Informal Classroom Observation Report

Teacher: Kelly Donovan

Description of the learners:

Five students: two males; three females

One TESOL student; one TFL French student; one TFL Chinese student (me)

One IEM student with two-year teaching experience in southern China,

One current Arabic learner at DLI who studied Chinese before

Topic: Food and how to order in Chinese restaurant

Teaching strategies: Content-based Instructions + grammar translation drill

Handouts:

Glossary of food

Sample of dialogue in a Chinese restaurant

Although this is a Chinese class aimed for beginners, the two actual language learners both had Chinese learning experience in the past. So the teacher spent a very short period of time greeting everyone and went straightforward to introduce new vocabularies. The glossary contains 8 major categories, including meat, side dishes, beverages, basic verbs, adjectives, adverbs, measure words, other nouns, question words and useful phrases. It has three rows with the simplified Chinese, Pinyin (the Romanization of Chinese sounds), and English as their headers.

To begin with, the teacher introduced the general term for meat in Chinese, and then taught the words of different kinds of meat one by one. Her pattern is, read one Chinese word first and let students guess what it is, then provide the word meaning in English and in the end, read the word aloud again and students would repeat after her. Since the pattern for meat-related words in Chinese is rather fixed, as it is the name of an animal plus meat, students were able to follow the pattern easily and expand vocabularies falling into this category quickly. They had so much fun that even mentioned the bad joke that Chinese people eat almost everything so they can put every species’ name after the character meat to make a new word. Then one student recalled her experiencing of eating in China and asked, “So how do you say chicken feet or pig feet in Chinese? “ The teacher responded her with the answer and confirmed the fact that Chinese people do eat them, for there were other students who were shocked by this question.

Reflection/Highlights of the class:

The teacher focused on the most important points rather than spread out. For example, for the meat part, she didn’t even bother to introduce the different cooking styles of meat since there are so many and it’s impossible to pour into students’ brains in a minute. However, she taught only one meat dish containing its cooking style, that is, the braised beef for it is the most common dish you can find in a regular authentic Chinese restaurant. I think this is a good example of her combing the knowledge of pragmatics with personal experience of living in China. As a result, students can acquire the most essential, practical and authentic language from her. Writing Chinese is a never-can-be-easy task, but Kelly handles it very well by guiding learners to find the patterns of writing Chinese characters (the logic behind it is the Chinese characters consist of radicals, i.e. meaningful graphemes).