Sally Coons, Andrew Sansone, Chandra Rapley, Kathy Yang, Ayako Yamada

Today we played jeopardy to review what we’ve learned in this class this semester. We find that it can be a good review game and consolidation activity. It’s important to introduce the rules of the game to learners who don’t know the tv show. The game can be used to quiz all levels of students from beginners to advanced learners. We can quiz students on everything from simple vocabulary to more advanced concepts. We could even use the game for other activities, for example to give students writing tasks or ask them to fill in the blanks. In addition, if there is more than one section of the class, each class could make the questions for the other.

Today, we thought it was fun to have a few “fun” categories, such as “Instructor Trivia” and “Know Your Classmates.” This, in addition to the fact that we worked in teams, takes the pressure off students and works to lower their affective filter so that they can review and have some fun at the same time.

The two pictures below illustrate possible uses for playing Jeopardy in the language classroom.  Both of these slides are taken from actual language lessons given in an EFL environment, with intermediate YL students.  It should be noted that although these pictures are static, the original PPT slides use moving .gifs to further engage students (and open up opportunities for using the TL to elicit verbs and other lexical classes).

In order to play, the instructor would query the students in question about the vocabulary item depicted, and possibly use follow up questions to enhance the difficulty (how fast is it going, use an adjective to describe it, etc.)

Sally Coons and Catherine Purdy

This is an observation and reflection on the planning process for the Bay View language lesson on November 13, 2015. We were introduced to this assignment early in the semester. We had an opportunity to talk with third semester students about their experiences with this last year, and that was the most helpful part of our preparation process. We watched a video made by past students about their reactions to language teaching to young learners. We worked in class on our lesson plan and met with another teaching team to hear about each others’ plans.

We think that it would have been helpful to use one of the planning periods to discuss co-teaching methods. We both have had extensive co-teaching experience, and we know that planning for co-teaching can be very difficult, especially for teachers with little experience. Even with previous experience, we forgot to discuss what our specific roles would be during each part of the lesson. We were able during the break between the two lessons to discuss how to improve our second lesson. One of the things we talked about was our roles. There are many different ways to plan for co-teaching, such as choosing a T1 and T2 for the whole lesson, or assigning T1 and T2 roles for each activity.

On reflection, we feel that teaching the language lesson was most beneficial for students with no or little prior teaching experience. For us, it was a nice opportunity to get back into the classroom and practice some of the precepts that we have been learning about in class.