Charlene CO #2 March 21, 2016

I observed Felicia Chiappetta's Foundations Composition Class today. Ms. Chiappetta is apparently a PhD candidate in The Florida State University TESOL Program. I also met Ms. Chiappetta's intern, who was very helpful in explaining things throughout the class. This classroom was set up differently. It has a large square table that takes up most of the space in the room, and the students sat around it. Ms. Chiappetta's class, I thought, was fast paced. However, the students seemed to keep up very well. I assumed they were used to her routine, and certainly no one was complaining.

I noticed that the students had books with pictures in them that I had not seen in my previous observation. The intern told me that these are picture dictionaries that help this level of class with their vocabulary. In addition, Ms. Chiappetta had written "was not = wasn't" and "were not = weren't" on the whiteboard as a visual reminder to students as they were writing. In addition, Ms. Chiappetta had written a schedule for the day to give the students an indication of what they would be doing in class. If I were a student in this class, I think that these things would make me feel supported "right off the bat" upon entering the classroom.

The first exercise for the class today was to describe people in the class using the word be in the past simple tense. Ms. Chiappetta telling gave the class an example of the kind of sentence that was assigned. The students were given seven minutes to write 10 sentences. As they wrote, Ms. Chiappetta answered questions they were having an provided hints as needed. The intern and Ms. Chiappetta then marked errors on the students' papers so they could correct them.

After that exercise. The class was given the assignment of answering the question "what did you do yesterday?" She asked that they write one sentence for the 22 words that were written on the whiteboard. She also gave examples for this assignment. Once again, errors remarked at the end of the exercise for correction by the students.

For the next exercise, Ms. Chiappetta asked the students to open their dictionaries to particular page. She then spent some time talking about verbs that take ed as an ending-- regular verbs. Then she talked about your regular verbs and their conjugations. The students apparently have been exposed to this previously, and Ms. Chiappetta was reminding them. The students were given the assignment to use irregular verbs in the past tense to talk about what they did yesterday.

The next lesson consisted of the students writing three sentences about "what Dr. Kennell is doing right now."

By this time, we had run out of time, and the students packed up to leave the class. I thanked Ms. Chiappetta and her intern for having me in the classroom. It was a pleasant experience for me, and the students appeared to be quite engaged and satisfied.