Genevieve CO#3

On Monday July 13th I observed a reading class.  Marilyn was out sick and Angel taught the class.  This was a good thing because Angel had the students do introductions as if it was the first time the class was meeting since he was new to the students and vice versa.  I appreciated getting to hear where the students where from.  Two students were from Saudi Arabia and one student was from Burkina Faso.  There was one student who was absent that day.  Angel explained to the class that when he arrived in the U.S. he spoke no other English than "hi," "bye" "thank you" and "bathroom," which is more vocabulary than I speak in most languages.  He explained that just like them, he began his studies here at an intensive language school.  He is now completing his PhD.  He explained that reading and writing are the emphasis of American higher education.
Angel explained his experience taking the TOEFL and discussed how important using context clues was for him.  He explained that he was an intensive reader who stopped very often to reference his dictionary.  He explained that he had to break himself of this for successfully taking the TOEFL.  "Your brain is a very powerful machine, more powerful than you know."  He caused that he had a student fail a test over the word "sock" because he knew he had recently encountered the word yet felt to frustrated that he couldn't remember it that he spent too much time on that one question to the detriment of the rest of the exam.  The moral of the story was "don't stop!  keep going, try to understand the text."  The first assignment in class was to read a short story and to do a number of tasks that related to the reading.  Angel was very good in encouraging the students who were a bit apprehensive to begin reading out loud.  "Don't get scared.  We'll just do a little bit at a time."  As the students read sentence by sentence Angel asked "do we understand (such and such word?"  As students encountered new words Angel provided synonyms along with the definition.  Angel also took time to act out idioms, which, for me seemed to be an excellent way to ensure that students would remember strange phrases that didn't mean what they appeared to mean.  Angel also helped students with certain sounds.  For example, one of the students whose first language was French would let the "h" be silent in words that began with the letter.  When the story was complete and the student began working their way through the corresponding assignments Angel provided helpful support. For example "think about grammar" he suggested.  "There are only two choices out of the word box that end in "s" so it has to be 'thinks' or 'notices'."  The exercises finished just on time and Angel indicated that there was no homework and that their regular teacher would be back next class.  I am appreciative to Angel that he let me observer while he was substituting.