Dana CO#1

I attended Felicia Ciappetta's Speaking 4 class today as an observer. ("T" teacher)  Class began promptly at 1p.m. in room 302.  Most students arrived on time. I made it just in the nick of time, having initially gone to the wrong classroom. LOL  Class consisted of students from Asian, Arabic, African and Hispanic cultures.

 The T projected onto the screen, many sentences from her notes of a prior session where the students were speaking about the exercise. The sentences all had glaring mistakes which the T had observed during the conversation.  (T also explained how it is difficult to listen to the conversation and take notes at the  same time, so her examples were not verbatim.) 

The T directed the students to look at the incorrect sentences and discuss them amongst themselves.  Students partnered-off in discussion groups.  Some students spoke the sentences out loud immediately, and others were a little more timid, but eventually they were all speaking the sentences out loud with each other and discussing them. This went on for 10-15 minutes. 
The T began teaching by going through each sentence and interacting with the students asking for corrections. Most of the errors dealt with context and verb tense and in some cases vocabulary choice.

The T discussed the discrepancy between the written and spoken word.  e.g.   etc.   etcetera  is the spoken form.  etc. is the written form.
The T also discussed transfer error that sometimes occurs when the speaker's native language is transferred literally to English.  For example:  Somos seis no?  TO We are six, right?  In spoken English: There are six of us, right?

The T was able to explain the grammatical rules without hesitation, which I found intimidating. LOL
I found it easy to find and correct the errors, but very difficult to explain the reason.  The T did involve me a couple of times in the conversation.  The class was fun and the students seemed relaxed. Before ending the lesson, the T reminded the students about the assignment for the next class session.