Chloe CO #1

My first classroom observation was a listening class with Calyn Stringer. I arrived before the teacher did, so I sat at a desk and observed the students a bit. There were many Arabic-speaking students in her class, as well as a few Asian and Hispanic students. The students were all friendly with each other, laughing and talking about soccer. The topic of discussion that day was baseball idioms. They are very common in English, particularly conversational English. That was somewhat of a revelation to me, I had never thought about it! I know almost nothing about baseball, but I completely understand the meaning of baseball idioms.

            To help the students understand, Calyn gave them a brief explanation of baseball. They learned about the importance of the bases- many of the idioms involve them. There are so many idioms- for example to “touch base” with someone, “hit a home run”, or “out in left field”, just to name a few. The students listened to and read a dialogue between 2 people, in which they used many baseball idioms. Then in pairs, they attempted to guess what the expressions mean based on context. After we went over the dialogue as a class, the students were split into 3 groups and had to create their own dialogue using 5 idioms. Then they had to perform their dialogues in class. On the whole, the students did a great job, but still seemed to struggle with some of the idioms. My classroom observation helped me understand how confusing idioms can be in a foreign language. Especially if you have no familiarity with baseball, the idioms may be completely meaningless to you! You must repeatedly encounter these idioms in context in order to truly understand them. I liked Calyn's in-class activities very much, and I will remember them for future reference.