Report 4 - Week 7&8 - Ozan Berk & Hilal Cemre Altıparmak

Week 7-8 / Report 4

Hilal Cemre Altıparmak & Ozan Berk

REPORT-4                                                                    

School: Celaleattin Sayhan Primary School
Class: 4/D - 4/E

Yonca ÖZKAN

Yasemin ÖZDEMİR

Task 1

This week we were supposed to observe conditions and situations related to the classroom, the activities, the teacher and the students which may enhance or hinder effective learning in the language classroom.

In the classroom there are some technological devices which the teacher uses to aid with their language acqusition process. There are smart board and projector. Unfortunately there isn’t a computer in the classroom so they can’t use these devices. On the walls there are many paintings made by students and some learning aids like a map and some hints about various lessons.  Classroom isn’t too crowded so every student has chance to participate into the lesson.

Two students share a desk so it is easy to implement pair work activities in this classroom but unfortunately the teacher doesn’t prefer to do that. She usually doesn’t apply group work activities either.  Students bought a supplementary book named “Marathon” and she uses this book instead of the book provided by government. She usually uses activities from the book.

The teacher uses her body langauge effectively. Adding to that she uses her voice, mimics and intonation professionally. She sometimes doesn’t act professionally in the classroom. She sometimes acts more aggressively than she should have been.

The students are fourth graders and for us it is very normal that they are making some noise during the lesson. They have difficulty in focusing on the lesson because they are young. Sometimes noise level raises so much that teacher has to give a warning to them. Students usually come from middle to high socioeconomical background and thats why they can afford some supplementary books and some of them are taking English private courses.

Task 2

In this week we were expected to observe whether the activities in a specific lesson are oriented towards fluency or accuracy. We have found out that the teacher usually uses accuracy oriented activities and gives more importance to writing rather than speaking.

The teacher prefers to use the supplementary book named “Marathon” instead of the coursebook provided by the government. She says that the supplementary book is well prepared and we also agree with that notion. In this book the activities are focused on accuracy rather than fluency.  The teacher teaches standard English and aims for perfection in accent and grammar.

In this lesson we observed that the teacher used repetition, fill in the blanks, writing, matching and true/false activities. While repetition activity was in spoken form other activities were in written form and they were all accuracy oriented. Goal of the activities were to teach grammar rules instead of teaching English for communaciation purposes.

Balance of the activities were heterogeneous. While she was giving too much importance to writing she disregarded speaking. If we want our students to be fluent and intelligible in English we should give more importance to speaking and teach it in a meaningful context instead of only using repetition.  Teacher mostly uses writing activities which are based on accuracy and those activities act as settle down activities. We can say that the teacher uses insufficient amount of stir up activities while using wide range of settle down activities. We think that the teacher needs to use more stir up activities in order to spice up her lesson.

We found out that those accuracy oriented activities are very effective on the learners as teacher only had to use error correction two times in her lesson. It seems that students are motivated to be more accurate but we can’t say that they are motivated to be more fluent.