Date: September 20th, 2022

ESAL 0180/0280 is a level 1 and 2 split class focusing on beginner English writing.

Observations:

  • The teacher takes attendance.
  • The teacher collects the homework but allows some students to finish the homework during the break.
  • The teacher reviews the parts of speech and simple sentence structure.
  • The teacher plays a video further reviewing sentence structure (~10 minutes).
  • Activity 1 (~20 minutes).
  • Break (~10 minutes).
  • After the break, the teacher explains capitalization.
  • Activity 2 (~40 minutes).
  • The teacher reviews previous homework and assigns new homework.

Reflection:

The way the class was organized seemed more conducive to a teacher-focused lesson. The teacher would stand at the front of the class and the desks were all placed around the outside of the room with the students facing toward the center of the class. This may not be ideal for most teaching strategies since it does not allow the students to move freely and working in groups can be a bit awkward. However, for this class at such a low level focused on writing there isn’t as much of a need for group work.

The teacher informed the students of the objectives by introducing the patterns and rules of parts of speech as well as capitalization later on. The teacher also gave multiple examples so students could see how they were used. Giving real-life examples is not only a great way to show how English can be used but also shows students why what they are learning is important and applicable to their life.

The teacher asked students about the parts of speech in which they were reviewing in order to see if students remembered them or not. While this may have seemed like a straightforward approach it showed that there were some students who had seen it before while for others it was their first time learning about them. Being in a split class it may be important to understand that some students may be much further ahead than others.

The teacher used mostly yes/no questions due to the class being a low level but they did use leading questions when asking about the homework that was due. T- “did anyone have any problems with the homework?”. This is a good way for students to step forward about any issues they may have had, though some students may have had difficulty but feel uneasy speaking up in front of the class.

This class mostly focused on listening comprehension from the teacher talk aspect. Students also did some writing by answering questions based on the topic of writing paragraphs. The homework returned during class as well as the homework assigned were both major writing projects for the students. At low levels, it is important for students to not only use English but to also gain experience listening and reading it.

During activities, students helped each other complete the tasks and understand new vocabulary. Due to the split class, some students had little to no issue with the task while others struggled. Some of the more experienced students helped out their classmates throughout the class. Which is something that should be encouraged but not to the point of students doing the work for others.

The class atmosphere was fairly reserved as most of the students sat patiently listening to the teacher while also taking notes. The teacher was very light-hearted and encouraged the students to answer some of his questions.

Most of the students were engaged during the class, though some students were caught on their phones which the teacher used as a great example of possessives. During the activities, some students were done early and either resorted to talking with their neighbours or going on their phones.

From this observation, I learned that having a split class can have some pros and cons. Some of the pros are that students are able to rely on each other for information rather than just on the teacher. It can also open up some activities which require some gap fill or group work exercises. Some cons would be that finding material that is relevant to both levels may be challenging and that while one task some may find too easy another task some may find too difficult.

During this lesson, I was given the opportunity to teach one of the tasks. The task was to review a paragraph and correct any missing capitalization. Students were tasked to work in pairs to correct and afterward, I guided the class allowing one student to read one sentence and correct the capitalization and then move to a new student for the next sentence. While it worked out in the end it took longer than expected. The next time I teach something similar to that task I would most likely read it myself and ask students which words I should capitalize.

For this class, I would like to add something similar to the capitalization correction but try to use a peer evaluation method where one paper is passed from student to student and they must find any missed capitalizations or mark it as complete.