For this observation, I observed Kelly’s beginner level Chinese class. The lesson only had one student arrive so Kelly adapted her lesson plan so that it was suitable for a tutoring session.

She started by reviewing numbers 1-10 in Chinese with the student (pronunciation, tones, & writing). She then asked the student if she remembered how to make higher numbers. The student iterated the correct rule for creating numbers between 11-99. Kelly helped her write the rule down and practice orally producing several of these numbers. She then asked the student if she remembered the measure word for 100. The student did not so Kelly taught it and they practiced making numbers between 1-999. They practiced by speaking in Chinese and translating to English and vice versa. Kelly also asked the student to practice writing the characters.

The next part of the lesson used the numbers in sentences. The first sentence was: “What time is it?” and answering: “It’s ___.” Kelly asked the student if she recognized the characters and explained the ones she didn’t know.

After practicing asking and telling the time (integrating numbers). They then learned how to ask “when were you born?” and answer “I was born on ____.” This sentence pattern used a lot of the vocabulary that was already taught. Kelly used a game with flashcard to help the student practice the sentence patterns.

During this lesson Kelly used a lot of questions to raise the student’s awareness of her own knowledge of the language and to make connections between learned and new information. She also encouraged the student’s autonomy by asking her to make rules and use her own knowledge to decode the language. Kelly also used contextualized input and output by having the student practice using the question and sentence patterns with the observers (2 spoke Chinese) and to tell the actual time.

The flashcard game at the end was an entertaining way to practice repetition drills that seemed to raise the student’s motivation. The student already had a pretty high motivation to learn the language, but Kelly continued to engage and raise her motivation by making the lesson enjoyable.

I really enjoyed how Kelly scaffolded the lesson so that they worked from small units (numbers) to using those units in more complicated sentence patterns. I would love to do this in my own language classes in the future. I would also like to encourage my students’ autonomy by asking them to use their own knowledge of the language to find underlying rules to decode the grammar.