First University Classes Assisted!

My students are beyond amazing and better than I could have ever asked for. You know that they break your expectations of adorableness when a students says, “I’ve seen this on American tv so many times and I knew this was my chance”, and proceeds to hand me an apple. In order to celebrate my student’s first ever class in oral production, I stayed up until midnight and then two hours the next morning baking cookies. Baking without USA measuring cups was a challenged, and I apologized profusely to my students that they probably tasted different than normal. Their faces lit up when they saw the cookies, and my night class went back for seconds.

Every Friday I assist in teaching two sections of oral production for freshman English Education students. Meaning- my students are studying to be English teachers, and I get to help them improve their fluency and confidence in the language. There are four of us Fulbrighters at UEL, and each of us is assigned a grade level for the course. The freshman class is the largest, meaning that I get to work with about 40 students between two classes. The classes are set up as 1.75 hour chunks, and there is an afternoon and night session (2 pm and 7:15 pm).

It’s interesting how many of my students stated that their reason for choosing the major is because they either 1. Loved English and have studied it a lot of their life or 2. Want to learn English. In a way, this is similar to a lot of English Education majors I met in my program who started the degree track because of their love for English, but eventually switched out of the Education track.

Our first class we spent some time doing icebreakers and getting to know you questions, which helped me to gage the students’ personalities and English levels. They are so spunky, and I was so impressed by the level of humor that they’re already able to include in their responses. My night class had a running joke about being single and loving cats, and we decided that blind dates are definitely necessary to set up almost the whole class haha!

I am a bit nervous about working with two different professors for the class. Both classes are based on the same syllabus, except my afternoon professor seems to want to incorporate a lot of texts, and my night professor is keen to follow a certain textbook. It does make me worried that I might get strung out from lesson planning two different curriculum. As well, I haven’t received an answer yet as to how I’ll fit into the class- whether it be creating an opening activity, or just adding to what the professor creates. I’m hoping that the next few weeks will help to lay that out.

My students are working on their biography and autobiography unit, which leaves a lot of wiggle room for activities like- headbanz, coffee house speed dating, classmate bingo, and other small activities that can be infused to introduce more adjectives and descriptive vocabulary. I’m hoping to plan a lot of group activities to get them up and talking. As well, I’ve begun collecting information on my students to gage their levels, goals, and backgrounds, and I hope to incorporate a variety of multiple intelligences in my activity so that I can collect feedback about how they best learned oral production skills.

It may be a lot of work, and things still may not be set up, but I love it. My students make it worth it everyday. My goal is to show my students how great their abilities already are, to improve their confidence, and show them that as they’re learning English- I’m learning Portuguese. It’s a joint process. I made sure the first day to emphasize that I’m not there to judge them. When I shared some of my recent mistakes (for example louca-crazy for louça-dishes) they laughed. I can’t wait to share more laughs and jokes with my students as we learn.