Essay

Teacher’s name: Roxana Correa

Student’s name: Eduardo Mansilla Contreras.
Date: 07/04/08

During this activity, I could put myself in students’ shoes and understand what a student
with a low level of the target language feels. At the beginning of the class I was very
confused and nervous because I could not identify the language that the teacher was trying
to teach us. The words were very strange but the teacher tried to teach us through simple
activities that attracted my attention and keep me interested. Then, I realized that the
approach that the teacher was using was a mix of different methods (mainly total physical
response and audio-lingual method) and that made me feel more confident. When I could
use the words in Indonesian properly, I had a feeling of success and low anxiety that
facilitated the learning of the language.

All the words were very strange but there were some factors and components that helped
me to understand the words in Indonesian. The teacher was a very good model. She
confidently showed us how the words were supposed to sound and she also made the
meaning of the words clear by making gestures. She repeated the words many times and
made us used the words in pairs. That helped me to convey the meaning of the words by
observing and hearing the other students. She did not move on the next word until she was
satisfied that the previous word had been mastered. Using body language, she showed that
she was happy every time that we learnt a new word or phrase. By doing this, she made me
feel that she supported me enormously.

These activities made me think on the way students feel when we try to teach them
English and understand students better. We tend to forget that some things that we believe
that are easy are not easy for students and were not easy for us at that age. Sometimes, we
try to teach them a lot of words during a class and the majority of the times that is
counterproductive because it is a lot of information that students can not assimilate. Instead
of that, we should try to select the most important words of the topic in order to make
learning more likely to be achieved. Another thing to keep in mind is that the vocabulary
that we try to teach must be very functional. The idea is that the majority of the words have
to be used immediately by the students in a dialogue or something like that because that
makes it easier for students to retain the vocabulary and the meaning.

These kinds of activities are very useful and effective but teachers need to have a wider
repertoire if they aim to be comprehensive. Sometimes, teachers need to make students
develop other skill such as reading and writing. In these cases, teachers obviously have to
use other methods to deal with these necessities. In other cases, teachers also have to teach
students some aspects of the language such as grammar that make students able to explain
some phenomena of the target language. Teaching grammar is difficult to teach with this
kind of activities because it is an opportunity to reflect on the language rather than
communicate.