WEEK 7-8     CLASSROOM CONTEXT AND LANGUAGE TASKS

Student Teacher: Fatma EŞ- Mine ÖNER

Class: 3-G / 3-H

Date: 23.11.2015 - 30.11.2015

Lesson: English

Number of student: 25

TASK 1

In this week we paid attention to conditions related to the classroom, the activities,  the teacher and the students which may enhance or hinder effective learning in the language classroom. During the lesson we watched and listened for anything that contributes to making the learning environment in which students learn better. While observing there were also factors that hinder learning . The learning environment in classroom is vital to student success and impacts students in many ways. A negative learning environment  adversely affects student learning such as low student achievement, poor behavior, student anxiety, or depression. We should set positive learning environment allows students to feel comfortable and confident as learners.

During our observation the positive factors about the classroom , the classroom was large enough for students to feel them comfortable. Everywhere in the classroom was colourful. Desks were suitable for students’ age.  Students were active. Students’ setting arrangement was traditional system and actually this wasnt appropriate for modern education system. There were a projector , computer and wardrobe for students’ materials. Teacher  had many opportunities for teaching.

On the contrary, the negative factors were the temperature of class,. The class was so hot that students couldnt focus on lesson all of them wanted to go outside. Also, the class was so dirty and some students were walking around the room. Control of the students was really hard for teacher.

When we looked at the activities which may enhance  or hinder effective learning in language classroom the positive factors are that teacher gave lots of example within activities and demonstrated these activities by visuals. These activities increased students’  interests to the lesson and they learned by doing and hearing and motivated them a lot to participate the lesson. However, there were also some negative factors like while doing activities because they talked with each other a lot and there were  disruptive behavior of some students. Teacher had difficulty in controlling the class. It hindered the effective learning in class. Besides , teacher didnt use any authentic material in class. She didnt use a different technique and bring anything new to the classroom.Moreover, The positive factors that teacher had in class for effective learning was her smiles, nods, giving positive rainforcement and gave positive response to encourage them and called students by their name.Morever; she used her body language effectively to be understandable and  she used her body language , gestures and mimes for taking attention of students and kept them awake

And also ; students were active and eager to the lesson. They all raised their hands to participate the activities  or answer  the questions. The students weren’t shy .The negative factors hinder effective learning were to students were walking around the classroom and they talked with each other very much.

While observing, we understood that greeting students with smiles is very important. The more smiles we offer to students, the more we will receive. Also during the lesson we should remain calm all times and  create a classroom environment where students feel safe. When they feel safe they want to participate the lesson more.

All in all, the classroom, students, teacher and activities have both positive and negative factors for effective learning. We should pay attention to this factors and do our job best. We should create positive environment to effective learning in language classroom

TASK 2

This week, we aimed to have observe whether the activities in a specific lesson are oriented towards fluency or accuracy.

We have many criteria that govern organising a lesson. Two of them are accuracy and fluency. During our teaching practice we have learnt that there is a need for them both.

Accuracy is the quality of language produced in either spoken or written form. So, our mentor focused on language correctness and especially she wanted to improve the ability to produce correct sentences using correct grammer and vocabulary. Because typically, at beginner level when the students don’t have enough language to worry about fluency, our teacher tended to focus on accuracy. Therefore, Our mentor who concentrated on accuracy help her students to produce grammatically correct written and spoken English.. It was influenced by correct habit formation. As a result, our mentor purpose was to make sure that students got something right. Something means e.g. grammar structure, vocabulary, some area of pronunciation.

She usually used Audio Lingual Method because she was a good model like an orchestra leader.  Students were imitators of the teacher as perfect model. They always repeated what teacher said. For example; our mentor used repetiton drill activity

T: big / small                      S: big and small

T: My father is strong          S: My father is strong

T: Turtle is not fast              S: Turtle is not fast

She used fill in the blanks. Students just wrote vocabularies which were on board on their notebook. Students completed the blanks under the pictures and these activities are accuracy oriented      

Accuracy without fluency is not useful in the same way that fluency without accuracy is also not useful. A good mixture should be but the beginner level students dont have enough language to focus on fluency oriented activities so our mentor always used accuracy oriented activities