In this observation, the teacher used a story of his childhood Christmas to grow his students’ Grammar skills. Besides so, He aims to improve their speaking and listening competencies. The class was organized in a horseshoe formation, and he instructed the class by sitting in the middle facing the students. He first read the story hoping the students listened to his words. He read at regular pace, and looked to see if students gave him any expressions. Later, he commented that he will read it the second time with regular pace but a sentence at a time. He repeated looking around to check for facial cues. There seemed to be no sign of confusions, so he completed the remaining. The last time, he requested students to now listen and write down on paper the key points they heard. Here, I find the teacher applied repetition differently than other observation teachers. Most of them tend to repeat phrase with the students, and by their level, this works well. However these students appear to be higher-intermediate students, so the need of repetition could be viewed and applied differently. This action proceeded and the student read what they wrote down and now the teacher said the original. The term ‘original’ shocked me, as it appeared he was initiating some sort of comparisons. Whether the intent was for good or bad, I thought perhaps this was tedious and a risk for learners. Tedious because the students may have perceived the task as a indirect grading of their grasp of the language. He never addressed why he needed to compare the original to their writing. Potentially, in the perspective of the student, this created tediousness. From tediousness, if they understood a minimal per se, this may have affected their self-esteem. The potential degrading of a student’s learning could result in a risk.

The teacher had the class split into three groups and each of them required a writer. This writer is assigned for the purpose of writing a fact from the story with proper grammar. Now, he never taught what was proper grammar in this lesson, so it heavily relied on the learners applying past knowledge. This activity was a great review, as it could really supplement the learners to see what they understood from the story (comprehension) and practice grammar all at the same time.

When everyone had their sentences written down and ready, he dissected the sentence up with the class. He explains what happened in the sentences and introduces “relative clauses”. I thought at first, he was teaching the definition relative clauses, it seemed however that he was going through the rule and not going in too much depth. Since there weren’t enough examples towards showing these clauses, so perhaps these were extension content he planned for the lesson?

From the teacher, I found the most intriguing aspect being his ability to instruct grammar to L2 acquisition learners inductively. Being a language fanatic and instructor myself, I would never ponder on the possible methods to inductively instruct new languages to learners. The how, what, why were reoccurring questions that my mind had during and after observing Rolf. It is this observation that I realized that there are no one way of delivery (i.e. deductive) but other forms of delivery as well.