Oct 19/2020
Today’s observation was of a synchronous virtual meeting of a university English conversation club. Participation was voluntary, so attendance numbers and proficiency levels vary with each time the club meets. The topic of conversation was national holidays and there were 2 teachers leading the discussion.
The club opened with 4 short videos on the history of Canada from the “Heritage Minutes” series. Each video was followed by one or two questions on the content. After the videos, the students were asked to turn on their microphones and cameras and talk about where they were from.
Next, there were small group discussions in break-out rooms about the national holidays from each students’ home country. A return to the whole class environment included a summary of the discussion, followed by questions on the students’ favourite holiday foods, cooking styles that were unique to the students’ local area and the students’ favourite holiday.
Participation was slow to start but was much better by the end of the class. I thought the teachers did a good job of building participation by choosing people to speak, while still encouraging people to volunteer. The environment they created was a safe place for students to try out new language that they were learning. The thing I would do differently would be the initial videos. They used more difficult language and did not speak about Canadian holidays. It may have been better to find some simple images of celebrations in Canada, or to screen share and look up images on the holidays that the students were sharing.