Will CO#5

  Today, I observed Dr. Rios 2:00pm listening class. He started by handing out a worksheet to the class. The first two questions were opinion based questions, meant to serve as a pre-listening activity. The questions were about defining success. They had a class discussion about what everyone answered. Dr. Rios asked each student leading questions about their response, prompting them to use synonyms and elaborate with more vocabulary words. At some point Dr. Rios used the expression “take it for granted”, and he paused to explain it to everyone. The entire discussion served to casually enforce and enhance their language learning. He used soccer players and other real life examples to illustrate the difference between “effort” and “talent”. After a thorough pre-reading conversation, he gave the class five minutes to read through the rest of the questions on the worksheet. They were all short answer listening comprehension questions. After that, he played the video, a TED talk titled “Success is a continuous journey”. They watched the video once, were given a few minutes to begin answering questions, then he played the video for a second time. The rest of class was spent letting the students answer their worksheets on their own.