Lesson Observation - Essay Example

Observer: Low and high intermediate elementary 6th grade. Teacher: (the person you are observing) (the your observation)Instructions: Enter your answers in each box. 1. What is the objective of the lesson you are observing?Insert your comments here: 1. Students will be able to talk about things that they are interested in.2. Students will be able to talk about their sicknesses using key expressions from Unit 4: “What’s wrong?”; “I have a ____”; “Why?”; “Because..”3. Students will be able to practice using key expressions through reading and speaking activities. 2. List the sequence of activities that you observed and the amount of time spent on each activity.

Insert your comments here: 1. Small talk (5min.)2. Introduction PowerPoint slides (10min.) – 10 slides speaking repetition drills.3. Textbook CD (10min.) – The students are reading a textbook passage three times after the teacher, with a partner, and to themselves. After reading a passage, they are answering to the three short relevant fill-in-the-blank questions. When the teacher is reading a passage, she mispronunciate the word, “throat” from “sore throat” as “srot”. The students follow her pronunciation when they are working individually.4. Speaking Activity – Connect 4 (15min.) – The students are working in a pair.

They are given with a sheet of Connect 4 worksheet. At the bottom, the key expressions are written i.e. “Take this medicine,” “You have to see a doctor,” and “Get some rest.” Student A initiate a dialogue with Student B. Student A should ask, “What’s wrong?” then Student B should answer, “I have a _____”. After Student B answers, Student A chooses a key expression from the worksheet to finish the conversation. When he/she chooses, he/she can mark the move on the worksheet to play Connect 4.

The goal is to make students practice the dialogues every time they make their move. In playing this game, I noticed that some of the students merely played this game without having a conversation. The teacher should walk around and monitor/assess student’s performance in order to maximize their learning potentials. 3. How did students respond to the lesson? What evidence of learning did you see?Students in this class responded to the lesson differently from one another given that the level of comprehension is affected by the activities each student was actively engaged in.

For example, during the passage-reading session, the students followed the exact words uttered by the teacher regardless of the fact that the teacher had mispronounced the world ‘throat’ as ‘srot’ following its follow-up with word ‘sore’. As identified that students were engaged in small talk during the dialogue session during the speaking activity. It shows that, if the students were attentive in the first place, they would be able to identify mispronounced words and ask the teacher for clarification.

However, considering that the purpose of the class is to refine communication and language skills, the students showed they were learning to follow instructions regarding the worksheets they were provided with before the start of the speaking activity.4. How do the activities you observed relate to the reading?With reference to the listening and speaking, it is identified in the reading that lack of attentiveness may not raise any alarm that a word was incorrectly used or mispronounced. According to the reading, an example shows that melody tends to be confusing especially in a setting where context is not referred to.

For example the reading material provides an example where Jane is seen referring to two different things with almost the same pronunciation as the melody in the words ‘Mister Fogg’ and ‘mist or fog’ a confusing effect if one is not attentive enough5. Suggest an alternative the teacher could have used.Suggests an alternative method from the reading that could be used by the teacher and that fits the lesson content and objective. Insert your comments here: The teacher from the class provide two methods for teaching language to the students.

One of the methods is listening to a passage from the teacher and reading it aloud to self and other students. Additionally, the students are asked to play a game that motivates that requires them to engage in an active dialogue as each student takes part in the game. An alternative approach as identified in the reading is that the teacher should be able to ensure that students differentiate words as spoken as written. Using the example ‘how do you spell ‘easy’? Students take ‘easy’ as the emphasized word and ignore the fact that the possibility of using ‘d’you’ in place of ‘do you’.

Therefore the teacher should consider teaching the basics of prosody as practicing reading and pronunciation alone does not allow students to the full dimensions of language (Gilbert, 2008).6. What other comments do you have about the lesson? Reference readings.Insert your comments here:According to the observations of the class, students were engaged in small talk for the first 5 minutes followed by 10 slides of speaking repetitive drills. According to the reading material, the small talk part is not marked to be part of the class and the time that the teacher was rushing to save as the mispronunciation of ‘throat’ should have been allocated to slower reading so that students do not follow what the teacher said in class assuming it was the right thing to do.

Reference Gilbert, J. (2008). Teaching pronunciation: using the prosody pyramid. Cambridge University Press