Although we have been having lessons in the International College for almost four weeks, we didn't really have a chance to experience how regular English classes were conducted in the IC. We finally had that chance on Friday morning, 19th June.
The class I observed was of level five, which is quite advanced considering that the highest level is level six. For the lesson we observed, the students were taught how to paraphrase secondary resources for use in papers. This was to prepare them for their essay writing come the end of the term.
Since the students had already learnt a bit about paraphrasing, the teacher started the lesson by asking the students' what is meant by paraphrasing, in addition to why, where and how to paraphrase. The students were able to give meaningful but simple answers on which the teacher built on when giving his feedback. I think this is a good method of concept checking, as this activates students' schemata and contextualizes the lesson, as well as allowing the teacher to get an idea of what the students do and do not know. The teacher can then 'fill in the gaps' if students do not fully understand something.
It was then mainly group work the rest of the way. The students were asked to brainstorm methods of paraphrasing, for example changing active voice to passive voice and using synonyms. Then the students were given a short paragraph from a piece of reading and a paraphrased version of that paragraph. They were asked to compare the two and identify the methods of paraphrasing used. This was again another good method to check whether the students know the methods and if they actually understood how the methods were used. However, when the teacher went on to explain the answers, a lot of lecturing occurred and it could be seen that a lot of students seemed 'disengaged'; many of them stared at the teacher with blank expressions. The lecturing could be because of time constraint and the teacher couldn't afford to extract responses from his students, but I think the teacher could have picked out key points to discuss with students instead of going through every single answer himself.
After that, the groups were given different passages to paraphrase. They were given poster-sized paper on which to write on so that they could present their work to the class later. An interesting method the teacher used in order to get students to finish on time was that even though the teacher had set aside 25 minutes for this part, he told the students that they were given 20 minutes. This made sure students would finish within the 25 minutes the teacher had planned for.
The lesson ended with the presentations and also some general feedback from the teacher.
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