For the observation, the teacher is teaching around 10 level 1/2 students two sessions a week. Students are reminded of the words they learned last session. the teacher would proceed and says the words out load and have the students repeat it two to three time. Through every part of her lesson, she repeats a couple of times to instill the phonetic sounds to the students. From this constant repetition, it somewhat pre-evaluates/pre-assess the students whether they grasp the phonetic sounding of the word. As soon as they finish repeating, she explains in basic vocabulary with slower pace, why they are looking at these words. Not just for reviewing purposes, but to introducing the topic of ‘telephone’. She keeps the introduction of the topic short. Only explaining that they use the telephone to talk to others for information. And so, she writes all the examples on the board and students follow the teacher to pronounce all the words in the sentence. As more repetition occurs, she has them turn to two respective sides: side a and b. For each turn, one side would state the example sentence and the other side would respond. Then, they switched roles. This was a brilliant practice, as both sides can practice questioning and responding. In the setting, it seemed more direct method with a bit of audio-lingual method.
As the lesson progressed, there were numerable instances where the teacher modelled everything she wanted to be completed. Since the class was comprised of level 1/2 students, she wanted to make sure the activities were realistic and applied to real-life environments. An example of a realistic activity was when they were practicing calling an imaginary ‘supervisor’. They would apply the words and phrases they had learned till that point, use it in the dialogue exchange. Frankly, certain students may lack self-esteem, so the teacher would remind them to refer to the white-board (had the phrases of the day) or ask her. Students were timid for sure, but they gradually became self-motivated to participate. The activity was interactive but also very practical due to them needing to speak first to get the new piece of information. The focus of the lesson knowingly was speaking, students were slowly able to manage the challenges at hand step-by-step. Challenges for the class were motivation to try and having enough knowledge to participate in the activity. For most, the activity became fun and interactive (since they were starting to apply new words in phrases that they learned prior). However, some may present this anxious feeling to the instructor. Thus, possibly prompting the teacher to think of the following considerations/reasons:
- Objective Orientated
- Purpose Driven
- Skill Set & Language Acquisition
Using basic vocabulary to determine the students’ process of the information (instructions and/or new content), the instructor must pace comfortably for students and themselves. Comprehensively, the teacher took content delivery slow enough information to be properly processed. Being slow may have setbacks, but students will gain much more out of the experience. From the teacher, I felt when students were allocated appropriate worktime, the more examples/opportunities for the instructor to proceed with post-assessment. the teacher also focused on efficacy and not efficiency. This was shown through her closure part of her lesson. She reviewed the material for the day and explained the use of their vocabs and phrases.