Before observing Jingjings class, I went to IECP website to see what they say

about the program and the students. To my surprise, the grammar class, which we
were about to teach, is going to be replaced by two Academic Modules that prepare
individuals for content and language in the science and humanities next Spring.
Though, it didnt affect our current teaching, it did make me feel pressured about
teaching one of the last grammar class. When writing this reflection, I went to IECP
website again and found something that I didnt notice before: students in IECP have
to take TOEFL/IELTS in addition to IECP grades in order to get IECP Certification. If
I have known this before, I would definitely have count this factor into our lesson
planning and ask for more information from Jingjing.
The class we observed from Jingjing was about passive voice. I was impressed
by the way she introduced the passive voice: she asked students to close their eyes,
then turned off the light above the blackboard and made other noticeable changes.
Students were asked to tell the differences when they opened their eyes and thus used
the passive voice without knowing it. In the final activities, we got a chance to pair
with the students and tried to guess the word by prompts that used passive voice. The
student with me was having trouble with the form of passive voice even after the
intensive exercise of making up sentences that integrated with tense and subject-verb
agreement. During the observation, I also noticed some of them were of higher
English proficiency and kind of dominated the class. Chen (the Chinese guy that
mentioned APA style when we were teaching Reporting Words in past and present
tense) was the first one that impressed me. When we were waiting outside the class,
he broke the ice and started to chat with us. He was very confident and comfortable in
the class. One last thing about the observation is the classroom arrangement. There
were a group of 6-7 people sit around a big table and there were also some people sit

alone with a separate table. Fortunately, the classroom is not so big that everybody is
close to each other, and I think this is very important for our activities planning in the
real teaching.
From the very first team meeting, we decided to teach this grammar class in a
meaning based approach in that it is a level 4 class and most students, from our
observation, are of high English proficiency. So we started the lesson planning with
the orientation. The textbook introduced the topic of obesity. Though clique, we
decided to use it so that the students would be more readily learning the content (even
though we dont really like the textbook, we dont want to totally discard it either).
The problem is how to find a discourse that both use reporting words and is about
obesity. The tentative plan from our first team meeting is that Kevin pretends to be a
news reporter and record himself as he reports the obesity facts.
For the presentation part, we had so many things to consider: do we want to
teach the differences of similar reporting verbs, how many reporting verbs should we
focus on, and what are they. We first examined the reporting verbs covered in the
textbook. Although it organized the reporting verbs in five groups, the definitions of
each group are too general and there are many overlappings between each group, that
is, many words can be categorized in multiple groups. (conclude could be used to a)
report facts and c) report results) Then the digression came, Elvin found the 11 most
frequently used reporting verbs and wanted to focus on them. I picked a few pairs of
reporting verbs that have similar meaning (allege/claim, declare/state, etc) and wanted
to analyze it so that the students would know when to use which one. I even spent
hours finding the corresponding discourses in The Corpus of Contemporary American
English. Both of the presentation proposals seemed to have flaws: for most of the
reporting verbs picked by me, I (even Kevin) was not able to articulate the differences

and in terms of analyzing them, it would be more appropriate in Susans DiscourseFunctional Grammar class rather than in the IECP Grammar 4 class. For Elvins 11
most frequently used reporting verbs, it would be tedious and time-consuming to
introduce each of them and their meaning. So we decided to discuss the presentation
part the next team meeting
The engagement and expansion (evaluation) parts were much more quickly
decided. We agreed that for the engagement we would change the reporting words
from the letter in the book and make students decide if they are appropriate and
explain why. Then Kevin came up with the idea of using the quote cards to further
expand (and assess) our lesson. So after the first team meeting, we divided the
workloads. Elvin would write out the lesson plan and change the reporting words in
the letter. Kevin would be in charge of the orientation and finding the quotes for the
quote cards. My job was taking care of the presentation part.
It really burned me out to come up with what we would be teaching in the
presentation. On the one hand, analyzing the meaning of similar reporting words pairs
would be too difficult for the students and the whole class could either go out of our
control or remain in horrible silence. On the other hand, I dont really want to teach
each reporting verbs and their meaning separately. In addition, I need some reliable
sources that we can count on when teaching. Since the textbook the class was using is
not that desirable, I resorted to Celce-Murcias The Grammar Book. Fortunately, there
is a chapter in the book: Reported Speech and Writing. Though most of the 30 pages
in this chapter is about the indirect reporting speech structures, I found half a page
about factive and non-factive division of reporting verbs that fit the grammar class
very well: we dont need to go over the meaning of every reporting words, and the
two groups are very clear and easy to understand. Whats more, at the end of the

chapter there is a teaching suggestion that involved using reporting verbs to write a
critique. I dont need the students to write a critique to report their cognitive stance,
but I can always adapt these activities into what is suitable for my class. The
suggestion mentioned presenting a paragraph in which the ideas expressed are
questionable and making students paraphrase it. Then the teacher would expect some
students to use factive reporting verbs in their paraphrases. So instead of finding a
paragraph that contains some controversial ideas and wait for the students to err, I
made up those four sentences that mixed factive reporting verbs with non-facts and
non-factive reporting verbs with facts to introduce the concept. The cognitive stance
in the critique became the later neutral or not analysis.
After watching Dmitri and Zaks team practice teaching, I also learned two
things. One is to paraphrase students answer so that the students will feel his/her
answers are important and other students will understand him/her better. The other is
trying to stick to one topic from the beginning to the end. So after some hours of
searching, I changed and unified all my discourses to include the topic of obesity. In
using the discourses, I tend to use them in their original forms. But after some
discussion with Elvin and Kevin, I agreed that sometimes a revised version of the
authentic materials would make the teaching more effective. For example, the original
discourse in the fact/non-fact exercise is:
Two randomized, controlled trials that studied the outcome of eating versus
skipping breakfast showed no effect on weight in the total sample. However, the
findings in one study suggested that the effect on weight loss of being assigned to eat
or skip breakfast was dependent on baseline breakfast habits.
Kevin suggested removing randomized, controlled and other terminologies
to make it more teaching-friendly. I said randomized, controlled were very

important in this discourse because they meant the trials were well designed and
scientific. But we did agree the sentence after however is a little bit hard for the
students to understand. So we ended up with the much revised one:
The findings in one study suggested that skipping breakfast could lead to more
weight gain. However, two scientific trials show no effect on weight gain between
eating and skipping breakfast.
We changed the order of the two findings and made it clearer for the contrast
of the findings. (I also used different coloring to mark facts, non-facts and reporting
verbs in the sentences. This was also got from Dmitri and Zaks team practice
teaching). I was once more convinced that revisions are necessary for using the
authentic discourses after the team teaching in the class. I hadnt thought that people
would actually read the whole sentences and use other clues besides reporting verbs to
determined whether it was a fact or not (in the example of A new poll finds threequarters of Americans believe).
Since we seemed to run out of time when we did the practice teaching, we
had to make decisions of which one to keep and remove from our lesson planning.
Kevin said if we ran out of time, he would cut his quote card activity. I really didnt
want to do that, because honestly I think the quote card is the best of our lesson. After
some discussion, we agreed that the demonstrate and demonstrate that distinction
seemed to out of place in the presentation and would be removed.. Elvin said if we ran
out of time, he would cut his letter of modified reporting verbs. We finally decided
to keep the first half of the letter and if we have more time in the team teaching, we
would teach the whole letter. Once again, we checked and revised most of the
discourses to make them less controversial so that they would eventually lead to the
answer we wanted.

The "Super Size Me" video and the rank of the reporting verbs were the last
revision we made before the practice teaching. One ting we are concerned is that the
rate of the speech in the video are quite fast and we were not sure if the students
would catch the statistics in the video. So we decided to play the videos three times
and hopefully they would feel confident at the third viewing of the video. In the
practice teaching, we were glad that we got the idea that we could use the height of
our different body part to make the ranking more vivid and explicit. In the team
teaching, I think we got control of the class for most of the time (most of the students
popped-up question were actually in our lesson plan). For the free discussion of
obesity after their first viewing of the video, I think we didn't gave enough time to the
students to talk the three questions over. That's why most of the answers we got was
from the first question. But we got our goal through-- to make students engaged and
start to think about obesity as a problem. We expected students would use "say" or
"said" when they first reported their partners words and would then use some other
reporting verbs as we were introducing the factive and non-factive reporting verbs.
But to our surprise, some of the students were already using"claim" or "suggest" in
reporting their partners' words. They were such a good class that shortly after we
introduced the factive&non-factive concept, we had already got a full blackboard of
reporting verbs. (we were worried that we couldn't get enough reporting verbs for
them to rank) One thing I think we didn't do very well was introducing the concept of
formal and informal writing by adding "that". Before teaching, I knew this part would
be a little tricky for us to teach. We didn't want to just say "don't leave out 'that'
because it will make your academic essay informal", so I put a few sample sentences
that I intentionally removed the "that"(which would pop up after). I was hoping that
students had read the chapter and would know the title " formal or informal " was

referring to the addition of "that". But the students at that time were still occupied
with the reporting verbs and their meanings. That was why some students tried to
replace the "believe" with other reporting verbs when we asked what they thought
about the sentences. Clearly we made a bad transition here, and if I got another
chance to teach the same class again, I would definitely be more explicit and
emphasize that we are moving onto a new concept. I would have two to three pairs of
same sentencse with and without "that" instead of the ambiguous five separate
sentences without "that".
When we were having the "quote card" activity, I decided to sit with one of the
groups since Kevin and Elvin were walking around and had taken good care of the
other groups. ( we didn't have much troubles grouping the students as we had
anticipated. They were sit in groups, but I think next time I would regroup them so
that they don't have to talk to the same people the whole class) For my group, I
decided to be a bystander that would come to help if they have a question. There were
some "conflicts" before I even noticed. First, they were not clear of what they should
do for the quote card activity. Two of them that came from Middle East were actually
arguing with each other. So I stepped in and explained the goal of the task. But after
my explanation, one of the guy from Middle East started to tease the other guy also
from Middle East. He kept saying:" I told you so" and the other guy was kind of
pissed off and laid back on his chair. All those happened so fast that I didn't know how
to react to it. All I can say at that moment was "Lets focus on the task. I felt so bad
that I didn't joined them as a team member because I might be able to solve the
problem from the very beginning by discussing with them the requirements of tasks. I
think for a teacher its a very tough decision whether to sit with one group of students
or not when they are doing activities. On the one hand, students may get nervous or

even uncomfortable if a teacher sit down and act as a team member. On the other
hand, some students in a group really need a teacher to be around, explain and guide
them to do a task (In the class observation, Jingjing sat with a group of students and
helped them with the tasks).
One final thought after team teaching this ESL class is that I benefited a lot
from the team discussion and the practice teaching. There were a lot of things that I
hadnt thought about at all and I definitely learned a lot from Kevin and Elvin. I love
how Elvin articulate and summarize the quote card activity. I love how Kevin walking
around each group of students. I appreciate how Kevin tailored the free discussion
questions (Is obesity a problem of personal responsibility or should the government be
involved?)in the orientation that would be eventually reinforced by the quote card
activity. I really got numerous ideas and inspirations from them. I couldnt imagine
what would be like if I had to do all those lesson planning all by myself, and what I
would feel teaching the course for the first time in front of 17 students that I had
known nothing about. In China, we seldom do team projects at all. Students were used
to working by themselves and to some extent we dont know how to cooperate with
each other. I think in my future teaching, I will introduce and include team projects in
my lesson plan whenever its possible. In addition, even though we may not have
many chances to do practice teaching before every course teaching or presentation, I
think I will encourage my students and myself to give a demo in front of friends or a
few classmates so that we can brainstorm and take a preemptive stance to revise some
potential problems before the actual presentation.