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Writing
Carolina Romero Abarca
Teaching Practicum
English Pedagogy
2009
Reflective writing Nº1: The Observation Stage
I. Introduction
• What do you think the cartoon provided below is illustrating? Why? Answer
briefly.
It is a married couple who are going to watch TV in a living room.
I can say that they are married because of their ages (they both look old). In fact,
the woman was not sitted comfortably on her armchar if the man was not her
husband, excepting he was an electrician but he does not look like an electrician
because he does not have any tool to work ; actually, he looks very relaxed since
he is smoking a pipe.
• Taking into account the information you collected during the observation
stage,
Before I started attending this school, I thought that this period was a waste of time.
I only wanted to start teaching. When I met the class, I thought that it was a disaster
since when the teacher was explaining a topic almost nobody was paying attention;
so, I would not have any chance to perform in a good way and I would get a bad
grade in my teaching practicum. However, the next two classes I could observe that
only few students were trouble makers and started attracting the attention of the
rest of the students. Afterwards, I analyzed this situation and I thought that the
solution for this problem was asking them some questions while I was explaining
something in order to a keep them concentrated on the topic .However, still it is
really complicated to keep them interested but at least I found out that this class is
not a complete mess.
Apart from that, I could observe the level of English of the students in order to make
my classes comprehensible; otherwise, I would have started teaching in a really
complicated way for them.
I think these two issues were the most relevant for me in order to change my
expectations about this period.
3. How did you feel? Provide one example you consider most relevant to
support your answer.
At first, I felt like a stranger in the classroom since the teacher never introduced me
to the students (he did it just a week before I started teaching). However, it was a
good experience since it made me feel more confident about my teaching
performance due to all the events that I could observe.
References:
Suggestions:
Sandra should use larger flashcards or body gestures to teach “going to”. However, if the
school has resources such as , a projector , computer , etc., she should use them.
Besides, she should not use the book the whole class since the students get bored easily;
she should try applying different types of activities; for instance, games because the
students are children. By the way, they are very quiet ; so, she should take advantages of
it.
When, we were watching the video of Sandra, some classmates said that her class was
very traditional. I could say that the class was traditional and it was very similar to my own
way of teaching; however, for me it is very complicated to do a class with a communicative
approach since in large classes it is not possible that all the students can speak; moreover,
we have to take in mind their level of English (in most of the cases, in large classes the
level of English is very low). For these reasons, sometimes it is necessary to teach
grammar to the students in order that they can associate what they are learning to their
own language.
Why teachers sometimes use Spanish to teach English?
I have asked some teachers this important question, and they answered me that they
sometimes speak Spanish because they wanna speed things up a little bit.
When students are exposed to a new language for first time, it it is really difficult to
understand without knowing anything about that language.
From my point of view, it is completely true. However in Chile 10th or 12th graders have
been exposed to English for many years and they continue using Spanish in the classes. It
happens because most of the students do not like English due to the fact that they think
that it is not useful. So teachers have make a great effort to motivate their students to learn
English in an interesting way obviously.
Another reason is that some teachers have very low expectations about their students.
They think that the students are going to fail because they are bad at science, maths, etc.
And, another important reason is that public schools have few hours for this subject (2, 3,
or 4 hours).