Week 7-8

Student Teacher: Aslıhan ANAPAL-Büşra GÜNGÖR-Halil AYBAR

Class:3/G-3/H

Date:23.11.2015-30.11.2015

Lesson: English

Number of student:25

An the communication, context affects us, in a bad or good way. In the class it should be considered. As a teacher our duty to ensure a classroomm in which learning most likely to happen. To manage this, we have to care about the context.

In the 7th week , we have observed the negative and positive sides of the classroom, the activities, the teacher, and the students. First of all, the classroom have some positive features such as the bulletin board; it is well prepared but it should have included more stuff in English. A.C is working, which satisfies the need of heating (?). They could sit 2 by 2, which means they have enough space for activities. On the other hand, there is a lot of food smell in the classroom, there is no air even though the windows are open. The walls color is really boring for a young learner class while it should be something more inspiring, passionate, and joyful. There is no first-aid stuff. There should be a speaker and a projector to watch or listen something but there is none. Secondly, about the activities; some of them include TPR activities which is very useful for  young learners to get their attention, make them want to involve in it. However, the activities has more negative factors such as; there is barely any variety. The teacher doesn’t use any diverse activity to get their attention. They are dull, and introduced in same way; same activity different topic while a young learner class would love to shift from activity to activity as Piaget suggests. The teacher does whats on the book, he never prepares any other activity different than book. Then, about the teacher; there were some good factors about the teacher such as his being friendly which affects the classroom atmosphere. He uses L1 L2 sandwich tecnique to make sure they hear how it sounds in English. And also, when he needs to explain a word, at first he tries to demonstrate it, another thing young learner love; to guess, as Piaget suggests. On the contrary, the teacher never focuses on listening, he never uses any of the activities which should be done by listening. He just gives the answer. Another negative factor of him is, he is bad at pronunciation. He has misproduce some sounds which cause students to learn that word’s pronunciation in a wrong way. Class is the only place that they can hear English. He doesn’t move around the classroom or hardly does.He doesn’t know the most of the student’s names which really affects the young learners. They care about it more when comparing to adults. He doesn’t also care if he has everyone’s attention. About the students, they are young learners which means motivation, friendliness, energy, fun, receiving, and movement to Piaget. They are voluntary for the activities. They want to involve when they are playing a game. In their characteristics, according to Piaget, they are good at pronunciation, which is the same for these students too. They are so bound to their teacher, which can be useful to teach them. As negative factors of the students, they don’t actually listen to the teacher, some of them just colors some part of the textbook or just eats something. They can easily lose focus, which is very normal as they are young and to Piaget. They can make a lot of noise for nothing, it is like a timebomb that they can make a chaos.

For the 8th week, we observed whether the activities oriented towards fluency or accuracy. When we look at the chart of the notes of our observation, the balance is more into accuracy-oriented for both spoken and written activity. For instance act out the dialogue on the book activity was focusing on spoken accuracy, the teacher was always warning the students about their pronunciation and grammar mistakes though it never helps  students to want to be more accurate. They just say it in that time and forget about what they said. It should be the fluency which needs to be focused in that kind of activity, we think. In fluency activity, which is only one, there were no real-life language use. The teacher never brings any other activity to classroom other than the books. Therefore, we don’t have the chance to compare enough activities.

As a conclusion, we think that context affects the learning in many ways. From the age of the students to knowing their names is really important for learning to happen. We should be aware about this while we are teaching.