Community Language Program Teachers College, Columbia University

A&HL 6302: Self-reflection (2) Teacher: Joey Hsu

Class: Intermediate Conversational English

Date of Teaching: 4/12/2017

The topic of the previous lesson was how to give compliments, where the students used

the expressions they learned to give compliments. Today, the class would shift the lesson toward

how to respond to compliments, where the students would learn how to respond to

compliments in a socially and culturally appropriate manner, and how to live with the similarities

and differences of giving and receiving compliments in their own culture and the U.S. culture.

However, during the class, expected cultural threads that came from the students of

different background were somehow lost due to the weak connection established between the

lesson objective, as stated above, and the in-class activity. This was also mainly because of an

insufficient discussion that was generated about the similarities and differences of compliments

and compliment responses from the cultural perspectives. To improve this lesson, I could

potentially turn todays class into the flipped classroom where the students could watch the

lecture at home and do some research on cross-cultural differences of compliments and

compliment responses. Coming to the class prepared, the students could engage in a number of

activities that were specifically designed to promote language learning as well as cross-cultural

communication. At home, for example, the students could collect the ways to give and receive

compliments in their mother languages and share them with the class. Also, they could compare

and contrast how American people and people of their home countries generally give and receive

compliments. From here, the students could bring in more depth to the class.