Running head: CLASS OBSERVATION AND PEDAGOGICAL CONTRIBUTION

Class Observation and Pedagogical Contribution

Xiayu Guo and Monchi Liu

Colorado State University

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Introduction

For this assignment, we were asked to observe ESL/EFL grammar classes being offered

at INTO CSU. To collect information about how grammar is taught, we observed six consecutive

sessions for an advanced grammar class. They are taught by the same teacher. Below, we discuss

the specifics of our observations. We are going to discuss the observation from the following

aspects.

Class Observations

Course Description

The six classes that we observed are focused on adjective clauses. In these classes,

students learned about non-identifying and non-restrictive adjective clauses, relative clauses, and

clauses to compare and contrast ideas. Classes were focused on students’ ability of applying

grammar in sentences and passages. Students had to understand how to differentiate and use

these clauses. Each class lasted 90 minutes. There were 18 students in class; their first languages

were Chinese, Thai, Turkish and Arabic. The teacher talked about language points, sentences and

paragraphs. If students had any questions and ideas, they could express them freely. There were

not many rules for managing the class. In addition, in some tasks, students needed to have a

partner. For example, students should do pair work in peer-editing.

The general teaching objectives and goals were adjective and relative clauses, but there

were some specific objectives and goals related to evaluation. Because all students were

intermediate-high to advanced level, it was expected that they should thoroughly learn the

language points covered in the class.

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A- The goal of this course was for students to develop intermediate-high to advanced level of

grammar; therefore, the students should be able to

1. Develop grammar knowledge and usage in sentences and connect separated sentences

into a new sentence by using appropriate connection adverbs correctly.

2. Avoid common mistakes and distinguish the function of different relative adverbs.

3. Use relative clauses in paragraphs and passages correctly.

B- Students should develop intermediate-high to advanced level of grammar skills through

sentences and paragraphs, therefore students should be able to

1. Recognize the relative clauses in paragraphs, though some points may not be fully

understood.

2. Generally combine separated sentences well by using appropriate relative adverbs.

3. Demonstrate consistent facility in sentence combination and formation in paragraphs

though there are some small mistakes.

Instructional Procedures

Teaching methods and approaches

From the class observations, we think that the predominate method was direct method

and the secondary method was content-based instruction. Although students in class were from

different countries, the teacher only spoke English, so no translation was in class. The teacher

explained grammatical points and interacted with students in English. Students could learn

English directly without influence of first language. Students needed to associate meaning with

the target language directly. Although this was a grammar course, students still had some

unfamiliar words in class. In direct method, teacher is supposed to demonstrate the new word

meaning through the use of realia, pictures or pantomime (Anderson & Larsen-Freeman, 2011).
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In the classes we observed, the teacher used some pictures or gave students synonyms to explain

these words. In the course, grammar was taught inductively, which means students were

presented with examples and they figure out the rules or generalization from examples. There

were some techniques students used in class that were related to direct method. They read

grammar-related sentences or paragraphs aloud to memorize grammatical knowledge. The

teacher assigned some questions and answer exercises and fill-in-the-blank exercises to check

students’ understanding of content. In every class students had homework, so the teacher asked

them to do self-correction or peer editing. When they did self-correction, the teacher asked some

volunteers to show their answers. She just repeated what a volunteer said and using question

voice to signal to the volunteer that something is wrong. Students would realize that they had

problems in that way.

In our textbook (Anderson & Larsen-Freeman, 2011)it’s said in direct method,

vocabulary is emphasized over grammar and oral communication is seen as basic. It means

exercises are based on the oral practice and pronunciation receives attention. At the beginning of

the first class, we suspected direct method would not work in grammar class, because in our

opinion, grammar-translation method is better in teaching grammar. However, after the

observation, we found that direct method was practical in class. Students could understand most

new words after the teacher’s demonstration. The teacher used examples to introduce new

grammar topic. She never gave students explicit grammar rules. Students were required to

generalize the rules by themselves from given examples. It is good for student because if the

teacher provide the grammar rules directly to students, they may not have a deep impression for

what they learned. In last paragraph, we said the teacher designed some activities in direct

method. These activities were very useful in teaching and learning procedure.
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The teacher also used content-based instruction. The teacher gave students some

materials in other fields and students learned grammar from these materials. For example, it is

impossible for the teacher to just explain grammar in class. In every class, she found paragraphs

which contain the target grammar. The teacher chose paragraphs about sociology and biography

to explain grammar. Students not only learn grammar, but also learn many things in other

academic disciplines. It seemed that the teacher was very careful about selection of course

content. We think it is good because students will not feel bored if they read interesting material.

Moreover, we noticed the teacher used this approach with high frequency. The teacher made a

case for content-based instruction as a method of language teaching and she demonstrates the

great variety of genres and topics in which grammar took place.

Classroom Interactions

In this grammar course, although the class was mostly conducted and directed by the

teacher, students were still active in the learning process. The teacher and students were like

partners in the teaching-learning process. The class interaction went both ways (from teacher to

students and students to teachers). They could prompt questions and express whatever they liked.

The teacher didn’t mind it, instead, she felt happy if students had questions. For example, in a

grammar presentation, two students demonstrated their ideas of quantity and quantifier to the rest

of class. If students had any questions, they could express freely. The presenter should answer

questions. Of course, sometimes they couldn’t answer questions or they gave a wrong answer.

Under this condition, the teacher would correct them and explain this grammatical point.

The teacher occasionally took part in students’ class activities. In pair discussion, the

teacher went around the classroom and joined in some pairs. She listened to their understanding
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of grammatical points and gave them some suggestions. In the course, the teacher and students

were more likely to be cooperative partners.

Sequence of Activity

The teacher started class with a warm-up activity; then she checks for comprehension of

grammar with some techniques; next she shows some common mistakes and showed students

how to avoid them; finally, students completed exercises or do quiz. The specific sequences are

different because teaching contents every day had some divergences. Generally, students review

knowledge they learned in last class in warm up. Teacher teaches students today’s content in

next step and told about mistakes. To evaluate students, teacher gives them some exercises or a

quiz.

Personal Reflection

We thought a lot after the first class. First, we are thinking about teaching methods. The

teacher uses direct method and content-based instruction more frequently, but nowadays TBLT

and CLT are more popular in teaching. Although these students are English learners, they are

adults so they have their own ideas and thinking. Direct method is a little inappropriate because

grammar is very theoretical. If the teacher explains grammatical knowledge in English directly,

students may not understand some terms. The teacher also used TBLT in classes but the TBLT

task the teacher did use showed us this method was inappropriate in grammar class. In the

second class, teacher asked students to design a trip plan to partners in relative clauses. This was

a typical task, but we found a big problem. Most students used other students who spoke the

same L1 as partners, so they could use their first language in order to complete task quickly.

Finally, maybe they finished planning, but they didn’t practice language and grammar. It didn’t
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work in learning process. It occurred to us that TBLT was not a good method in grammar class.

Students should learn grammar directly; we think it might be more effective.

On the contrary, in our study experience in China, it seemed that content-based

instruction was hardly used in grammar class because grammar is a serious subject. It was related

to theoretical points so teacher always explained grammar systematically. In this course, the

teacher used content-based instruction. We like this method and we are surprised it could be used

in a grammar class, but actually, it is useful. Students were interested in passages in other fields,

so they always had enthusiasm to learn topic-related grammar. Meanwhile, students gained

knowledge from passage. This is an inspiration for us. We cannot only use grammar-translation

method and direct method in grammar classes. Instead, we should try to explore new methods.

We found that the teacher always let students do peer editing. When students had some

exercise to do in class or their homework, the teacher asked them to find a partner and they

checked answers together or for each other. Peer-editing is a very popular and common way of

correction in all kinds of classes. It improves students’ interaction with others. In this stage,

students are very active. Additionally, although the activity was peer-editing, students still had

questions when they checked partners’ answers. The teacher helped them with the questions,

which is more effective for them to solve their problems.

The most interesting thing we found was the way the teacher corrected students’

mistakes. When there were grammar tasks in class, the teacher might find volunteers to write

their answers on the whiteboard, but sometimes they made mistakes. The teacher found the

mistakes and then she read the sentences. She would change the intonation of her voice on

mistakes. In this way, the mistakes is immediately clear to students. The teacher never told
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students, “It’s wrong.” She only hinted there were mistakes and students could find mistakes by

themselves. This was an effective way to correct students in grammar class.

There were definitely problems in this course. The teacher used pictures to explain

unfamiliar words to students, but for grammar terms, it was hard to explain by pictures. Because

of the limited time in class, the teacher did not use any realia to explain terms. Some students

knew the meaning of a term but others did not. Yes, this was an advanced grammar course, but

students are not native speakers. It is inevitable for them to be unclear about something. The

function of first language is weakened; students are confused about details. When we observed

class, Chinese students around me always asked me some details about relative clauses because

they didn’t understand teachers’ explanations.

Pedagogical Contribution

As part of this assignment, in addition to observing the grammar classes, we were also

asked to provide a pedagogical contribution; that is, we had to develop a new strategy for class.

We will specify the development as follows.

Problems and Goals

We found the biggest problem in class was that the teacher didn’t collect enough

feedback from students. The feedback includes students’ learning questions and the mistakes on

a grammar topic. Mistakes not only appeared on paper and exercises, more often, they appeared

in conversation and interactions. Also, sometimes students did not realize their mistakes during

the interactions. Grammar must serve for language communication. If they cannot apply what

they learned in communication correctly, the grammar makes no sense. Based on the course, we

developed negotiation strategies. Specifically, the teacher should collect feedback from students

with negotiation strategies.

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The goal of negotiation strategies is making teacher interact with students. The teacher

should focus on students’ output. Students always give feedback unconsciously. For example,

students get good scores in exams, but in daily conversation, they make awkward grammar

mistakes. Nonnative speakers might be shy and afraid of asking “stupid” questions, but they

definitely have problems. If they do not ask questions, the teacher will not know their learning

problems. In this case, teacher should pay attention to implicit feedback. Using negotiation

strategies helps teacher to grasp implicit feedback and negative evidence. Teacher can solve

students’ problems easily by the strategy and get feedback as much as possible.

Theoretical and Methodological Foundation

We developed negotiation strategy in class. Specifically, it means students give teacher

feedback as much as possible. The theoretical foundation of negotiation strategy is closely

related to output hypothesis. This hypothesis was coined by Swain (1995), who observed that

children who had spent years in immersion programs still had a level of competence in L2 that

fell significantly short of native-like abilities. She claims that language production forces

learners to move from comprehension to syntactic use of language. Swain (1995) states output

may stimulate learners to move from the sematic, open-ended nondeterministic, strategic

processing prevalent in comprehensible to the complete grammatical processing needed for

accurate production. Output, thus, would seem to have a potentially significant role in the

development of syntax and morphology.

After students produce a problematic utterance and the teacher receives feedback about

its lack of comprehensibility in the form of a clarification request, the students realize that their

utterances are not understood. Pushed to reformulate a new utterance in order to facilitate
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teacher’s understanding, students modify their output in a more target-like way. Example (1) is

modifier output from McDonough (2005, cited in VanPatten, & Williams, 2015).

(1) LEARNER: What happened for the boat?

NS: What?

LEARNER: What’s wrong with the boat?

In this example, the learner learns expressions “what happened for” and “what’s wrong”, but

he/she does not use “what happened for” correctly. “What happened for” is used to explain the

reasons why an event happened. Therefore, he/she cannot say “What happened for the boat”.

The native speaker teacher does not correct the learner immediately, but uses clarification

request to indicate learn this sentence is problematic; then, the learner modifies the sentence. In

the course, there was no such kind of process, so we think teacher can encourage students to

produce modified output about grammar so that she can check students understanding better.

Now we are going to talk about negotiation strategy. Teacher and students must place

emphasis on the function of negative evidence. In this grammar course, teacher didn’t take

advantage of the function of negative evidence very well. Negative evidence refers to the

information that students receive concerning the incorrectness of their own utterance. Students

receive negative evidence through interactional feedback that occurs following problematic

utterances. It is helpful for students to edit acquired knowledge. Another argument is for implicit

feedback in monitor theory. The theory maintains that students have an innate ability for second

language acquisition in social communication which needs to be activate through the interaction.

So, it can activate through implicit feedback such as recasting and negotiation for meaning

(VanPatten & Williams, 2015). These ways could be considered acceptable because they would

take place in a social environment. This theory could also be used to argue that because
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acquisition is naturally outside of awareness, any form of negative evidence has the potential of

bringing awareness away from meaning and thus will not result in acquisition.

Feedback occurs during negotiation for meaning. Long defined that negotiation for

meaning facilitates acquisition because it connects input, internal learner capacities, particular

selective attention, and output in productive ways (Vanpatten & Williams, 2015). Through

interaction, student’s attentional resources are directed to problematic aspects knowledge or

production. First, the student notices that what they say differs from what a NS says. This is

noticing the gap. In addition, student notices that they can’t express what they want to say. The

interaction itself may also direct student’s attention to something new, such as new grammar

construction, thus promoting the development of L2.

Negotiation for meaning is an important component of negotiation meaning; it contains

clarification requests, confirmation checks and comprehension checks (VanPatten & Williams,

2015, p.186). Negotiation cannot be reduced or cut in class. Long (1996) defines negotiation as

“the process in which, in an effort to communicate, learners and competent speakers provide and

interpret signals of their own and their interlocutor’s perceived comprehension, thus provoking

adjustments to linguistic form, conversational structure, message content, or all three, until an

acceptable level of understanding is achieved.” Mackey (2002) describe how negotiation

contributes to the language learning process, suggesting that negotiation facilitates

comprehension of L2 and serves to draw learner’s attention to form-meaning relationships

through processes of repetition, segmentation, and rewording. Additionally, recast is also very

useful. Nicholas, Lightbown and Spada (2001, cited in VanPatten, & Williams, 2015, p.187)

define recast as a “utterance that repeat a learner’s incorrect utterance, making only the changes
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necessary to produce a correct utterance, without changing the meaning.” Teacher and students

can use this kind of feedback to correct grammatical mistakes.

Teacher should try to collect feedback as much as possible by negotiation for meaning.

Confirmation checks can be used to elicit confirmation that an utterance has been correctly heard

or understood, such as Mackey’s research in 2000 about the words basin, base and vase (Gass,

Mackey & McDonough, 2000, p.473):

NNS: There is a [besen] of flower on the bookshelf.

NS: A basin?

NNS: Base.

NS: A base?

NNS: A base.

NS: Oh, a vase.

NNS: Vase.

Teacher states a sentence with grammatical points and let students repeat or paraphrase it.

If students make mistakes, she can repeat the mistakes and indicate those mistakes until they

produce an understandable utterance.

Clarification requests are more direct than confirmation checks. They are expressions

designed to elicit clarification of the interlocutor’s preceding utterance. This kind of implicit

feedback is more common in this grammar course. Teacher asks students questions such as

“what did you say?” When students produce incorrect utterance, teacher can do clarification

requests.

Comprehension checks are expressions that are used to verify that an interlocutor has

understood. Teacher can use this negotiation for meaning when she explains grammatical points
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to all students. After explanation, she asks, “do you understand” or something else to check

students’ comprehension.

There is another type of implicit feedback which does not belong to negotiation for

meaning but is still useful. It’s recast. Recast is a rephrasing of non-target-like utterance using a

more target-like form while maintaining the original meaning. Recast is interactional moves

through which learners are provided with more linguistically target-like reformulations of what

they have just said. A recast does not necessarily involve the repetition of a learner’s entire

utterance, and may include additional elaborations not present in the original propositional

content. Example (2) is an example of recast (Oliver & Mackey, 2003, cited in Vanpatten and

Williams, 2015)

(2) NNS: A dog in here, or two of them.

NS: A duck in the pond or two ducks.

NNS: Yes.

In class, students often make incorrect sentences. Teacher repeats the incorrect sentences and

changes a particular part of the sentence to remind students they are wrong.

As a result, we think, negotiation strategies can be used in the grammar course we

observed. In this course, the teacher used clarification requests and comprehension checks, but

rarely. We develop this strategy for the teacher to collect feedbacks in various ways and maybe it

is helpful for teaching. The teacher attaches importance to students’ feedback, but only active

and explicit feedback. Sometimes students are not willing to give the teacher negative evidences.

At this time, the only thing that the teacher can do is collect implicit feedback by negotiation

strategies.

Procedures for Development

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Actually, the teacher didn’t let us help her to organize class, but we explained our

strategy for her and developed procedures of applying negotiation strategies in grammar class.

In the second class we observed, there was a grammar presentation. This presentation

was a very good source to develop negotiation strategies. Students were confused about few, a

few, little and a little. In the question-and-answer activity, the teacher just showed some

exercises about these four phrases and let students answer. We thought collecting feedback by

this way was not comprehensive enough. The teacher can use negotiation for meaning to check

students’ understanding. We gave the teacher example procedures. The teacher repeats incorrect

utterance that student produce and indicates he/she is wrong. During this process, the student can

remember the correct expressions more deeply. Also, the student identifies the correct utterances

by themselves; it improves his/her confidence.

Step 1: After presentation, the teacher doesn’t need to give them exercises. The teacher can

say, “Please make sentences with few, a few, little and a little.”

Step 2: There must be some students who cannot distinguish the four phrases. These students

say, “I have a few friends so I’m unhappy.”

Step 3: The teacher says, “Er… a few friends so you’re unhappy?” Do you mean that?

Step 4: Students say, “Yes, I have a few friends so I’m unhappy.”

Step 5: The teacher says, “A few?”

Step 6: Students say, “Oh, I have few friends so I’m unhappy.

This is a type of confirmation check. Student produces a wrong utterance with a few and teacher

notices this negative evidence. Confirmation checks give learners the opportunity to infer that

there is a problem with their utterance.

Evaluation of Strategy
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We’d briefly like to analyze the success and limitations of negotiation strategies in class.

Obviously, the success is that negotiation strategies give the teacher more ways and opportunities

to collect feedback and check students’ understanding in teaching contents. Some shy and

diffident students can be motivated to some extent. According to students’ feedback, especially

implicit feedback, the teacher changes her teaching methods, classroom interaction and class

settings.

However, there are limitations. It is impossible for teacher to collect feedback one by one

with negotiation strategies because it is time-consuming. Also, when the teacher does

clarification requests and confirmation checks, some students are not sure whether they really

understand this point; so when the teacher asks, “do you understand?” they may answer, “yes.”

They choose to conceal that they are not sure about this knowledge. When this condition occurs,

the teacher might not know the students’ actual understanding of grammar. It means, for some

students, clarification requests and confirmation checks still make no difference. In Strategy

Foundation part, there is an example of confirmation check. That is about the words base, basin

and vase. This is a check of vocabulary. In grammar class, there are also some new vocabulary

they should learn each class. Sometimes students respond with a wrong word to teacher, just

because they do not hear the teacher clearly but it doesn’t mean they do not understand this

word.

But generally, negotiation strategies are useful in class. The teacher needs to develop

their advantages mostly, so that the teacher can collect enough feedback and students are

benefitting from class.

Conclusion
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In this project, we observed 6 consecutive classes in advanced grammar course. We

developed negotiation strategies for the teacher to check students’ understanding of grammar

topics. However, there are some drawbacks for these strategies, such as time-consuming and

students may conceal the unsure knowledge. The teacher is supposed to develop the advantages

of these strategies and use them in grammar teaching.

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Reference

Anderson, M, & Larsen-Freeman, D (2011). Techniques & Principles in Language Teaching.

47-48.

Gass, S, Mackey, A & McDonough, K (2000). How Do Learners Perceive Interactional

Feedback? 470-473.

Swain, M. (1995). Three functions of output in second language learning. In G. Cook & B.

Seidlhofer (Eds.), Principle and Practice in Applied Linguistics. Oxford, England:

Oxford University Press. 125-144.

VanPattern, B., & Williams, J. (2015). Theories in Second Language Acquisition. New York,

NY: Taylor & Francis Group.