TCSOL Practicum II

Spring 2015

Teaching report
Instructors name: Yijun Zhong
Class taught in: Chinese
Date of teaching: March 12, 2015
Duration of teaching: 50 minutes
I. What transpired in class
1. The class I taught was a drilling class with advanced students of
Chinese. The theme of that lesson was on warehouse-style
supermarkets. Since students were already quite familiar with the
language structures, all I had to do was to design tasks in which
they could practice the use of these structures. I prepared four tasks
for the class, and after each task there were further focused
exercises on the grammar structures that students had already
been exposed to during the task. The sequence started with a
simple matching and information gap, moved on to the major
reading task (information gathering) and ended with a problemsolving activity. Due to the limitation of time, I did not get to
implement the final task.1
2. I felt that for most of the time I was able to get my students
attention, because the tasks enabled them to constantly think about
practical issues and they seemed happy to contribute to the class
with their own ideas. Though I also prepared solutions to the
problems presented in each task, sometimes students had different
ideas, so as long as they could justify their solutions, I was not too
controlling on their having the correct answers.
3. There were two tasks in which students might encounter words that
they were not very familiar with. Instead of providing the English
translation right on the materials, I chose to let them ask their peers
or me questions to maximize learning opportunities. After they had
completed the task, I wrote the new words on the blackboard and
explain them to the class.
II.

Reflections

1. Compared with my first student teaching, I was definitely more

prepared this time, so students were exposed to a variety of tasks. I
felt that it was always better to over-prepare than under-prepare.
1 The lesson plan and the teaching video are both attached to this
document and uploaded.

That being said, flexibility was also required in teaching, because

more often what students had come up with might not be the same
as what I had in mind. For example, in one task I asked the students
to match the characteristics of warehouse-style supermarkets and
ordinary supermarkets. One of them put under ordinary
supermarkets and she justified it quite reasonably. Therefore, I
mentioned in the end that we could have different answers and
what I showed them in the slides might not be definite.
2. One aspect that I could improve in was the transition between each
task. Though they were all interrelated and progressed from simple
ones to more complicated ones, I did not have very smooth
transition between them. I felt that if the transition was improved,
the students might have a better understanding of the overall
structure of the class.
3. While I tried my best to offer students authentic, contextualized
tasks, I still believed that some of them could be improved so that
they were even closer to the real world. For instance, in the reading
task, I gave students some information on a supermarket. I felt it
could be better if I just showed students the website of that
supermarket and walk through the selected information with them.
This way students might be even more encouraged to explore
instead of just reading whatever I had prepared for them.