On July 24th I taught my 5th practicum hour in the conversation cafe. In the class, we focused on presentation skills. Today I tried to look for more opportunities to include language in the lesson. For a warm-up activity I put students in groups to construct sentences using specific vocabulary from the Academic Words Lists. This was a great activity for me to look at their sentence composition. It has given me a new idea for a more specifically focused grammar activity next lesson.
I am really happy with the student engagement I am achieving so far, but I would like to get the class to as close as 100% as possible. The obstacles that may be stopping all students from participating might be their confidence or high proficiency. I’m finding the students I have participated very actively aren’t my highest level English speakers, but the ones that are higher level are more reserved. They will however speak when I call on them, but they try to reserve their participation until I’ve specifically asked them for it.
Next class, I will be using the same words from the academic word list and work on sentence composition. I’m excited to see how the students meet the challenge of more academic work in this setting of the conversation cafe. The students will also be presenting their weekend stars and wishes. I’m excited to return to having them present and see how their “public” speaking and presenting confidence has been building.