Being excited and worried at the same time is perhaps one of the worst things that might happen to a person. Worried about not being able to keep to the standard and fall behind..Anyway, everything started at about 7 am when I had to wake up to be at IH at 8 am. The course starts at 9am, but as I had my second lesson today and therefore I had to print out some handouts, I decided to avoid long queues or some other technical problems and actually arrived the earliest. The day started with Manana as usual as she gave us some handouts with some names and surnames and asked us to find 2 people with the same names and the other two with the same family name while being at a so-called "party". It appeared that all of us had very similar names, like Jan, Jam, Jim and surnames - Bird, Beard, Baird etc. I could find mine in about 2-3 minutes and it became clear that we would talk about phonemes.
We were given a handout with a list of phrases - intonation, weak form, phoneme, diphthong etc and first we had to elicit the meanings ourselves, while next we received the matching definitions. Afterwards, we played a very nice alphabet game with flashcards. We said the sounds first /I/, /a:/ and then Manana threw all the papers on the floor. We had to pick as many as we could and create words with them which led to the creation of a poster with the phonemic script of the words we came up with.
Nick arrived for the second session and told us to write 3 words - jeopardize, partisan and rickety. We had to elicit spelling, stress, phonemic symbols and meaning. We tried to elicit information on the board under Meaning, Form, Pronunciation and Usage. Then we were told a story about Vietnam,where Nick used to live. He talked about how he went somewhere with his bike and got a splurtifer (mud) on his face and then he was fanoogled (frustrated). So, after he set context using his personal experience, he elicited information using CCQs, then we had drilling and board work.
Still, the most action-packed was the end of the activity when Nick stated that both above-mentioned words were from his imagination and they actually did not exist. It came as a shock as I had almost already memorized these absolutely useless words. Anyway, it means that Nick's lesson was efficient.
At the end, we were made to give the meaning of the words and check understanding with CCQs.
Lunch break arrived, 1 hour before my lesson. Well, basically an hour and 40 minutes because I was supposed to be the second this time, but still although I had prepared lesson plan, cover and Language Analysis and handed it in before 9am, I had not written scripts for myself, so I had to do in during the break. Anyway, half an hour rushed and it appeared that I had only 30 minutes to jot down exactly what I was doing. I was specially concerned about giving instructions and using appropriate language as these were my main aims for today. I managed to finalise this on time.
The lesson itself went smoothly, the Ss seemed to be engaged and interested in the activities. And again, straight after it finished, I became even more nervous about the feedback. During the session, Nick pasted some positive and negative feedback on the boards and asked us to identify our strengths and weaknesses. Then, he gave us comments individually and I found out that he liked my lesson so much, he hardly had any remark to make. This time, I have to focus more on eliciting the instruction and also jotting down some noted while monitoring.
I am more than happy and excited but at the same time I feel very concerned about the fact that I have more responsibility and it will add up as time goes by. For Monday, we also have to prepare the first assignment (+I have to deliver my third lesson). Tough weekend it approaching I guess.
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