Report 5 - Week 9&10 - Ozan Berk & Hilal Cemre Altıparmak

Week 9-10 / Report 5

Hilal Cemre Altıparmak & Ozan Berk                                                                

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

Yonca ÖZKAN

Yasemin ÖZDEMİR

Task 1

This week we observed how the teacher used the blackboard in the classroom. The teacher uses blackboard to help her explaining grammar structures to the students. She also uses the blackboard to introduce the new vocabulary items as well.

In the lesson she firstly talks about the topic in English and also in the mother tongue when students have difficulty in understanding the general idea. Then, in order to make the students see the structure and new vocabulary items she writes them on the board. 

She needs to write them on the board because even though they have a projector in the classroom they don’t have a computer to work with and because of that they can’t use technological devices in the classroom and the teacher needs to rely on blackboard, books and worksheets while giving a lecture. As she relies on blackboard a lot she uses the blackboard effectively.

On the 10^th week the teacher used the blackboard to introduce usage of “like” and “don’t like”. She drew an ice cream, an apple and a boy playing football to teach the word “like”. She also drew a smiling face to indicate students will use those terms with “like”. After that she also drew a banana, a can of coke and a girl skipping rope to teach the usage of “don’t like” and to indicate students need to use those terms with “don’t like” she drew a pouting face. Then she wrote some examples with “like” and “don’t like” on the board. She wanted the students to write down those examples to their notebooks. We noticed that while she was writing something on the board she didn’t give any work for students to do.

We observed that students were bored while teacher wrote something on the board as they didn’t have anything to do. We learned that we should plan our lessons considering we might spend too much time on writing something on blackboard and prepare something for students to avoid making them get bored of the lesson.

Task 2

In this week we were supposed to observe the oral correction techniques used by the teacher. The teacher as we said in the week 7/8 - task 2, uses activities aimed at accuracy and perfection that’s why most of the error corrections are immediately corrected.

Teacher usually corrects the mistakes automatically while using peer correction time to time. She sometimes signals for self correction as well but she corrects every mistake made by the students one way or another. As she focuses on accuracy it can be expected for her to correct mistakes immediately. She tries to teach Standard English and gives importance to being native like.

During the lesson she corrected students several times. For example, a student said “driving” instead of “drawing” and teacher corrected it herself using her body language. She acted as if she was driving a car and said “This is driving” then she acted as if she is drawing something and said “This is drawing”.

We have read some articles about this topic, oral correction, and we have found that there isn’t a consensus about this topic. While some scholars like John Truscott say that we should abandon oral correction even going as far as saying “available evidence suggests that oral correction is ineffective” (Truscott, 1999) , some scholars say that they disagree with him and on the contrary, oral correction is quite effective (Lightbown, Lyster and Spada, 1999)

We think that oral correction should be used moderately in classroom but instead of usually correcting students directly we should give importance to peer correction and self correction to make our students more autonomous and motivated.