Intermediate English II (First practice)

This time I’m teaching intermediate English II, and I can say that I really like this group. They are pretty active and that makes the teaching-learning process easier, at least for me. In this opportunity, I taught phrasal verbs which is quite a bit challenging for everybody (under my view point). When I was about to begin the class, I found out that a part of what I was supposed to teach was already done; nevertheless, I had an extra activity which anyways I did not use it at the end due to the time.

 To start the session, as I did in the previous group, I introduced myself, and I also made clear 3 important points for a class to be developed with no difficulty. I briefly talked about discipline, respect, and participation. I tried to give confidence to my students so that they felt comfortable with me. After that introduction, I formally began the class with a matching activity which was the warm up just to see how familiarized they were with the topic. Afterwards, I moved onto the next activity. For this, the students used their books. They worked on the grammar and vocabulary part. I gave a reasonable amount of time for them to solve the difficulties, and some minutes later I checked along with them. 

As the next point, I made some copies for my students since they had to practice phrasal verbs in the written form. They had to complete some sentences; it was a fill-in-the-blank activity. The exercise was sort of challenging as we know that phrasal verbs tend to change the meaning in some contexts. This activity took around 15 minutes since I had to make clear why it is that we used certain verbs; basically, I explained the meaning of some of them. Once that this activity was finished, I put the class to work in pairs; this time, it was a speaking activity about New Year’s celebration. It was the last activity I was going to develop along with a listening. To monitored this activity (the speaking one), I did the same the teacher does. I got closer to the students and started to interact with them making comments about the celebration and what they did. It was pretty cool.

Finally, I had reached the listening part. At first, I just gave some tips for them to get concentrated on the dialogue they were going to listen to. They were already familiarized with the listening since the previous activity (the speaking one) was part of the listening. Then I just solved to questions, and it was in that way that I finished my first teaching practicum with this group. I really felt comfortable, and since I like the teacher’s style, it is not difficult for me to teach there. I think playing is not necessary to make a class active and dynamic though this is something which might depend on the characteristics of the group. I really enjoyed this experience.