Nurhadi Hamka

Student ID: U5880202

Master of General and Applied Linguistics
The Australian National University

Spanish Class Observation

Introduction
Teaching language is never easy, yet, teaching foreign language such as Spanish to
speakers of other languages is exceptionally a challenge. This article aims at reporting two
Spanish classes that I have observed on March 20th and 21st, at the Australian National
University. These classes were taught by different teachers whom both have Master degree
in Linguistics one is currently a PhD candidate in the same field, and another is a PhD
candidate in Literature. Three main points will be discussed in this report: the setting; the
descriptions of the class; and, some reflections which will be based on what was experienced
about teaching method and as an observer.
Observation
Class 1 Monday, March 20th
This Spanish class was a tutorial of week five. It was scheduled at 2 pm and lasted for
one hour. This group six tutorial have 22 students in the class where most of them are
Australian native speakers of English, and only two are Chinese. The portion of the class was
shared into three main parts: introduction and explanation, exercise and correction, and
conclusion. In the first five minutes, the teacher tried to recall the students memory by briefly
revising the previous lesson which was explained in Spanish and English. Although the
students stayed in silence, this part could function as a warm-up. For the next 25 minutes, the
teacher introduced some of the vocabularies that related to the topic saying time in Spanish,
for instance: Qu hora es? (what time is it?), and son las menos (it is). During this
session, the students were in complete silence and paying attention to what the teacher was
explaining. The teacher used Spanish in most of this time but sometimes used English to
explain such exception which is quite complicated to comprehend, for example, es la una
(which is only used to show time within the 1 oclock hour), and la medianoche (which is only
used when saying midnight time). As I could observe, during this 30-minute time, the
teaching-and-learning process was teacher-centered since the students role only took notes.
In the next step, the students were asked individually to do an exercise based on the students
handbook which lasted 10 minutes. During this 10-minute exercise, the class was completely
silent. However, in the correction part, the class started to be crowded as the teacher
prompted the students to speak and corrected the answers directly. In this time, the teacher
also corrected the students pronunciation as he sometimes asked the students to speak
independently. Although the students asked him in English, the teacher kept encouraging
them by answering the question in Spanish. In this session, a student-student interaction was
not recognised; however, teacher-student interaction was well established. For the last 10
minutes, the teacher summarised the lesson and told the students about next week's topic
so that they can prepare themselves in advance.
Class 2 Tuesday, March 21st
This class was a group five tutorial. In this class, there were 19 students where all of
them are Australian native speakers of English. The class started at 1 pm and finished at 2 pm.
Like the class 1 above, the topic was the same, but this class was like an immersive Spanish
class. Since the first minute, the teacher kept using Spanish until the class over. He also
divided the class into three significant parts: introduction, exercise, and (little) conclusion. In
this class, I can judge that the level of the students was slightly higher than class 1. Although
the teacher used Spanish all the time, the students were seemed to understand the
explanation and very often asked the teacher something that was not clear yet. The amount
of time for introduction and explanation were slightly shorter than class 1 which was only 20
minutes but allotted a considerable amount of time for an individual and group exercises.
These exercises lasted about 35-40 minutes which included teacher and peer corrections.
During the individual exercise, which lasted only 5 minutes, the class was completely silent,
but when it came to group exercise, the class was just like a traditional market where
everybody speaks. In this situation, the teacher walked around the group and took a chance
to correct the students pronunciation in place. Finally, there was only a very brief conclusion
since most of the time was allotted for exercise and correction.
Reflection
After 60 minutes of witnessing these teaching-and-learning processes, I can argue that
the class 1 is more structured since the time for explanation is greater than other parts of the
class, while class 2 is more practical as teacher allotted more time for students to practice.
Unlike class 1 which is more to teacher-centered, class 2 points out students-centered where
teacher acts only as a facilitator. The skill that is emphasised in class 1 is more on
comprehension in which English is used as a help to explain such difficult one, whereas class
2 as immersive Spanish class is predominantly speaking, and a bit of listening and
comprehension. As an observer, it was enjoyable being in class 2 seeing the students engaged
using Spanish all the time although I have no idea what they were saying; nevertheless, class
1 was also remarkable as the target language was clearly delivered and therefore could speed
up the understanding of the target learners.