Observation Report on the Lesson

Week 3-4                                                               

Class: 8/C, 8/D                                                           Muhammed Emin Yüksel              
Date: 23.10.2015 / 06.11.2015                                                         Caner Koca
School: Celalettin Sayhan Primary School

During the third and fourth weeks of our internship, we were expected to observe the lesson in terms of the teacher's actions. The subject was the simple present tense and the teacher made a short introduction about the subject matter. Since the students have a background knowledge from last year, the teacher's aim was to review the subject. She reviewed mostly confused grammar rules by presenting first and then giving plenty of examples afterwards. In doing so, she can remind the students how to use the simple present tense properly. The students are inclined to forget what has been discussed in the classroom right away. For this reason, it would be essential to review the previous knowledge as much as possible. Especially, when the upcoming TEOG exam is taken into account, reviewing the previous subjects occasionally  is crucial to ensure the permanency of the knowledge.

As for the practice phase of the lesson, the teacher asks some warm-up questions about the grammar rules that has already been discussed. She uses exercises from the book to practice the subject matter. She started with a gap-and-cue exercise and gave positive feedbacks or corrected the mistakes depending on the replies. The second exercise was a 'find the mistakes and correct them'. This would be a good practice for the students to have an ability to spot a mistake and replace it with its correct form. Once they complete such an exercise successfully, it means that they have become aware of the rules of the subject matter. Overall, the aim of the exercises was to consolidate the grammar rules of the simple present tense.

After practicing the rules adequately, the teacher asked the students to create a sentence out of the given structure. "Why don't you make a sentence with 'after and before' " the teacher asked. And a student replied, I go to the school after breakfast. Another example from a different student was 'I go to the sleep after I brush my teeth.' Furthermore, the teacher asked, 'do you like grill?' and expected the students to reply by using the simple present tense. Except those a few questions, the students were not provided with activities to produce the language.

To sum up what we observed during the third and fourth weeks, the teacher started with a quick review to revive the previous knowledge. Then, she continued with a series of exercises to consolidate the proficiency. However, she did not allowed much time for the production of the language. The reason would possibly because of the fact that the students will mostly need grammar practices in their TEOG exam instead of open-ended production questions.