My First Session with the Academic ESL Class Not Under-enrolled

Today I met for the first time with ESL 140 Academic Reading and Writing Tuesday Thursday class that isn't under-enrolled.  It meets for almost three hours, from 8:10 until 11:00. (We have 50-minute hours, so we'll take one break of 10 minutes, and then we can get out at 10:50.)

The students come from Algeria, China, Ecuador, Italy, Peru, The Philippines, Russia, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam. 

I let them introduce themselves to the whole class by name and country of origin close to the beginning of class, and they exchanged names and contact information with two others.  After we went over the "fancy" language in the SLOs (not designed to be clear to students--maybe a bit pretentious) and did the filling out of green information form and class attendance cards, I dictated four sentences from their the first unit of their textbook, which is on the media.  "When a dog bites a man, that isn't news.  But when a man bites a dog, that's news."  They worked in groups to compare their dictations and discuss the meaning of the sentences.

Their homework is to buy the book, get 8 1/2" x 11" binder paper, finish a 5-paragraph composition about themselves, read my professional bio, and write 5-10 questions to find out what I didn't include.