Jessica Briante

Prof. Reilly

EDUC 359

30 August 2017

Mini Lesson Reflection

1. Challenges included: students not knowing the langue, students not understanding the

language, the time utilized, and the pronunciation of words. First, students observed the

language of the lesson, French, but all students are not familiar with this language. Once

students discovered the language was French, their understanding of the language was

minimal, which resulted in confusion. Furthermore, the time utilized for this mini lesson

was a challenge. A last challenge presented was the pronunciation of words, which is

difficult in any foreign language being learned.

2. Students began to understand the lesson and what the objective of the lesson was as it

progressed. For students overcome the language barrier, there was a lot of repetition

throughout the lesson. The repetition allowed students to understand what they were

going to learn as the lesson continued. Going into this lesson, the time presented was five

minutes. As the lesson was prepared, the amount of time did not seem sufficient.

However, as the lesson was taught, the time appeared not as much of a problem, even

though the lesson felt a bit rushed. To overcome the pronunciation challenge, repetition

of verbally saying the number name and hearing how to pronounce the number name was

a big help. To further assist students with pronunciation of the number names was the

video displayed before the teacher began practicing the number names with the students.
3. The lesson began with a video; students were stimulated by trying to determine the

language the video was in. This video gave an outline for students who would be on

different learning levels. The video could serve as an introduction, review, or challenge

the higher level students by seeing if they could say the number name before the video

revealed it. Language was used throughout instruction by speaking short and simple

sentences. For example, pratique ensemble meaning, practice together moi, toi,

nous meaning, me, you, we. Other short and simple words in the French language

were utilized as well, including the number names.

4. Being part of the class in this activity displayed real life experiences ELL students have

in an English speaking classroom. A major portion of this activity was learning in various

different languages. To know what was occurring in the lesson, attention towards the

teacher(s) became significant. I can relate this activity to the experience of ELL students

in an English speaking classroom as how difficult and frustrating it can be as an ELL

student in an English language classroom learning material that you will be tested on.

5. The purpose of this activity was to see how difficult it is to instruct students who do not

understand a certain language. Feelings of confusion, anger, and frustration were not high

during the lessons, but if those lessons continued in foreign languages for the whole

semester, those feelings would be heightened. These heightened feelings are the feelings

ELL students have every day, and I believe the purpose of this activity was for us to be in

an ELL students shoes to know how they feel. As teachers, we expect things out of our

ELL students, but we never understand all the feelings they have until we are in their

shoes. This activity provided that, resulting in discovering how to assist ELL students to

achieve their goals best to their ability.