan and China. Today our topic of discussion was pets which was a topic some students expressed interest in last time. We had to begin the class with the presentations on last week’s discussion that we did not have enough time to finish. After that we reviewed discussion language, showed a video about pets, split the students into groups for a group discussion, and finished with a student from each group summarizing their discussion.

There were some nice successes in the class today. All the students agreed to turn on their cameras when giving presentations today which some of them were previously reluctant to do. My teaching partner and I took our sponsor teacher’s advice and implemented a listening activity into the presentations at the beginning of class. We asked the non-presenting students to answer a few questions about the information that was presented. One of the students provided very detailed answers so it was great to see such a strong demonstration of listening skills. In the group discussion I told the students that we would keep track of their usage of the discussion language and I had the phrases displayed during the discussion as a reminder. The group I observed made a great effort to use the language and it was a significant improvement from last week. We ran out of time for the presentations, so we asked one student from each group to volunteer to provide a quick summary. This actually worked quite well as the students provided more concise summaries than I have heard from them in the past.

We also faced several challenges today. I think we spent too much time on the presentation from last week and it ended up taking away from the time designated for this week’s discussion and presentation. This should not be a problem again next time, however, as we still managed to complete this week’s discussion and presentations. Next week we will not have any rollover presentations so we can spend the whole class on a single topic. I was unsure how well my review of the discussion language went as I did not receive any feedback from the students as I delivered it. I had planned to call on students to practice using some of the phrases with me, but I cut this out due to time constraints. Our discussion ended up being much shorter than planned so students did not have enough time to discuss all of the questions. At the end we had barely any time for presenting the discussions, so we had one student from each group volunteer to provide a summary. While they did a great job, the two volunteers were the two students who generally speak the most; the other students, who arguably need the practice more, did not get the opportunity to practice summarizing. We were also unable to provide listening questions like we did in the presentation at the beginning of class.

Next time, I think we should figure out some ways to incorporate vocabulary into our lesson. When asked what they wanted to work on, a lot of the students said they hoped to improve their vocabulary so I would like to help make that happen. I think we could also increase the complexity and depth of our discussions by introducing some slightly more controversial topics that will require more critical thinking. This will hopefully provide students more opportunity to disagree, which is something I want to work on as well. Both last week and this week I did not hear the students disagreeing with each other. I hope to design next week’s class in a way that might make it easier for the students to disagree.