Alex R CO #1

On Monday May 2nd 2016, I observed my first class at the Center of Intensive English Studies. The class was held in room 313 at 1 pm and was taught by Andrew Wilson. With the main focus on speaking English, Andrew's lesson plan had the four CIES students doing various activities to practice their English dialogue. The first portion of the lesson involved students speaking to the rest of the class about their weekends, the students however were instructed to describe their weekends using a sentence with a regular verb (I watched TV) and another with an irregular verb (I went to the gym). The next activity had the students state the opposite of a word listed on the board. Although this section was pretty straight forward, at times there was still confusion and misunderstanding. For example, one of the words students were asked to state the opposite of was the word "heavy". One student said "thin", Andrew said the student was correct if heavy is describing a person. However, in order to describe an object, Andrew tried to clarify by picking up a nearby chair and described it as "heavy" and then proceeded to empty out a box of cookies and asked the students to describe the box. The students, again not entirely wrong, responded "empty" instead of "light" talking about the contents of the box instead of the object's weight. To continue the objective of learning opposites, Andrew handed the students a worksheet asking a question about a picture (Are the clothes dry?) and since the questions were always wrong, the students would have to fill in the blank to correctly describe the picture (No. They're wet.) Students were allowed to work with a partner but not permitted to use their textbook or dictionary. This first experience with a CIES class thought me a lot about teaching English as a foreign language, specifically how easy it is for misunderstanding to occur. I look forward to making similar observations tomorrow in the higher level speaking class.