Evaluation of Yini Chen (R/W) 1

Evaluation of Yini Chen (R/W)

Colorado State University

Evaluation of Yini Chen (R/W) 2

My name is Steven Shook, TESL/TEFL graduate student, and I observed Yini

Chen teaching an ESL class on 4/2/18. Her class consisted of about 10-12 ELLs and

about 10-12 graduate students as well. The focus of the class was reading and writing,

and Yini chose the topic of the fast-food restaurant McDonalds for her class to

continue a theme of “Life in America.”

Yini’s class began with her handing out the readings and exercises in a packet

to everyone before the class began. She then conducted a warm-up, where she asked

students to talk about their favorite fast-food restaurants with each other. This

seemed like a good topic for a warm-up, as everyone seemed to have something to

say on this topic, and it was held to a reasonable amount of time. Afterward, Yini

wrote some of the names of people’s restaurant choices on the board.

She then segued into the main lesson by explaining how McDonalds was

currently the most popular fast-food restaurant in the USA. She handed out playing

cards and asked students to form themselves into groups based on the cards they

drew. After this, students were asked to read the story about the history of

McDonalds in their groups, with each student reading a paragraph before allowing the

next student to read a paragraph, thus taking turns until the reading was complete. I

was concerned that the amount of time given for this assignment, five minutes, would

be too short, but the students easily finished within the time limit.

She then asked which words seemed key to the story or difficult to understand

and wrote them on the board. She defined one of the words, and then moved on to

the vocabulary exercise in the packet. At this time, I would have spent a little more

time reviewing the vocabulary words that had been written on the board, as this would

have likely helped with the vocabulary exercise.

After this was a comprehension exercise, where students were asked to read

two sentences and decide which one happened first in the story. During this exercise,

as well as in all of the others, Yini displayed very good classroom management skills,
Evaluation of Yini Chen (R/W) 3

soliciting questions from volunteers and then choosing people if no one volunteered.

This allowed the class to progress smoothly.

The next exercise was a writing exercise which challenged the students to

rewrite a number sentences from the story. This was the most problematic exercise, as

the instructions for the task were not clear, and while the purpose was to add

prepositions and articles where they were needed, some students took the exercise a

step further and changed verb forms to the past tense to match them to the original

sentences in the article. In this case, an explicit statement of the task’s purpose and a

clear example might have aided students’ comprehension of the expectations for this

exercise. After this, she invited some students from each group to come up and write

their sentences on the board. This was a fun activity, although she was slightly

hampered by the lack of markers in the classroom.

The final exercise was for students to place themselves in the role of one of

the original founders of McDonald’s and write down some sentences about why they

would have sold the restaurant. There were only two minutes allotted for this task and

I did not know if that would be enough or if students would engage with this, but the

end result was very positive and the students seemed to enjoy coming up with creative

sentences.

Overall, Yini did an excellent job organizing the lesson plan and sticking to

the time allowed for each task. She used a series of visually-attractive slides to show

her main points and had a good understanding of how long each task would take.

She projected a confident persona and moved smoothly through the activities. The

activities were all well-related to the topic, and even if some of the reading seemed

“too easy” for some of the students, I am certain that they learned some things from

this lesson and had a good opportunity to practice their language.

My main suggestion to improve the successful execution of this lesson plan

would be for the instructor to give more explicit instructions and to demonstrate

examples for each exercise. Although the students were able to perform the
Evaluation of Yini Chen (R/W) 4

chronological-ordering task, I think it would have benefitted from a demonstrated

example. In the following writing exercise, there was some confusion about how to

execute the exercise and one of the students began to argue with the instructor. Of

course, as instructors, we are never guaranteed that our instructions will be

understood, especially in an L2 setting, but explicit instructions and examples can

certainly help.

Yini’s lesson plan was well-planned, smoothly-executed and provided a variety

of interesting activities. I think it was well-received by the students and overall, a

success.