Topic > Understanding Divorce: Causes and Consequences

First I would like to provide a brief description of the teaching context. This lesson is designed for 16 intermediate to advanced adult ESL students from different countries with different L1s such as Arabic, Chinese, French, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, and Vietnamese. Their age varies from 20 to 38 years. This class took place at NOVA from 3:25pm to 5:30pm. This is a writing course; therefore, the instructor focuses on teaching students the basic skills of constructing essays. The teacher normally uses mini communicative tasks that encourage students to participate through meaningful scaffolding to achieve the main task. Most of the class seeks higher degrees in American universities; therefore, they want to improve their writing in this course to pass English proficiency tests such as IELTS and TOEFL. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay This lesson was about writing a cause and effect essay, and to make it happen, students need to clearly outline what they were going to write, which is an important step or phase in writing an essay. I designed this lesson to be 65 minutes by agreement with the instructor, but when the students started writing their essays, the teacher decided to let them finish writing in class, instead of assigning the rest as homework. Therefore, I took an hour and a half of that lesson. I filmed the entire session, so I could reflect on the entire session. The video reflection and comments from my host instructor shed light on the strengths and weaknesses of my teaching. Some parts were great while others were less than great. I started the lesson by trying to involve the students to build a good relationship with them, and it went very well. We talked about the topic of that day, which was divorce. I chose divorce as the topic for the essay because I thought students would be able to relate to this topic if I asked them about the social and relationship issues plaguing society. I wanted them to be able to guess the topic after giving them the clues, but unfortunately the students were not able to identify the topic. Ultimately, I ended up mentioning the topic we were going to discuss. Subsequently I showed them a video that addressed the topic of divorce and its causes. I wanted them to have a general idea so they could participate. After the video, I asked them to tell me what they think causes divorce. The students began to provide the causes and I subsequently drew their attention to the results of the divorce. Once again, they provided answers about the effects of divorce. I think I managed to engage the students and draw their attention to the topic we are about to discuss, as well as getting them to generate causes and effects in just a few minutes. Therefore, I think I managed to achieve the goals in the warm-up phase. In the first lesson I had time management problems because I was unable to divide the students into smaller groups in a timely manner. As a result, I thought of another way to divide students into groups. I had each student draw a number and all the students with the number one entered one group, the students with the number two entered another and so on, until we had three groups of five. This procedure was convenient and quick because students were seated in their groups within five minutes. I distributed three different handouts to the three groups highlighting the different onesbody paragraphs. Each group was responsible for delineating only their specific body. In one leaflet it was the cause, in the other the effect and in the third the solution. I wanted each group to work on different body paragraphs because I wanted to cover more areas. Some groups finished before the time allotted by me, i.e. 15 minutes. Therefore, I asked one of the groups who finished first to come to the board and start writing the schemes they came up with. After all three groups listed their patterns, I asked the students if they could see the differences between the different patterns on the board, but I don't think they were able to see what I had in mind. As a result, I had to explain to them that there are three patterns we can follow to create a cause and effect essay. I think the task went very well, and this time the instructions and organization were clear and quick, but I think the station task was not done very well. Therefore, this idea caused some confusion for students. The final result of this task in which the students had to identify the three different models was not clear enough to them. I think I failed in this part because the students didn't identify the patterns themselves; instead, I had to explain to them that it is more teacher-centered teaching. I created this assignment because I wanted students to take the discovery approach where they see the big picture they created as a group. On the other hand, this task succeeded in using the communicative approach because students participated in groups in a limited time to develop an outline. I wanted to have all the patterns on the board so students could see and correct their classmates' patterns. Therefore, I started asking students what they thought of the first group's outline and whether we should group some ideas together and have a topic sentence for it. The students had great ideas for the essay, but their ideas were not categorized into headings and were sometimes repetitive. Therefore, we worked together as a class to group ideas and provide topic sentences. I think this was a good scaffold for the students because they created three different outlines and could see how to categorize their ideas to come up with an organized outline. I must admit that this phase, the post task, was not easy for me because I had to work with the examples provided in front of me to help the students achieve the best results. At one point, my mind stopped and I couldn't think of any titles or examples. After working on the post assignment where we classified and organized the patterns, I gave the students a break and then asked them to write a cause and effect essay using the same divorce topic we had been working on since the beginning of the lesson. lesson. This was the evaluation phase and the students had already done the main part because they had already created the outline for this essay. The teacher decided that they should finish writing the essay in class. Therefore, I took another 30 minutes to have the students write the cause and effect essay. After the students finished writing the essay, the teacher took their essays so he could grade them. He will give them to me at a later time so that I can evaluate their work too. Watching the instructional video repeatedly made me identify some strengths and weaknesses in my teaching. I established a good relationship with the students and they enthusiastically participated in the activities. Also, I think the video we watched at the beginning of the lesson worked well because they were able to absorb the content and.