Jordan CO#2

On July 15th I observed Ross Kozloski's speaking class. He started out by having me introduce myself and then prompted the students to ask questions to me. No one spoke up immediately, so he plied the students a little by reminding them of some of the introduction type of questions they must have learned previously. It's interesting to see teaching moments in the random spontaneity of life. Eventually there were some volunteers and some of the more outspoken students started taking things a little out of hand, so Ross got things back on track and started class.
It was presentation day! The students had paired up the day before to work on a presentation using on of the social situations they had been studying (such as apologies, thanking, declining, inviting, etc). I was prepared to sit back and watch, but one student's partner was absent. Thus I found myself filling in with a simple sketch about being invited to a party. We all got time to finalize and prepare then started the presentations. Ross made sure to have each pair to introduce themselves and explain their social situation before beginning. During the sketches he offered almost no help instead letting the students work out what to say on their own with two exceptions: when one pair did not know the proper word and when one pair stumbled over one phrase enough to confuse the meaning. His comments after each presentation were mostly content based and gently prodded the others to help explain what had happened to make sure the class understood. He made sure to bring up cultural notes pertaining to the skits either to point out differences or expound upon points made purposefully or otherwise by the students. When the students should have known better, Ross offered some grammatical corrections. We finished up by going over some idioms dealing with food (such as "baloney", "bring home the bacon", and "don't cry over spilled milk").
Seeing the fluency over accuracy training in action was very interesting. Ross seemed to have a certain accuracy level which he expected of the students and made corrections for if it was crossed, but beyond that he just made sure the content was easily understood by the class.