Observation Reports - Fourth year 2022

For my observations, I decided to observe at an Institute of the English Language in Asunción, Paraguay. The institute teaches English from the ages of 4-5 (children 1) up to adults, and there is no age limit to be a student. The institute assigned me the classes I would observe and subsequently teach, according to the requirements for this year’s observations guideline.

Observation Report #1

It was a class of 12 students, but there were only 8 students present that day, and they were around 13-15 years of age, and they were in the Adolescence 7 course, which is an intermediate level B1-B2, they were using the book “Impact”, Unit 2, and their teacher is Miss V. The class observation lasted for 120 minutes in total.

Rapport

Miss V knows each of her students and can call them by name, and she is very aware of their strengths and weaknesses and can give room for those students who need a bit more help than the others to accomplish the tasks at hand. Furthermore, the students know what their teacher expects from them and follow the classroom rules and regulations. The students tend to speak among themselves here and there. Still, they keep it to a minimum rate Miss V notices this but allows them to do so because after all, they are teenagers, plus the more they practice their Speaking skills the better, and this also allows for rapport to build amongst them as a group.

Classroom Management

The sitting arrangement is a bit different from most classrooms, here they have round tables where there is space for up to 6 students, so they can engage with the teacher and then engage with their groups to complete the tasks, and thanks to the sitting arrangement Miss V can give instructions for all the students to hear, but then she always makes sure to ask her students about the instructions she’s given, that way students are always listening to just in case she asks them to repeat the instructions, and the students have the chance to clarify any doubts they may have. The act of asking the instructions from a few students after giving them herself gave her control over the class when she needed to have it. The teacher is aware of what her students need and is actively engaging with them at all times.

Miss V know her students have a very high level of English, so she tries to keep them speaking in English at least when they interact with her, and she avoids giving explanations in Spanish and giving equivalences, or translations, that way her students will get used to using the language during the class.

Speaking and Grammar Skills

In the same class, I observed the students engaging with a worksheet about the Trinity Levels because they were going to take the exam to see if they were equipped with the English Skills to do the Trinity exams.

As a task, the class was divided into two groups, and each group was given these two pages of questions. They had to read all of the questions, come up with answers for each of them, figure out what was the tense of the question, and then think of five questions they could ask the other team.

This was a great exercise because it got the students thinking about grammar and speaking. They had fun asking the questions and coming up with the answers. This task had clear aims, the objective was to focus on the students’ accuracy and fluency regarding their answers and their guesses for the tenses of the questions being asked. If there were mistakes with the answers regarding the tenses, Miss V preferred to make them guess the tense again, rather than giving them the answers straight away, which is great, students do not need to be spoon-fed the answers. If the students misspoke, they would get corrected after they have finished speaking, just to do some error corrections to cheer them on rather than discouraging them from participating in class.

Observation Report #2

The second class I observed for 90 minutes, and was a class of six students 12-14 years old, and the course is called Adolescence 3, the teacher is Miss C, and their levels are around A2-B1, and they were also using the book “Impact”, but they were developing a class about writing emails.

Rapport

Students can share their thoughts and ideas with the teacher. Students tend to talk among themselves, but positively, without disrupting the class. Miss C. is very calm and explains the topics at an understandable level without using any Spanish whatsoever.

Classroom Management

Miss C has control of her class, but students are a bit reluctant to use English as they interact with each other. Even though they have the vocabulary to have interactions in English, they prefer to use Spanish, and regardless, the teacher is always encouraging, and she uses English to explain the words or phrases the students don’t understand, avoiding using Spanish during the class.

Reading Skills

At first, the students had to read a short story about friends during the summer, then they had to read the emails these friends exchanged during their summer break, but when it came down to reading, the students were a bit hesitant due to their lack of confidence in their skills, but they were able to read and write everything they were asked. The teacher corrected their pronunciation mistakes after they were finished reading their paragraphs, which allowed the students to not feel too ashamed or embarrassed about their mistakes. Then after correcting any pronunciation mistakes, the teacher asked if there were any new words they did not understand or knew the meaning of, which there were no new words for them during the class. The teacher is very reassuring and encouraging towards the students, which puts them at ease whenever they had to read something.

Writing and Grammar Skills

As I mentioned above, the class I observed was using the “How to Send Emails” Unit of the course book. The students had to read a story about some characters, so then they had to read the emails those characters were sending to each other during the summer vacation. The goal of this activity was to have students read and then write their emails to their friends. The students were a bit lost when the teacher asked them to write the emails using the format given because they were used to texting or using WhatsApp to have conversations with their friends. The students had to take into account the format, the length, and the connectors they were using when creating the emails. Students were able to create the emails and read them out loud, some struggled with their pronunciation, but they had their ideas and their grammar in check.

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