Class observation report - Essay Example

Moreover, they were able to understand and produce simple questions and statements. This class of nine students consisted only of Latin ethnic group. Spanish was their first language. Some students were relatively new arrivals who needed some basic survival skills and others had been in the United States for over six months and never felt the need or desire to combine learning English and working at the same time. However, all of them shared the intention to learn English in order to find a decent job or to improve their language and to get job promotions.

Several key factors had been put in consideration while conducting the observation for this class. The first factor was the identification of errors made by the students. The second factor was the way the instructor assessed the errors that students made during class activity. The duration of the classes was one hour and fifteen minutes each with a break of fifteen minutes. The classes were held in normal classrooms, as well as in computer labs. In normal classrooms, students focused on topics that dealt with grammar skills, speaking, and small passages of reading, whereas in computer lab, they were offered opportunity to practice through specific writing assignments, such as, how to write a CV, or the etiquette of sending E-mails for job employment opportunities, and learning a new vocabulary.

Textbooks were required in these classes, however, students were provided with a lesson sheet and guidelines for every class. In the classroom, the instructor gave five incorrect grammar sentences and asked the students to identify the errors in each sentence. This was a type of warm up activity to assess what the students had learned in the previous class and to get them ready for the coming lesson. One of the given sentences was, ‘I can’t come to class the last week because I was sick’.

Regarding this sentence, one thing that I found very interesting was that all of the seven students were only able to identify one error in the mentioned sentence and that error was the past form of ‘can’t’. They were unable to identify the missing article ‘the’ because of which they produced the sentence wrongly. The interesting finding in this observation was that students were not able to recognize all errors and repeated the same mistake while attempting to identify the errors in the provided sentence.

According to students, when they were asked by the instructor why not they were unable to identify the second error, they said that in their L1 the use of the article ‘the’ in a sentence like this is considered correct. Another error produced by the students which captured my attention was regarding the way the instructors began addressing the new lesson after the warm up exercise, which was about the present perfect. The instructor started by defining the present perfect tense and telling the proper condition to use it, however, the students were struggling in grasping that information.

Therefore, the teacher provided an example in the students’ mother tongue (L1) and another one in English which was, ‘Have you been drinking’, and asked the students to pair in one group to provide some examples. He gave them ten minutes to finish this exercise. The first example the students provided was, ‘I have drunk three cups of coffee today’. With attention to the previous sentence, the reason why I chose this particular error among other errors was that the students were