Still so much to work on!

Before writing this blog, I thought that I had killed my last micro teaching, however, that would not be the case. I noticed two significant issues from my video: 1) my evaluative teacher talk; and 2) the non-authentic student interaction.

At the beginning of this program, we looked at the T-Initiated IRF and its effects. For the feedback stage, there were two ways that a teacher could handle this stage by either giving the student a communicative or evaluative response. Where communicative is for scaffolding towards independent student functioning and the latter is just for highlighting their errors and close the exchange. From my MT, I counted nineteen different times that I told a student 'very good'. Using this primarily as a segue word to move the conversation forward. The student had answered the question, but in no way was it 'praise' worthy. Since reading Kohn's "The Risk of Rewards" in SLA, it has really forced me to think twice about giving praise to students and the ways it can demotivate them. I have to find a way of moving the discourse along through other means that's not praising or evaluative.

This being said... I am having a giant problem with figuring out how I can go about doing this without it being one of the two. Any help would be strongly appreciated! 

The second thing that I had noticed in the MT video was how unauthentic I made the student interaction. In class, we discussed about trying to create classroom discourse to resemble an actual conversation we would have outside of class. I need to realize this when I'm getting the students to interact with one another. An example of this would be when Kevan asked DeeDee, "Whose bedroom do you think it is?" This question had previously been asked, so I should have had him ask, "What do you think?” since that would better represent authentic discourse between native speakers. I another aspect in creating authentic discourse, which I haven’t ever addressed in my classes, is the use of 'stress' when talking. A way to introduce this would be the rubber band technique we went over in class. Adding this fun element to everyday classroom interaction will help students in understanding the flow of conversations. Also, from watching my video, it can give doing a tedious conversation task a little extra flavor for individuals that are tired of being in class for 8 hours.