April 20th, 2012
Information on the
observed class:
Courses: Children 3
Teacher: Dolores Gonzalez Ruzo
School: Interaction
Number of students: 9
Ages: Between 8 and 11
After saying hello, the
teacher started the class. She devoted almost 20 minutes to drilling affirmative
and negative sentences with "will" by telling each student a person,
a verb, and an adverb of time for them to form the sentences. She kept up a fast
pace so that students would not get bored. If they made any mistakes, the teacher
clapped her hands or made a sound with her mouth to indicate something was
wrong and the students corrected the sentence; if the student could not tell
where the mistake was, the teacher showed him/her. Simple but challenging
language was used (e.g. Verbs other than "get up" or "brush
one's teeth", such as "walk the dog" or "water the
plants" were used).
Next,
the teacher told the students they were going to learn how to ask questions
with "will," wrote an affirmative sentence on the board and invited
the students to figure out how to ask the questions. She reminded them of the
rule "special word + person + action." The students, looking at the
board, succeeded fairly soon in figuring out that inversion had to be carried
out and after that the teacher wrote "the rule" for yes/no questions
with "will" on the board: "Will + person (all the personal
pronouns were written on the board) + action." The teacher then gave four
flashcards to each student and, using the action on the cards, each student had
to ask a question to the classmate next to them or to the teacher.
After
this oral practice, the teacher made students work on their handouts to practice
yes/no questions with "will". The activities consisted on different
images of people performing actions and short answers (e.g. "Yes, I
will" or "No, we won't") with a space for the students to write
the corresponding questions.
Note: The
teacher only spoke Spanish to help students organize ideas (she said the
correct sentence in Spanish for the student to say in English). Whenever
students got distracted, the teacher put them back on task using a calm but
firm voice – she neither shouted nor showed anger-; and she laughed together
with students when these laughed at something, which created a relaxed and
natural atmosphere.
Reflection:
The
first thing that called my attention was that the teacher never got angry, even
when students did not do what they were supposed to. I think I would have been
much stricter if in charge of the class, but the teacher then told me something
that was obvious but that I had not thought about: That however bad students
may behave, they are still children and can therefore not be treated like
adults. While observing the class, I kept thinking at times "I would make
them stop and not turn a blind eye to bad or distracting behavior; otherwise
they could never listen to me" but the teacher told me that sometimes you
need to ignore some things because if once tries to make children behave in a
soldier-like way, they either get scared or loose motivation.
I
could also notice that kids like to know about the teacher's life. Whenever the
teacher mentioned her boyfriend they suddenly looked at and listened to her
more attentively. I talked to Dolores about this, and she told me that she
exploits that a lot, because it is almost as if children forgot that they are
learning English and feel like they are having a real conversation with the
teacher, which gets them much more easily and effectively engaged.
Moving
on, that children (at least in this group) seemed to prefer oral activities to
written ones was a salient feature of the class. When hearing that they were
going to work on the handout, the students started automatically complaining;
while doing the written activities, they got much more easily distracted;
because they found it harder (generally speaking), they got tired more easily.
Finally,
I noticed that, even though children are able to correct the mistakes they
make, they do it more automatically than consciously. It seemed to me that
students did not really think about
why what they said was wrong, nor cared about understanding what was wrong, but
rather they were simply interested in getting it right and moving on.
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