ILT Blog post 3

This week, our lesson focused on learning a few new phrases and the rules governing those phrases. Materials and activities were pretty similar to what we’ve been doing in the past lessons, with a few new additions. Miranda used the computer and projector to write (taking out the potential difficulty for students that a teacher with poor handwriting presents) and gave detailed handouts for learners to look at throughout the lesson and take home, something she’s done in every session. These I think she includes so we have something to refer back to. I have a hard time remembering everything, so having it in front of me is great.

My favourite material in the lesson was the colour-coded phrases Miranda used during the phrase presentation. This helped me pick out the patterns a lot easier – I could see the way the same vocabulary and grammar was used in different ways. Miranda clearly did this on purpose, and it was very effective.

There were roughly 4 parts to this lesson, structured really well so the easiest material was in the beginning and the harder was at the end. There was a warm-up, going from easier material to more difficult, which is a good way to teach a subject that students don’t have every day or very often. It allows the students to be reminded of what they are supposed to know. I think Miranda structured the class the way she did so we could ease into the material. Once we got to the harder stuff, like figuring out the rule of how to put phrases together, I was ready.

Something I noticed and really appreciated that Miranda did was give the literal translation of some of the phrases. That’s something that I’ve never had a language teacher do, but something I always end up doing for myself. Overall, I liked this lesson a lot. There was a lot of variation and it was really engaging. It’s interesting to me how a lesson that’s very well-structured like this one doesn’t really appear to be—from the student’s side, it’s a seamless lesson. You would never really know how much prep goes into it. It’s completely necessary, though, as this kind of lesson is the best for students.