1/12/14

This morning I had the opportunity to interview Bernard Celestin, the electrician. On audio tape, he explained the electrical situation and his plan to remedy the problems; one of which was the fact that that there’d been someone who’d tried to steal some of the equipment and had done some damage in the process. I will make this tape available when we return.

Today was the third day of the teacher’s workshop. There were 7 teachers present. We began by having the teachers share written thoughts from their journals. Next we introduced listening activities as a way of enhancing fluency.

We emphasized that, during listening activities, it’s important to clearly set the expectations for the listening activity, activate prior knowledge, listen multiple times, make the material audible and understandable, and have an explicit listening purpose. Here’s what we did to exemplify the technique:

1. Pre-activity – discussion of the meaning of parent-teacher conferences. During this discussion, we learned some interesting things about how or if this type of conference happens in the schools these teachers represent.
2. During activity – we had the teachers listen to and watch a short video of a parent- teacher conference one time. We distributed questions about the dialogue and had them listed to the scene two more times. They then had time to ask clarifying questions and answer a multiple choice questionnaire about the video.
3. Post activity – we asked the teachers to partner up and role play a short mock parent-teacher conference and to video record them on the XO’s.

The teachers seemed to enjoy the experience of creating the conferences and using the XO’s while they did it. We had them share their creations with one another. We ended by introducing the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) and took some time to go over the sounds. We had each student phonetically spell his name and compare them with one another. We tried to do another exercise where they recorded words or dialogues on the XO’s and share them again with one another, but by this time most of the XO’s had run out of power. We ended class by asking a few teacher to review what they’d learned from the activities.