On July 08, 2020, I taught, with my teaching partner, my sixth one-hour lesson with a group of three students enrolled in an Advanced Oral Communication class. The objective of this lesson was that students would be able to differentiate between ‘L’ and ‘R’ sounds when listening and then produce them accurately when speaking. This was to be accomplished first through practicing ‘L’ and ‘R’ production in isolation with instruction and modelling. Then a game would have students identify ‘L’ and ‘R’ in words and sentences modelled by the teacher and produce ‘L’ and ‘R’ in provided words and sentences to earn points. The game would reveal a story, and students would then practice speaking ‘L’ and ‘R’ words in context from a provided text of the story. Finally, students would debate a topic related to the story using ‘L’ and ‘R’ vocabulary terms. This was the first lesson we prepared with a focus on accuracy over fluency and communicative meaning, which was good learning experience, and it was yet another reinforcement of the lesson of simplification and clarity of objectives.

In preparing the lesson plan, we sought to incorporate feedback from both our practicum supervisor and our students. Our supervisor had suggested we push the students’ language skills further, target accuracy as well as fluency, and better incorporate both error correction and evaluation. Our students had asked, among other things, for a focus on pronunciation. Addressing ‘L’ and ‘R’ production and reception was an opportunity to respond to both. We also benefited from a clearly-defined and focused objective. This provided the basis for developing a series of well-integrated activities that scaffolded student learning for the target skill while keeping the content simple and consistent. I appreciated the challenge of creating a new lesson approaches and content. This included preparing specific pronunciation explanation and modelling for the first time. I also generated original content for the majority of the lesson, which allowed me to integrate everything from the warm-up onward. This was a rewarding challenge. Finally, a clear focus on a certain skill made it easier to organize student participation in ways that we could assess and correct.

In delivering the lesson, we created some of the best classroom dynamics so far and incorporated fulsome correction so students could actively improve. The focused lesson plan meant we could easily provide clear instructions and the appropriate language of the content offered relevant opportunities for clarification and correction. Because we were not grappling with complicated activities, we could also focus on other dynamics such as having all students’ cameras on, motivating them through a simple game, or inserting moments of error correction after they produced a meaningful piece of speech. These benefits, however, fell away toward the end of the lesson as we attempted to transition from practicing production from given text to active discussion a debate. Here we lost the strength of the simplified content by shifting to abstract concepts without scaffolding. This could have been improved by either simplifying the discussion topic or providing greater prompts. In concluding the lesson, we regained engagement by returning to the previous scaffolding of pronunciation skills and challenged students to produce very difficult terms with combinations of ‘L’ and ‘R’ sounds. Students expressed a great deal of enjoyment at the end of the lesson, which was gratifying.

Overall, this lesson was a great opportunity to explore a new skill focus and content creation. I was very pleased with the experience of teaching pronunciation – I feel very comfortable with the style of isolation, modelling, and student production with error correction and increasing demands. I also feel more confident in creating original content to match learning objectives more closely. Finally, we achieved a good engagement with activities while managing the timing and momentum of the lesson..