1. 1. Observation Report 1 Intermediate Reading and Composition David Atterberry
01/19/12 There were 16 students in class on the day I observed. The class took place in Kolthoff 139. Class started by the students exchanging their homework journal writings. They were instructed to read and respond to their partner’s journal entry. The students wrote independently for about ten minutes before the students exchanged journals again and read the response their partner wrote to them. After a couple minutes to read the responses, the teacher asked the whole class if anyone said anything funny or surprising. The teacher called on individual students to talk about what they read briefly. I thought this activity was a good way to get the creative juices flowing in class. While the topic of the journal writing was personal (what did you do last weekend?), the writing seemed to serve as a way for students to practice producing written work while not being afraid of making mistakes (as the journals were not “corrected” but discussed). I could see the journal exchanging being good for class rapport as well because it allowed students to interact with classmates in a casual, personal way. Even as a native speaker, I found free- writing/journal writing tasks in my English classes to be beneficial, if only to “clear my creative spring” as one of my professors once put it. After the journal activity, students were put into four groups to go over their homework assignment. The teacher numbered the students off to put them in groups. I found this method of grouping to be quick and effective, although I would vary the way I made groups over the semester to ensure a variety of groupings. The students were asked to compare their answers to the homework and come up with a consensus for each question. The homework questions were about a reading in their textbook about advertising. Students were also asked to justify their answers based on the reading. While listening in on the group discussions, I noticed they were doing a great job defending their answer choices by using the text. After about 8 minutes of group discussions, the class came together and the teacher gave each group four cards labeled A-D to denote each of the possible answers to each question. The teacher then asked each group to hold up the letter of their answer to each question. If the group was correct, they received a point (written on the board). For each question the class discussed why they chose the answer they did, whether it was correct or not. This discussion seemed to lead to a closer analysis of the text they had read in their books. The students seemed to enjoy the homework correction game; it seemed like a fun way to examine the students’ work, and the activity lead to some good discussion of the text and vocabulary. Later in the lesson, students were shown a series of commercials via Youtube that corresponded with ads they read about in their textbook. After each commercial, the class would discuss why the ad would be successful or unsuccessful and where they thought the ad was shown. They were making some great connections between culture and advertising. The students were shown three different McDonald’s ads from three different countries and asked to write in their journals for a couple minutes about what