English IELTS – Mexico 

 This observation was another chance to be a part of a class in Cancun, Mexico while in the comfort of my own home. The opportunity to see students learning in another country is very rewarding!  

The students in this class are preparing for the IELTS exam. This means that the assignments and tasks are aligned with achieving successful results on the exam.  

The lesson I got to see was about strategies in reading. Specifically, how to find headings and skimming and scanning. It is important to know these skills for the IELTS exam because if you spend too long reading, you will run out of time. These are skills that need to be utilized on the exam to find information quickly and then produce answers.  

The latter half of the lesson explains the task of answering questions from a text or reading. The students then use the knowledge they discussed in the beginning about skimming, scanning and finding headings to practice answering questions from a reading. This is putting into practice the information they just learned! 

I think this would be a “fun” class to teach, for me. Although I’ve heard it can be challenging, I like that there is a clear goal at the end, to do well on IELTS. This would be a great place to build a course from because the final objective is so obvious to everyone. Most students in this class would be striving for the same goals and that would make lesson planning easier. I would love to teach an IELTS class one day!