Bianca CO 2

            Today I observed Felicia Ciappettas composition class. The students were much more advanced than the other class I observed at the beginning of the session. I wanted to observe different levels at CIES to get a better understanding as to how the program works across the board. Also, to measure what level 3-4 student behaves as.

At the beginning of class, Felicia, wrote out the agenda on the board for the class to get familiar with expectations for the class period. The first thing on the board was a journal prompt: “what does it mean to be successful?” this was a free-writing activity to measure writing fluency. The exercise was timed for 10 minutes. As the students wrote, or didn’t write, I scanned the room to see their reactions from the prompt. Felicia reminded the students several times that the purpose was not to focus on grammar rules. I noticed that the students were hesitant to write because they were worried about grammar and/or punctuation.

In the previous class session they had written and error log journal entry. This composition differed from today’s entry by various degrees. The error log entry was timed for 30 min. It measures accuracy not fluency and the feedback is based on performance not content.

After the students wrote and discussed how they felt during the exercise, Felicia collected the compositions and transitioned into the vocabulary portion. The words included: leery, juxtapose, cornucopia, embedded… At first, I thought the words were a little difficult for the level of students but Felicia presented the words in a friendly manner and comparison method to link similar words to justify its meaning along with its part of speech.

I noticed after listening to the student interacts, that their English was actually really good. They were able to decipher their feelings and explain themselves enough to be understood. Felicia comically used “KAPEESH” as a way to collect everyone’s attention and smile. I thought this was nice and supportive and the students seemed to respond well.