Report 3 (5-6 weeks)

OBSERVATION REPORT -3 (Week 5& 6)

 Abubakar Suleiman -2012177150

Füsun Çeliker- 2012177030

4N3- English Language Teaching

2015/2016- Fall Season

Celalettin Sayhan Primary School

Yasemin Özdemir, Yonca Özkan

This report’s main subject is classroom management. We observed how to conduct activities and guide the students in week 5 and 6.  In the first task, we examined to find out how the instructions affects the lesson progression.  In the second task, we underlined the importance of pair-work, group work activities, and directing them successfully.

Task 1

As teachers, we know that the students are attached to our direction and instructions while learning process. In this task’s report, we covered instruction giving skill and its sub-skills. These sub-skills are important to understand what creates good rapport in the classroom with the perspective of instruction giving and classroom management. We explained by one by how the teacher uses these sub-skills.

Signalling start of activity: When the teacher comes into the classroom, the students and she greet each other. But, they continue talking after greeting . She usually waits for the students calm down and stop talking each other. When they don’t stop talking, she warns them saying ‘’ I’m waiting for you. (pauses for a second) Çocuklar, hadi sizi bekliyorum, yeter artık!’’  We can say that she gives a powerful signal.

Using simple language & short sentences: In the beginning of the class, she reminds them what they did last week, after that, she gives instructions with short and clear sentences for new activities. She uses target language mostly when giving instructions or taking their attention to something. Also, she uses graded language.

T: Okay, Marathon book, page 25. Open your books please. (She shows the page.)

T: Student A, stand up please. (Waits for the student.)Answer this question.

T: The fifth one is (She feels that they’re distracted, so she stops for a moment to take their attention.) England? Germany? Turkey? Which one?

Using eye contact & mime- gesture: She makes eye- contact with students while speaking to them, but she doesn’t use mimes or gestures effectively.

Using target language: The teacher uses English mostly. She uses Turkish when  instructions misunderstood or students need help or clarification.

T: Open your books, please. Page 14. You see the flags, right? You do it (fill the blanks activity) yourself. (Halts for a second.) Bayraklara bakarak, hangi ülkelere ait olduklarını İngilizce yazıyoruz.

S:  Yardım almak serbest mi?

T: Of course.

Quality of voice: The voice of the teacher should be loud or low when needed. This students are younger and their attention span are shorter than an adult. Sometimes, the teacher needs to use her voice louder, but she can’t. Her voice is like a straight line, a few lessons about contolling it gives a positive result.

Using visual aids:  Up to now, she used flashcards to remind students numbers  from one to a hundred. Apart from this, the teacher draws cartoons on board sometimes, to make some language points clear.

Demonstrating rather than explanation: The teacher uses demonstrating technique more than one time, for building up some vocabulary. For example, she taught ‘in, on, at’ prepositions with a pencilcase, a rubber, and a pencil.  Also, she showed differences between ‘he, she, it, we,they, you, i’ pronouns with a group of students. She called five students in front of the classroom, and showed how to use pronouns.

Giving instructions with logic and clear & Repeating them in a different way: She gives instructions in English first, then if students need, repeats  inTurkish. The instructions are clear and understandable.

 Checking understanding & Signalling end of activity: She checks understanding with the acts of the students. If they answer the question correctly, or do the activity as she wants, she assumes that they understood it.  If she wants to move into another activity, she moves it.

 We think that, using simple, short and understandable language while giving instructions  is the core, but using body language, visual aids and demonstrating  effectively contributes more to the lesson.  We don’t think that these sub-skills will have a negative impact over the lesson, unless they used correctly. Also, we gained huge information how to give instructions, we belive, all of this will affect our teaching.

Task 2

This task aims to observe pair work and group work activities. We want to talk about benefits of pair and group work activities, after that, answering what’s happening in our classes. Pair and group work activities occur from small groups of students working together, learning together and they are highly effective and essential strategies for teaching. Many researches have been done researches about their advantages. 

To summarize the advantages, we listed some of them.

·         Give learners more speaking chance

·         Allow the students to mix everyone with the group

·         Students help each other and learn together

·         Cut down embaressment

·         Allow them to speak more fluently

 Sadly, we couldn’t observe any group or pair work activity despite their benefits.

 We’ve dissussed about ‘If we were the teacher, what could we do?’ First of all, we know that these kind of activities help us through managing our classes. We would come up with different and fun ideas to bring this activities into our classroom or run a contest in our classroom to engage them with idea of working together.

To put in a nutshell, there are many ways to use different activities bringing fun into our classrooms, pair/ group work activities are just one way. One famous quote says ‘Habits are safer than rules; you don’t have to watch them.’ Breaking  habits lead the fun and creativity in our classroom.