On Tuesday, November 6th I observed Jennifer Babjak's listening class at CIES. I took down a lot of notes on her methods of instruction, as they seemed to be very effective in keeping the class interested and involved. She was constantly moving around the classroom, never staying in one place for more than a few moments. While playing speech samples for her class, she would pause and allow time for the phrases to really sink in and make sure they were able to clearly understand the speaker. Additionally, before playing anything she would tell the class how to listen to them - that is, what to listen for in each sample.
Upon assigning the students to work in pairs for an activity, she quietly observed the class until she noticed a certain student or pair of students who needed help moving forward. Those she would help, but allowed the rest of the class to continue on with free practice/conversation as long as it was on topic. Then she split up the class into two discussion groups, making sure that there was a mixture of cultural backgrounds in each (not just an Arabic group and an Asian group), in order for there to be a natural "information gap" which made discussion the topic, finding a job in a foreign country, easy to discuss.
For the next activity she improvised her directions and instructed her students to randomly mingle, after completing the activity with one partner, to move on to one they had not spoken to about the activity. This even got me involved, as some students were interested in my opinion on the matter! Perhaps the most important and useful things I noticed about Ms. Babjak's teaching style were a student-based approach, in which she did not just continuously lecture but asked them questions about their home countries (such as "What are the typical working hours per week, for government/state workers and other types of jobs?" which related the lesson topic to something each student could identify with), and being able to laugh with her students and maintaining a relaxed classroom atmosphere.
Hey Jordan, what was their group level?
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