TCPD 3 – FINAL REPORT Virginia Pagnutti

Escuela Normal Superior en Lenguas Vivas “Sofía E. B. de Spangenberg”

Profesorado de Inglés

Trayecto para la construcción de la Práctica Docente 3

Profesor: Mariano Quinterno

Alumna: Virginia Pagnutti

Año 2008
TCPD 3 – FINAL REPORT Virginia Pagnutti

TCPD 3 – 2008
FINAL REPORT
I.GENERAL INFORMATION

1. Information about the school and the course

School: Escuela de Jornada Simple Nº 26 "Adolfo Van Gelderen"

Jerónimo Salguero 2455
Palermo, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires
Course: 4’ C
Textbook: Chit Chat 1 - Oxford Classbook and Workbook
Number of students in the
class: 22
Any other relevant The classroom is situated on the first floor, at the end of the
information about the corridor, on the left. It is quite comfortable, about 42 square
classroom, such as size, meters. It has three blackboards, on the left there is a large
light, temperature, window overlooking an internal patio. On the right there is a
acoustics, visual support, wooden door continued with another large window. From
etc.: there we can see the corridor and further away, the park. The
classroom is very quiet and luminous. The temperature is
warm.
We made our calls on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays,
one hour each day for a total of nine visits during the morning
shift.

2. Seating arrangement:
Blackboards D
o
Teacher’s Desk o
r

Wi
W
n i
d n
ow d
s o
w
s

Cupboard
TCPD 3 – FINAL REPORT Virginia Pagnutti

II. THE LEARNERS

1. Motivation:

Observation Nbr. 2 – April 24th

Nature of Task Speaking
How often do you …..? Use of adverbs of frequency.
Repetition of the same question, substitution drills.
Students’ reaction: The students were bored, unmotivated, tired and impatient. They lost
interest in replying to the teacher.
Possible reasons: They barely answered the teacher’s questions: some of them were
bored and others didn’t understand.
They weren’t interested because what they were doing was not
meaningful. If they had been given an advance organizer, which is
information presented prior to learning (any verbal or visual
material) they would have been able to organize, interpret and
introduce the new incoming information1.
Teacher’s The teacher kept asking the same question to her students,
reactions and substituting adverbs of frequency or nouns. Instead of paraphrasing,
comments: in order to make the questions easier to understand, the teacher kept
asking the same question, raising gradually the tone of her voice.
This was a clear example of behaviourism, where the teacher
presented a structural pattern, a question, as a stimulus, expecting the
learners to respond, by repetition or substitution.2

Observation Nbr. 8 – May 14th

Nature of Task: Writing
Main topic: Parts of the face
Vocabulary learning
Students’ reaction: The students felt very excited about the topic. They spoke between
them, exchanged information and ideas about the characteristics of a
monster. They showed enthusiasm and got very excited talking about
their monsters.
Possible reasons: They found the topic very amusing and could share their feelings
about their drawings with their classmates and the teacher. They
were able to use their imagination to create their monsters.
Teacher’s
reactions and
comments:

2. The learning process:

The students were involved in the learning process only when the topic attracted
their attention. Because it was related “to the context, as their learning fit into their
1
Gimenez Sacristán and Pérez Gómez. Comprender y trasformar la enseñanza
2
Williams and Burden. Psychology for Language Teachers: A Social Constructivist Approach.
TCPD 3 – FINAL REPORT Virginia Pagnutti

experience; to the meaning as the topic was relevant to their interests and to the purpose, as
it was a way to increase their knowledge”.3 They communicated and exchanged ideas about
their own interests, even with those classmates they never talked to.

During the observations there were no instances of self-initiated communication

exchanges, except the day when they talked about sports.

It was difficult to account for diversity in the group as in general they didn’t speak
in class, except when they were questioned by the teacher. There was a girl, Camila, who
had many difficulties in expressing herself in English, and a boy, Sebastian who wasn’t
able to reply to any of the teacher’s questions. One of the factors that affected the learning
was the way the teacher used to ask questions. She sounded very intimidating, and this
made the students feel rather frightened and thus, less confident. Another factor was the
lack of material. Some of the children had the text book, but others didn’t.

Hardly ever did the teacher realize about her students’ difficulties.

3. The learning environment:

The classroom was quiet. The students didn’t seem to be worried, or interested in the
English lesson. Obviously teaching styles influence the classroom atmosphere. The teacher
was more concerned in imparting knowledge to the children than promoting interaction
between them.

In general, students interacted between their desk classmates, except Federico and
Johnny. Federico always played and chatted with the classmates seated behind him, and
Johnny with Emanuel, seated in front of him. Federico never paid attention to what the
teacher was saying, his only interest was to be seated looking at the back. Camila and
Yanina were practically excluded from the whole class as the teacher used to sit down on
the corner of her desk, and from there she had no visual contact with the two girls. On the
right, there was a group of four, (Nicolás, Facundo, Sebastian and Juan Ignacio) who never
participated in class.

III. TEACHING SKILLS AND STRATEGIES

1. Use of English:

3
Holderness, Jackie. Teaching English to Children.
TCPD 3 – FINAL REPORT Virginia Pagnutti

The teacher used classroom English all the time although, she didn’t encouraged the
use of English on her students much. Whenever she asked a question in English, many
times her students answered in Spanish, and she didn’t make any remarks about it.

Most of the dialogs consisted on an English- Spanish interaction:

For example (the first class the students were learning the adverbs of frequency and
routines):
__ What do you have for breakfast?
__ Nada.
__ ¿¿Nada?? ¿¿ Cómo que nada?? Y ustedes (referring to the rest of the class), ¿tampoco
desayunan?
__ No
__ Chicos no pueden estar toda la mañana sin tomar nada, ¡Tienen que desayunar! How
about you, ________? What do you have for breakfast?
__ Café con leche.
__ y nada mas?
__ No.
_ (. . .)

The teacher didn’t modify her English much, because she was constantly resorting
to the textbook. She restricted her teaching to the book’s exercises. She didn’t make use of
teacherese. Her use of English was as wide as the activities from the textbook allowed it to
be. From our point of view, she wasn’t able to provide the comprehensible modified input
that according to4 Krashen and Michael Long learners need for language acquisition. We
think she taught in a rather automatic way, really far away from the interactionist view of
language. She used a lot of drills, repetition and reinforcement throughout all her classes.
But we couldn’t really tell if her way of teaching was due to a behaviouristic “habit
formation” idea, or if it was due to a lack of planning before her lessons, which would
explain her resorting so much to the textbook. The student’s use of English was good,
although was also restricted to answering the exercises from their textbook. We can’t really
say that they are able to establish a conversation and to interact with each other in the
foreign language.

2. Planning:

As we mentioned before, there was no evidence of planning at all. The entire

teacher’s work was based on a textbook called “In Focus”. Consequently, the topics were
the ones planned by the author of the book. We could confirm this lack of planning when
during every class the teacher decided by glancing the pages of the book at the end of each
lesson, which the homework for the following day would be.

The balance of activities was not good. They were monotonous and most of the
tasks given by the teacher consisted on the students’ correction of the previous day’s
homework. The only activities which where different, (although always resorting to the
book), were two listening comprehension activities. In consequence, there was not much

4
Theories of second language learning( ELENI I)
TCPD 3 – FINAL REPORT Virginia Pagnutti

real interaction among the students since there was no motivation on the part of the teacher
to make them talk freely in English. They just answered questions such as “What do you do
after having breakfast” or ‘’what do you usually do on Fridays?”

The teacher did not give much importance to timing, since (as we already mention),
the activities consisted always on the same things. All the lessons were devoted to the same
activities. Consequently, there were no different phases during each lesson.

As regards materials, she made little use of the blackboard (for example to make
reference to frequency adverbs, during one of her lessons or to clarify something), and a
tape recorder (which she used for two listening activities). She didn’t resort to visual
support such as posters or a videotape, and she didn’t resort to other kinds of material
either.

3. Form-focused instruction:

The teacher followed the deductive approach because she explained the grammatical
rules of the language to her students and didn’t make use of elicitation. That is to say, she
didn’t guide them throughout questions to make them formulate the grammatical rules
themselves. She taught in an automatic way which on the one hand, allowed her students to
be good as regards semantic, syntactic, morphological and especially phonological features.
But on the other hand , if we take into account the first one of the five hypothesis from
Krashen’s theory of language acquisition5, ( which says there are two ways for students to
approach language learning: they may “acquire” it or “learn” it ), Alicia’s students have not
acquired language. Because we acquire as we engage in meaningful interaction in an
unconscious way, and we learn by a conscious process and by paying attention to form. So
her students will probably have perfectly learnt all the features mentioned above by the end
of the course, but they will not be able to speak in an unconscious natural way. They will
not be able to interact meaningfully.

As regards language interference, the students didn’t make many mistakes due to it.
Or they answered in Spanish to their teacher English questions, or the teacher resorted to
Spanish in order to call the students attention when they were misbehaving.

4. Correction:

As we said before, most of the class activities were based on correcting the previous
day’s homework. Each student answered orally a question from their homework such as
“What time do you get up?” which was orally modified by the teacher if necessary, and
then, based on that information, each student corrected his written work. So, self correction
was an important resource during the class. There was no peer correction at all, and in case
a sentence was not understood clearly, the teacher resorted to the blackboard or to Spanish.
Thinking time was not necessary, because all the activities had been previously
made at home, and the lesson was completely devoted to correcting the tasks given as
homework.

5
Theories of second language learning ( ELENI I)
TCPD 3 – FINAL REPORT Virginia Pagnutti

IV. CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT

Regarding classroom management we can say that in most cases the “three-part
exchanges in which the teacher initiates, a student responds, and the teacher gives some
feedback”6 took place and this reflects how the classroom interaction is restricted and very
far from real-world interaction.

The teacher usually “controls the turn taking”7 by nominating the students when she
establishes eye contact with almost all the students. As we mention before, some of the
students were never named or looked at, such as Federico, Camila and Yanina. The former
did not care about this situation as he always spent the whole period talking to other
students, but the two latter were not taken into consideration and it was difficult for us to
assess the consequences of this fact, as they were not very extrovert so they do not show
very much how they feel.

Concerning behaviour, the teacher did not have much problem to manage discipline
as the group of students was quiet and calm. Although they do not seem to be hardworkers,
they behave. On the other hand, there was only one opportunity when the students spoke in
loud voice altogether, when we consider that the teacher could not manage the situation.
She presented a new topic (sports) by asking them what sports they know. In that moment,
she lost the control of turn-taking as everybody was speaking at the same time, however for
the first time during our observations they were eager to participate or to talk about
something proposed by the teacher. As Willis says “The power of controlling is reassuring”
8
for a teacher, but in this way the students “get hardly any chance to manage their own
conversation, exercise discourse skills, or put to meaningful use the target language”9

Pair and group work was not present in this class, except once when the teacher
asked them to do an “ask and answer” activities in pairs about daily routines. In that
opportunity, she read the instructions from the book and told them to work. She did not
either check understanding or monitor the activities. Besides she did not make any
comment on their work after the activity.

Talking about giving instructions, in general the instructions were given in their
mother tongue. Little target language was used by the teacher to explain the activities. But
the most striking aspect about her teaching method was the fact that she did not paraphrase
her instructions (when said in English) when a student did not understand. She insisted on
the exact same words over and over again although they did not get the point of an activity.

V. PROBLEMS AND POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS

One of the main problems that in our opinion arose in this class was the lack of
motivation on the part of the students. As we said before, that was an extremely silent class,
6
Willis, Jane. Language Learning: Creating the best environment
7
Willis, Jane. Language Learning: Creating the best environment
8
Willis, Jane. Language Learning: Creating the best environment
9
Willis, Jane. Language Learning: Creating the best environment
TCPD 3 – FINAL REPORT Virginia Pagnutti

and apart from the fact that this could be a specific characteristic of the group we consider
that one possible reason may be that the learning was not designed on the basis of the
students’ interests. “Successful lessons and activities are those that are tuned to the learning
needs of pupils, rather to the demands of the next text-book unit, or to the interests of the
teacher”10. In this case the lessons, although not prepared at all, followed the order of the
textbook. Vigotsky said that “the child is an active learner in a world full of people who
play important roles in helping them to learn to make them pay attention to objects and
ideas…”11 “the adults mediate the world for children and make it accessible to them”12
Unfortunately for these students the teacher does not play that role.

Another reason for this lack of interest could be that the teacher relies on the spoken
word only. As Scott and Yreberg proposed “most activities for the young learner should
include movement and involve the senses … you will need to have plenty of objects and
pictures to work with… demonstrate what you want them to do” 13. While their proposition
of words is not enough is really motivating, she did not “play with the language” at all.

Lack of variety could also be the origin of this problem. “Since concentration and
attention spans are short, variety is a must”14 Scott and Yreberg said wisely. And they
exemplify this talking about “variety of activity, variety of pace, variety of organization,
variety of voice”. Unlike we found a monotonous class with not variation in any of the
aspects mentioned above.

“Children are energetic, children are noisy, children are fun and enthusiastic,
children are children”15 said Genevieve Roth. Those children seemed to have forgotten
about being children at least during some periods.

Willis states that there are four conditions for language learning, three of them are
considered essential and the other is believed to be desirable. A part from considering
Exposure and Use of English as essential conditions, Willis takes into account Motivation
to learn “motivation to process the exposure they receive, and motivation to use the target
language as often as possible, in order to benefit from exposure and use”16 This teacher
forgot about these conditions, she did not “select topics and activities that serve to motivate
them…”17

Jackie Holderness mentioned that “a good language classroom should be the scene
of a lot of talk”18if this does not happen we should pay attention to the possible reasons of
this fact.

10
Cameron, Lynne. Teaching English to Young Learners
11
Cameron, Lynne. Teaching English to Young Learners
12
Cameron, Lynne. Teaching English to Young Learners
13
Scott and Yreberg. Teaching English to Children
14
Scott and Yreberg. Teaching English to Children
15
Genevieve Roth. Teaching very young children
16
Willis, Jane. Language Learning: Creating the best environment
17
Willis, Jane. Language Learning: Creating the best environment
18
Holderness, Jackie. Teaching English to Children.
TCPD 3 – FINAL REPORT Virginia Pagnutti

While planning classwork, we are able to decide to “choose themes that will
motivate students to use and learn the language, themes that match their interests and
experimental world(s)”19. “We” have the opportunity to choose, “we” can design our own
path, and “we” have the power to select. And “the more relevant the themes are, the higher
motivation and involvement will be”20. This teacher seemed to have left this power aside
with the consequence of taking her students’ motivation away.

John Holt asserts pessimistically that “to a great degree, school is a place where
children learn to be stupid”21. It is a dismal thought, but hard to escape. “Children come to
school curious; but within a few years most of their curiosity is dead or at least SILENT” 22
just the characteristic that puzzled us in this class. He added that after some years “children
will do the tasks with only a small part of their attention, energy and intelligence” 23, “a
child is more intelligent when the reality before him arouses in him a high degree of
attention, interest, concentration, involvement-in short, when he cares most about what he
is doing”24

At this point of our reflection we would like to suggest a possible solution to this
small problem that leads to great negative consequences. Undoubtly, this would be
“planning”, thinking beforehand about the class, negotiating with the students the themes of
the class, involving them in the decisions that include them.

VI. YOUR ROLE AS AN ASSISTANT

Although we offered our help to the teacher, she never involved us in any activity
during the classes.

VII. FINAL REFLECTION

Teresa Gimenez:

1. What caught my attention was the fact that the teacher didn’t seem to plan the
lessons. She usually asked for a text book to one of her students, and chose the lesson to be
learnt. Generally they did a single activity during the whole hour. This was one of the

19
Estaire and Zanon. “Planning Classwork” A task-based approach.
20
Estaire and Zanon. “Planning Classwork” A task-based approach.
21
Holt, John. How schools fail (ELENI II)
22
Holt, John. How schools fail (ELENI II)
23
Holt, John. How schools fail (ELENI II)
24
Holt, John. How schools fail (ELENI II)
TCPD 3 – FINAL REPORT Virginia Pagnutti

reasons why the students got bored: children can’t concentrate on one activity for a long
period of time.

Another thing that diverted children’s attention was that the teacher frequently used
metamessages when addressing to them. It means that the class communication wasn’t
centred in the content, but in the relationship. The main problem with metamessages is that
most of the time children don’t understand the real message and get confused.

2. The teacher was using a manipulative technique rather than a communicative one.
She repeated the questions substituting the adverbs or the nouns, and the children replied
with the predicted answer. I would have expected a communicative technique, where ‘’the
students were free to be creative with their responses and interactions with other
students’’25. The manipulative or controlled technique, which is teacher-centred conflicts
with the topic based framework, which is learner-centred. I bear in mind that a fairly small
amount “of teacher control should always be present in the classroom. Controlled
techniques sometimes have communicative elements”26. But I believe that we must tip the
balance in favour of free techniques.

3. The teacher lacked enthusiasm in teaching; she acted as she was performing a
duty, something she had to do because she was paid for. I strongly believe that teaching is
not only imparting knowledge, is making your students feel that they mean a lot to you. We
have to be able to appear in front of them with a positive attitude, showing our interest in
their success. This observation made me conscious that planning a lesson is essential. I am
sure that the teacher knew about different methods and approaches of learning. But routine
and lack of planning led her easily to the wrong method of learning.

María Silvia García:

1. I was concerned because during my observations, I realised how most of the

teachers start by planning every single detail of their lessons in advance, and then when
years go by, most of them tend to leave all that planning behind and improvise their
teaching while giving their lessons. I think that is due both to a lack of time for planning,
and also to feeling a bit disappointed, because perhaps nowadays, teachers don’t feel their
students are interested in learning. These problem does not appear in primary school’s first
years, and in fact it is the other way around!, but it can be noticed as from seventh grade
onwards, increasing a lot during secondary school.

So, when I noticed the teacher had not planned a single lesson, and when I also
noticed this lack of motivation among the students. . . I felt frightened!! Because I pictured
myself a few years ahead, having unavoidably left all my planning behind . . . and I did not
like what I saw. I wouldn’t like to be leading a class where all my students would be in
complete silence, and not because they were all paying attention to me, but because they

25
Brown, D. Teaching by Principles
26
Brown, D. Teaching by Principles
TCPD 3 – FINAL REPORT Virginia Pagnutti

couldn’t wait a minute more for my lesson to finish and go to break! That would be sad for
me, because all my efforts to become a good teacher would have been made in vain.

Anyway, at the very end of my observations, I realised they had been of a lot of
value to me, because they taught me how valuable previous planning and everything it
involves (for example, variation of activities) is. Even though it takes time and is not as
simple as it seems, planning is the key to make our classes interesting and motivate our
students, and variety of activities is the key to reach each of their many diverse
intelligences.

2. a) Trough this observations, I could understand clearly the difference between a

Transmission model and a Transactional model of teaching27. Since most of the attitudes of
the teacher followed the first model’s line mentioned above. For example, she based all her
teaching in a behaviouristic model of learning (stimulus- response, habit formation) and
since she focused mainly on the structure of the sentences produced by her students, risk
taking as regards making up wider personal sentences was discouraged. Another example
would be that if a student was able to reproduce a predetermined correct answer, which was
taken as evidence of learning. . .

2. b) It actually doesn’t conflict with the theory I read. In fact, it helped me to

understand it through real examples such as attitudes of the teacher that had certain
characteristics, or students’ response to those attitudes. And as I mentioned the teacher
followed a clear “transmission model”, so I could only see examples of this kind of
teaching and compare it with what I knew about the “Transactional model”.

2. c) I would personally choose the “transactional model” of teaching. I will

compare and contrast what I saw in my observations in order to state the key areas I will
have to attend in my own teaching. I would like to put all my emphasis on learning how not
to control directly my student’s learning. I would have to base all my teaching on the
cognitive/ social model (Vigotsky, Halliday), whereas the teacher from our observations,
based her lessons on the behaviouristic theory (stimulus response/ habit formation). And I
would allow mistakes because I agree with the fact that they are essential for learning.
Whereas the teacher sounded rather intimidating whenever she asked questions, and it
seemed as if she expected a perfect answer from her students not allowing any kind of
mistakes to happen. And finally, whereas the teacher didn’t make her students interact with
each other, I would try to provide an environment to allow peer interaction to happen and
as a result meaningful learning would happen too.

Marina Tibabuzo:

Having had great expectations on what my observation would be like, I finally

finished them very disappointed. I have been thinking about my words in these final
reflections, considering the best way to express the whole feeling I have after this
experience, but the word that summarizes my thoughts is disappointment.

27
What whole language is, and why whole language (Whole language within a broader perspective)
TCPD 3 – FINAL REPORT Virginia Pagnutti

During the first day in the school something surprised me a lot. It was the fact that
this course of children of 7th Form was very, very quiet. That is why my first comment was:
“Girls, can you believe this peace? I don not have this in my school” This made me
wrongly think that the classes would be perfect because the teacher would forget about
behaviour. However, what puzzled me was that the teacher did not take advantage of this
characteristic of the course. She seemed to be always tired and expecting for the bell to
ring.

The aspects of my observation that have made an impact on my understanding of

teaching and learning English as a foreign language were the features that characterise her
method that are aspects that I do not want to repeat in my own teaching. So as I could not
see things that I would like to copy or apply in my classes, I would take into consideration
the attitudes I am not going to attend in my own teaching practice

Bibliography:
-Gimenez Sacristán and Pérez Gómez. (1994) Comprender y transformar la enseñanza.
Madrid: Morata.
-Williams, Marion and Burden, Robert. Psychology for Language Teachers: A Social
Constructivist Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-Holderness, Jackie. Teaching English to Children. England: Oxford Polytechnic.
-ELENI 1. ‘’Theories of Second Language Learning’’.
-Willis, Jane. Language Learning: Creating the best environment.
- Brown, D. Teaching by Principles.
-Weaver, C. Understanding Whole Language.
-Cameron, Lynne. Teaching English to Young Learners.
-
Scott and Yreberg. Teaching English to Children.
-Roth, Genevieve. Teaching very young children.
-
Estaire and Zanon. “Planning Classwork”. A task-based approach.
-Holt, John. How schools fail (ELENI II)