Wonmi Lee CO #2

Teacher: Leslie Wagner
Topic: Listening
Level: 3B

The professor started the class with announcements, and then went through the agenda of the day's class. The students received a print out for the questions of the listening activity. The class went through a vocabulary review that the listening activity focused on, and students answered with synonyms, definitions, or examples of the word or phrase.

For the listening activity, the students were told to listen for the "topic" in the first sentence, and reminded that they can take notes in their notebooks. The lecture was over 9 minutes long, which surprised me by the long length. The listening activity was a lecture about stress, going over what stress is, how it impacts our lives, and how we can deal with it. After the listening lecture was done, the professor showed the class the notes that she took, and how they compared with the students and also compared the notes with each other. Then there were comprehension questions that were answered individually, which the class then came together to discuss. There were some simple fact questions, but also some questions that required students to state their opinion. The professor made sure to ask each student, so that the whole class was involved and had a chance to answer. I was impressed with her easy going nature, and she seemed very attentive to each student.

One thing that was different about this class was that there were two distinct students who seemed to disrupt the chemistry of the class. She effectively took charge of this, by asking them very nonchalantly to focus on the lecture. Also, I got a few good points from the listening activity lecture, which stated "Make plans and act about stress when appropriate. Do not waste energy on worrying, and plan actions to fix or avoid stress. However, know when it is appropriate, and learn to accept situations that you cannot control. For example, in traffic, you cannot control it, so learn to accept it and try to avoid the stress."

Tips that the professor gave: she has noticed a lack of student-centeredness with the TEFL graduates, and highly emphasized to keep the class student-centered and make sure to have a lot of interaction with the students.