Fall Teaching Reflection and Sample Lesson Plan
On November 14th, 2013 I student taught in an elementary level Chinese classroom at Columbia University with three students. One of the students was a Japanese freshman undergraduate from Barnard, and the other two students were graduate level students from different graduate schools around Columbia. None of the students had any prior Chinese background before starting to take classes here at Columbia. The Japanese student presumably had advanced Chinese character knowledge from her native Japanese, but this should not have had an impact on the primarily spoken class I conducted. Emily accompanied me and took notes regarding how students responded to my instruction.
Going into the classroom, there were a lot of unknown factors. To start, the normal drill instructor told me there would likely be four students (and there were only three), and the only material I had that I knew that they had previously studied were the grammar patterns I witnessed during the observation class and the grammar patterns the drill instructor showed me that she had planned to for the drill class that day (mentioned in the objectives section of the lesson plan). Having little knowledge of the students’ backgrounds and since they were only first semester beginner level Chinese students, I took a primarily teacher center classroom approach when creating my lesson plan because I assumed it would be difficult for them to generate a conversation on their own without examples. Also, my objective going into the lesson was to be accuracy based when directly asking students questions, and fluency based when they broke into smaller groups and performed activities. However, this was a difficult balance to strike.
Further discussing the lesson plan, I will use Ur’s (1999) guide from Box 15.2 to assess my preparation. I prepared the lesson about 2 days ahead of the scheduled class, but found myself revising it several times as I asked some Chinese friends for advice on how they learned the measure words. All my notes were hand written, and the only guide I used to prepare my plan were the list of grammar points given to me by the drill instructor. I decided to center the class around the grammar points so that the students could have additional reinforcement from what they had learned during their normal Chinese session. My hand written notes were approximately two pages long, and had several key phases and examples I wanted to use listed under each TASK heading. I looked at the notes several times during class and kept them for my reference after the class was finished.
One note that Ur mentions that I did not take into consideration that I definitely will in the future was “note down your objectives” on the lesson plan. I did not do this, and regret it. The general objective I had before going into the classroom was “practice the SV A還是B？ ／ S教sb. VP ／ Measure Words：杯，套，張，把，雙 grammar points, eventually culminating in a fluency exercise that will give students a chance to use the grammar points in their own way freely.” If I would have been more specific, noting down which exercises I wanted to be accuracy based and which I had wanted to be fluency based, I would have been able to give more effective error feedback, which I felt my class performance lacked.
For the general oral corrective feedback, I felt this was the weakest part of my class for several reasons. To start, as I mentioned above, I did not clearly denote on my lesson plan where I wanted to be more fluency based or accuracy based, so tended not to give as much corrective feedback as should have been given during the accuracy based parts of the lesson. For those sections I intended to be accuracy based (2, 3, 4 and 5), several times I used the recast technique to correct students, and found that it was effective for the female student and one of the male students, but the second male student did not realize I was modifying his answer when giving him the recasted feedback and thought I was asking him a different question. I also used the elicitation method of corrective feedback several times by giving students open-ended questions to finish what I was saying. I found this method to be more fitting for the second male student who was unresponsive to recasting.
Next, I would like to use Ur’s Box 15.4 to assess the general effectiveness of the class I taught. As the class was small, only 3 people, it was difficult for the students not to be active the entire time. I tried to ask each student different questions and have them all interacting with each other by having them also ask questions, so the class was lively. All the students were paying attention and seemed interested especially in the section about measure words (which ended up taking far longer than the time I allotted). The students were asking questions, and I did allow for questions to be asked in English which made them more comfortable. Most importantly, the students did engage with the foreign language throughout. Though not all of their utterances were accurate, they did all make an effort to elaborate on what they were saying and generally tried in class
One aspect I was a bit surprised about was that the students did not really seem to know the grammar that they had been expected to cover in the drill lesson for that day. Since I only have the class I observed to compare with the class I taught (the class I observed seemed to have a good command of the grammar even before starting the drills), I had assumed the students would come being relatively comfortable with the material already, as had seemed to be the situation during the observation class. However, students had many questions about the grammar, situational usages of each, and also questions about the measure words. I now have a better idea of the function of the drill class as it seems to be a forum to work the kinks out of their grammatical knowledge and reinforce the material, rather than being a forum to increase speed and make their usage of the grammar more reflexive as I had originally thought.
One more aspect of effectiveness that I would like to discuss was the lesson going according to plan. During the practicum class we did not identify this as a critical measurement for evaluating an effective lesson, but still important as the teacher needs to meet daily objectives. During my class, I thought the planning aspect went rather well despite taking extra time on some tasks, it did not effect our final objective of reaching the “shopping” scenario and engaging in a fluency exercise.
Finally I would like to discuss classroom interaction. I found that I spoke a lot more than I had expected after reviewing the class mentally and looking at the observation notes. Usually for every two sentences I said, the students said about one or even less. As it was an elementary level class, it could be expected that that the students were restricted by their own knowledge of Chinese grammar and were not as flexible in their usage, but even during the fluency based parts of the lesson where I had students interacting with each other, I sometimes found I had to help students form the questions they were trying to ask. This is another part of classroom management that I need to work on that could be remedied by marking “fluency” or “accuracy” based sections in my lesson plan, as during the fluency parts I could let the students struggle a bit more before stepping in to help them.
Overall, I left the class feeling that the students seemed satisfied, although I was not. I was a bit frustrated because I felt the students should have been faster in their responses with the grammar patterns we practiced by the end of the lesson even though they still struggled a bit. They did do better than when they had started, and all the tasks on the lesson plan were completed with each student engaging with Chinese the entire time, so the lesson was successful to some degree. However, there is a lot that I know I could improve for next time, primarily being identifying objectives and clearly noting fluency or accuracy based tasks on my lesson plan.
Andras Molnar
11/14/2013
TCSOL Student Teaching Lesson Plan
Introductory Chinese (N1)
Topic: 去商店，買朋友的禮物
Time: 50 minutes
Objectives: 1. Students will be able to utilize the grammar points they have learned the previous week's class.
Grammar points:
(SV A還是B？ ／ S教sb. VP ／ Measure Words：杯，套，張，把，雙 ／ S WH-word 都 V ／ S 越 A 越 B ／ V 一 V ／ VV看)
3. Students will be able to ask questions to a store clerk and buy items.
[AM1]
Procedure:
1. Self-Introduction: (5 mins) (Fluency focused)
Introduce who I am in Chinese and have students introduce themselves to me. Basic information such as name, age, and something they like is sufficient
i. While students are introducing themselves, write names on board to set up for next activity (and so I can remember them).
2. Warm-up: (5 mins): Weather (Accuracy)
Have students speak about the weather and what kind of weather they like. Draw different weather expressions they like under their names.
Expressions: 今天天氣怎麼樣？ 昨天呢？ 明天怎麼樣？
下雨天，颳風天， 下雪天， 晴天， 冷， 熱
Go over what types of weather there are, write ones they do not know down on board, and have them express what they think about the weather. WRITE DOWN the types of weather they like under their names.
3. Activity 1: (8 mins) SV A 還是 B (Accuracy)
Use SV A 還是 B grammar pattern (they have already learned from class) to talk about the weather to other students. Teacher will ask a few questions to individual students first to give them an idea of what is expected, and then the students will ask each other.
Some of the information about what they like is already on the board, so students will know if the answers are correct.
4. Activity 2: (5 mins) Talk about different products (Accuracy)
For this exercise, the teacher asks students 你喜歡蘋果還是案桌的手機？
Students respond, and can integrate grammar pattern 是教 sb. VP with 你會
教我怎麼用這個手機嗎？
5. Activity 3: (8 mins) Measure Words (Accuracy)
I have various items they have learned from this weeks lesson:
一杯茶， 一套茶具， 一張桌子（in classroom)， 一把椅子（in classroom)， 一把叉子，一雙筷子
Pick-up each item, ask them what it is, and ask them if they know any other words that go with that particular measure word. Also, what does the measure word describe (ie. 雙 = a pair)
Also, have flashcards with the different characters on, have them read and repeat.
6. Activity 4 (20 mins): Go to a store (Fluency)
Use the items that are on the table and that have just been discussed to have the students buy a present for their friend’s birthday. There are actually two pairs of each item, so they can use the A 還是 B grammar pattern and 你喜歡甚麼？ to ask each other what they want. First round done by teacher, ask all the students some of the questions. Second round have students break into pairs and have them ask each other.
Last, the students come back together and talk about what they bought and why.
7. If time left: Ask students have questions, how do they like Chinese?
8. If A LOT of time left:
Go over S 越 A 越 B and 越來越A
On November 14th, 2013 I student taught in an elementary level Chinese classroom at Columbia University with three students. One of the students was a Japanese freshman undergraduate from Barnard, and the other two students were graduate level students from different graduate schools around Columbia. None of the students had any prior Chinese background before starting to take classes here at Columbia. The Japanese student presumably had advanced Chinese character knowledge from her native Japanese, but this should not have had an impact on the primarily spoken class I conducted. Emily accompanied me and took notes regarding how students responded to my instruction.
Going into the classroom, there were a lot of unknown factors. To start, the normal drill instructor told me there would likely be four students (and there were only three), and the only material I had that I knew that they had previously studied were the grammar patterns I witnessed during the observation class and the grammar patterns the drill instructor showed me that she had planned to for the drill class that day (mentioned in the objectives section of the lesson plan). Having little knowledge of the students’ backgrounds and since they were only first semester beginner level Chinese students, I took a primarily teacher center classroom approach when creating my lesson plan because I assumed it would be difficult for them to generate a conversation on their own without examples. Also, my objective going into the lesson was to be accuracy based when directly asking students questions, and fluency based when they broke into smaller groups and performed activities. However, this was a difficult balance to strike.
Further discussing the lesson plan, I will use Ur’s (1999) guide from Box 15.2 to assess my preparation. I prepared the lesson about 2 days ahead of the scheduled class, but found myself revising it several times as I asked some Chinese friends for advice on how they learned the measure words. All my notes were hand written, and the only guide I used to prepare my plan were the list of grammar points given to me by the drill instructor. I decided to center the class around the grammar points so that the students could have additional reinforcement from what they had learned during their normal Chinese session. My hand written notes were approximately two pages long, and had several key phases and examples I wanted to use listed under each TASK heading. I looked at the notes several times during class and kept them for my reference after the class was finished.
One note that Ur mentions that I did not take into consideration that I definitely will in the future was “note down your objectives” on the lesson plan. I did not do this, and regret it. The general objective I had before going into the classroom was “practice the SV A還是B？ ／ S教sb. VP ／ Measure Words：杯，套，張，把，雙 grammar points, eventually culminating in a fluency exercise that will give students a chance to use the grammar points in their own way freely.” If I would have been more specific, noting down which exercises I wanted to be accuracy based and which I had wanted to be fluency based, I would have been able to give more effective error feedback, which I felt my class performance lacked.
For the general oral corrective feedback, I felt this was the weakest part of my class for several reasons. To start, as I mentioned above, I did not clearly denote on my lesson plan where I wanted to be more fluency based or accuracy based, so tended not to give as much corrective feedback as should have been given during the accuracy based parts of the lesson. For those sections I intended to be accuracy based (2, 3, 4 and 5), several times I used the recast technique to correct students, and found that it was effective for the female student and one of the male students, but the second male student did not realize I was modifying his answer when giving him the recasted feedback and thought I was asking him a different question. I also used the elicitation method of corrective feedback several times by giving students open-ended questions to finish what I was saying. I found this method to be more fitting for the second male student who was unresponsive to recasting.
Next, I would like to use Ur’s Box 15.4 to assess the general effectiveness of the class I taught. As the class was small, only 3 people, it was difficult for the students not to be active the entire time. I tried to ask each student different questions and have them all interacting with each other by having them also ask questions, so the class was lively. All the students were paying attention and seemed interested especially in the section about measure words (which ended up taking far longer than the time I allotted). The students were asking questions, and I did allow for questions to be asked in English which made them more comfortable. Most importantly, the students did engage with the foreign language throughout. Though not all of their utterances were accurate, they did all make an effort to elaborate on what they were saying and generally tried in class
One aspect I was a bit surprised about was that the students did not really seem to know the grammar that they had been expected to cover in the drill lesson for that day. Since I only have the class I observed to compare with the class I taught (the class I observed seemed to have a good command of the grammar even before starting the drills), I had assumed the students would come being relatively comfortable with the material already, as had seemed to be the situation during the observation class. However, students had many questions about the grammar, situational usages of each, and also questions about the measure words. I now have a better idea of the function of the drill class as it seems to be a forum to work the kinks out of their grammatical knowledge and reinforce the material, rather than being a forum to increase speed and make their usage of the grammar more reflexive as I had originally thought.
One more aspect of effectiveness that I would like to discuss was the lesson going according to plan. During the practicum class we did not identify this as a critical measurement for evaluating an effective lesson, but still important as the teacher needs to meet daily objectives. During my class, I thought the planning aspect went rather well despite taking extra time on some tasks, it did not effect our final objective of reaching the “shopping” scenario and engaging in a fluency exercise.
Finally I would like to discuss classroom interaction. I found that I spoke a lot more than I had expected after reviewing the class mentally and looking at the observation notes. Usually for every two sentences I said, the students said about one or even less. As it was an elementary level class, it could be expected that that the students were restricted by their own knowledge of Chinese grammar and were not as flexible in their usage, but even during the fluency based parts of the lesson where I had students interacting with each other, I sometimes found I had to help students form the questions they were trying to ask. This is another part of classroom management that I need to work on that could be remedied by marking “fluency” or “accuracy” based sections in my lesson plan, as during the fluency parts I could let the students struggle a bit more before stepping in to help them.
Overall, I left the class feeling that the students seemed satisfied, although I was not. I was a bit frustrated because I felt the students should have been faster in their responses with the grammar patterns we practiced by the end of the lesson even though they still struggled a bit. They did do better than when they had started, and all the tasks on the lesson plan were completed with each student engaging with Chinese the entire time, so the lesson was successful to some degree. However, there is a lot that I know I could improve for next time, primarily being identifying objectives and clearly noting fluency or accuracy based tasks on my lesson plan.
Andras Molnar
11/14/2013
TCSOL Student Teaching Lesson Plan
Introductory Chinese (N1)
Topic: 去商店，買朋友的禮物
Time: 50 minutes
Objectives: 1. Students will be able to utilize the grammar points they have learned the previous week's class.
Grammar points:
(SV A還是B？ ／ S教sb. VP ／ Measure Words：杯，套，張，把，雙 ／ S WH-word 都 V ／ S 越 A 越 B ／ V 一 V ／ VV看)
3. Students will be able to ask questions to a store clerk and buy items.
[AM1]
Procedure:
1. Self-Introduction: (5 mins) (Fluency focused)
Introduce who I am in Chinese and have students introduce themselves to me. Basic information such as name, age, and something they like is sufficient
i. While students are introducing themselves, write names on board to set up for next activity (and so I can remember them).
2. Warm-up: (5 mins): Weather (Accuracy)
Have students speak about the weather and what kind of weather they like. Draw different weather expressions they like under their names.
Expressions: 今天天氣怎麼樣？ 昨天呢？ 明天怎麼樣？
下雨天，颳風天， 下雪天， 晴天， 冷， 熱
Go over what types of weather there are, write ones they do not know down on board, and have them express what they think about the weather. WRITE DOWN the types of weather they like under their names.
3. Activity 1: (8 mins) SV A 還是 B (Accuracy)
Use SV A 還是 B grammar pattern (they have already learned from class) to talk about the weather to other students. Teacher will ask a few questions to individual students first to give them an idea of what is expected, and then the students will ask each other.
Some of the information about what they like is already on the board, so students will know if the answers are correct.
4. Activity 2: (5 mins) Talk about different products (Accuracy)
For this exercise, the teacher asks students 你喜歡蘋果還是案桌的手機？
Students respond, and can integrate grammar pattern 是教 sb. VP with 你會
教我怎麼用這個手機嗎？
5. Activity 3: (8 mins) Measure Words (Accuracy)
I have various items they have learned from this weeks lesson:
一杯茶， 一套茶具， 一張桌子（in classroom)， 一把椅子（in classroom)， 一把叉子，一雙筷子
Pick-up each item, ask them what it is, and ask them if they know any other words that go with that particular measure word. Also, what does the measure word describe (ie. 雙 = a pair)
Also, have flashcards with the different characters on, have them read and repeat.
6. Activity 4 (20 mins): Go to a store (Fluency)
Use the items that are on the table and that have just been discussed to have the students buy a present for their friend’s birthday. There are actually two pairs of each item, so they can use the A 還是 B grammar pattern and 你喜歡甚麼？ to ask each other what they want. First round done by teacher, ask all the students some of the questions. Second round have students break into pairs and have them ask each other.
Last, the students come back together and talk about what they bought and why.
7. If time left: Ask students have questions, how do they like Chinese?
8. If A LOT of time left:
Go over S 越 A 越 B and 越來越A