Vie Miller CO#1

I attended Felicia’s listening class on Thursday at CIES from 2:00-2:50 PM. We haven’t covered listening in class yet, and I was excited to see how someone could teach “listening.” Felicia began the class with an activity aimed at building the students’ vocabulary-- a pre-requisite of listening-- through a mildly-controlled exercise. The students were supposed to write sentences with verbs and nouns which they had defined through a previous activity, and I was permitted to walk around and help them choose the right conjugation of verbs or the right noun. I had a particularly instructive moment when I worked with a student who wrote “I embrace my friends over social media.” While the use of “embrace” was correct given the definition that the student had, I conveyed to her that “embrace” has a more concrete connotation even though it could be used with abstract concepts (i.e. to embrace change). She understood, and she rewrote the sentence. Afterwards, I asked the teacher if I had done the right thing. She said that I didn’t do any harm, but that she normally wouldn’t have corrected the student. Echoing some wisdom from Snow, Felecia said that meaning--rather than using the perfect verb--was the most important goal.