Observation Report on the Language

Week 1-2                                                                   

Class: 8/C, 8/D                                                           Muhammed Emin Yüksel               
Date: 09.10.2015 / 16.10.2015                                                         Caner Koca
School: Celalettin Sayhan Primary School

Class Observation Task 1 

During the first and second week of our internship experience, we were expected to pay attention to the language that the teacher and the students used. In the first week of our internship, we had a task to observe students’ and teacher’s language using. However, we could not have much chance to observe the whole class in terms of language use due to the fact that they discuss the grammar sections of the subjects on the other days of the week.

We only observed them doing exercises of the subjects that had already been discussed. This bad luck situation may cause a little problem because we have only a chance to attend their class on Fridays. On the other hand, in the following weeks we have some tasks that will involve us to observe the other subject matters which  completely make us to pay attention to different environment and atmosphere of the class.

As a matter of fact, this first week's report had to be made in this way because the students’ and teacher’s attitude technically does not give us a chance to see the way that they discuss the subject. And unfortunately the whole class kept on doing exercises too monotonously during the lesson. Once they finished an exercise, they started doing another one. For this reason, there was a little chance to see and observe  what they did in the class.

Observations on teacher’s and students’ attitudes can be arranged as follows,

• The teacher gave priority to English when the sentences were simple enough for the students to understand. The teacher also used the target language when she wanted to give simple directions to students such as 'open the door', 'clean the board'.

• The utterances were mainly made by the teacher, in both languages, while the students mostly preferred to stay silent or give sort answers.

• The teacher had to use the mother tongue when students had difficulties in understanding what the teacher said in English.

• When the teacher was asked something in Turkish , she replied in Turkish as well.

• When the students made mistakes, the teacher helped them find the correct answer and,  from time to time she asked the same question to the other students to find the answer by themselves instead of providing the correct answer right away.

• The students were mostly willing to answer the questions in Turkish rather than English. We rarely observed the students’ answering the questions in the target language.

• The teacher's feedbacks to the mistakes, questions or answers were, in general, in Turkish and the teacher often waited for the students to do the exercises, there was no spoon-feeding, so to say.

 

Class Observation Task 2 

 

While having focused on the utterances of the teacher and the students last week, this week, we observed the questions the teacher asked during the lesson. It is an 8 grade class and the students are aware of the importance of the English classes, because they have an upcoming TEOG exam, which consists of 20 English multiple choice questions. Vocabulary is one of the skills that should be dealt thoroughly in order for students to prepare for the exam properly. For that reason, this week, the teacher held activities concerning the vocabulary skill and its development. The activities were taken from the book called Upturn in English. The students were asked to fulfill matching, vocabulary box and fill in the dialogue exercises.

Since the teacher's purpose was to check whether the students knew the meaning of the unknown words or not, the activities were mainly based on 'display questions' to test the students' vocabulary skill. For instance, the teacher asked a direct question like 'what does a close friend mean?', and after a couple of seconds a student raised hand and responded: 'yakın arkadaş'. Afterwards, the teacher provided the synonym for 'close friend' as 'best friend' in English. There was also another case where one of the students responded in English instead of giving a Turkish definition of the unknown word. 

The teacher asked the meaning of 'to count on', and a student responded in English, 'to trust someone'. And later she was rewarded with a positive feedback as 'yes, correct! Well done!'.

The teacher also asked some referential questions based on the reading dialogue that the students read in the beginning of the lesson. During the activity, the teacher asked a question 'how is a true friend supposed to be?', and the students could use either some charts from the book, or create their own sentences. The students needed some time to put their sentences together, then the first students responded, 'they always back up you.' the teacher's feedback was to correct the sentence indirectly by saying 'they always back you up', and then told that he made a good sentence. 

Consequently, the teacher focused on the student's vocabulary proficiency during the lesson. She mostly used display questions to check the students' capacity and proficiency in vocabulary skill. She often emphasized that every word they have discussed in the class should be learned when taken into consideration the fact that having a rich vocabulary is crucial to pass the English section of the TEOG exam.