TCSOL Practicum II

Spring 2015

Observation report
Instructors name: Yuanyuan Zhang
Class taught in: Chinese (mainly) and English
Date of teaching: February 18, 2015
Duration of teaching: 50 minutes
I. What transpired in class
1. I met with the instructor before the class and we discussed the
difficulty to implement task-based teaching with beginning
students. We both agreed that under such circumstances, the best
we could do was to modify the traditional way of task-based
teaching and replace it with a sequence of small tasks which were
not necessarily related with one another.
2. Generally speaking, the instructor followed the format of PPP in her
class. The class started with the vocabulary, moved on to grammar
structures and ended with dialogues. The students were first
introduced to the language structures that they were supposed to
learn and then were asked to make sentences using these
structures.
3. Though for most of the time, class activities were quite controlled
and students answers were predictable considering their limited
mastery of Chinese words and sentential structures the instructor
tried her best to engage the students by asking them about their
own situations and ideas. For example, after she had taught them
the new words in the lesson, she asked them to think about one day
that was most important to them. Students generated some
interesting answers and while most of them picked national
holidays, one of them replied that her own birthday was the most
important day for her.
II.

Reflections

1. I felt that it seemed impossible to avoid explicit instruction on

grammar structures with this group of students because they were
under a lot of pressure to get a good grade and to earn the credit.
Therefore, I understood that the instead of prompting students to
come up with the correct usage themselves, that is, deductively, the
instructor simply listed the usage including example sentences on
the slides. Nevertheless, I still believed it could be better if the
students were first involved in some priming tasks that emerged

them with the new structures. This way the class might be even
more interesting and less stressful. It would be okay if students
could not speak Chinese fluently and just replaced some Chinese
words with English ones. They just needed to be involved in the
communication process.
2. I noticed how important it was for the instructor to treat her
students as living human beings and ask them about their own
lives. This, to me, was very successful since students were engaged
and expected to use their creativity. It would never hurt to let
students take control of their own learning process and make class
activities less controlled. However, at one point the teacher asked
about their romantic relationships, and I did not think it was quite a
good idea, because some of the students might not be in one, not to
mention the heterosexual or homosexual problem.